How to Make Your Own Hard Cider

In recent decades hard cider has been a more popular drink in Great Britain than in the U.S., but you've probably noticed micro-brews of apple and pear cider popping up in your town. Why let the micro-breweries have all the fun? Make some hard cider yourself and adjust the recipes to create your own blends. Tricia brews hard cider in her home kitchen in our video and shows you how easy it is.
First, let's run through the brewing vocabulary. "Racking", for instance, isn't about grouping balls on a pool table -- not when we're talking hard cider.
- Airlock- Nope, not like in Star Trek. This is a much smaller airlock and it releases gases while keeping air from entering the fermenting jug.
- Yeast - Remember brewer's yeast from the 1960s health food stores? It's different from the yeast used in baking. Be sure you have brewing yeast. Pitching - This is not baseball. "Pitching" here is the verb for adding yeast to the cider.
- Auto siphon starter - Has nothing to do with cars and gasoline. This handy tool gets the siphon going from one jug to another, and in brewing you'll be siphoning repeatedly.
- Racking - Siphoning the cider from one jug to another, leaving the solids behind.
Hard Cider Equipment

Keep it Clean

Recipes for hard cider
In our hard cider video Tricia is brewing still, dry cider. Watch the video for the basic steps of making hard cider. We wanted to give you additional directions for making other kinds of hard cider: still, sweet hard cider and both dry and sweet sparkling hard cider. Our recipes here are for one gallon of cider. These extra ingredients should be added to the cider after the second racking, and just before you bottle the hard cider. We don't have measurements or experience with using stevia as a sweetener, so if you have tried that please leave us your tips in the comments. Some think the sweetness of stevia has an odd lingering flavor that competes with the natural sugars in the cider.How to Make Still, Sweet Hard Cider
By now you know that yeast likes to eat sugar. So how do you sweeten up the cider a little without the yeast producing fizzy gas? You add a non-fermentable sugar -- xylitol is a sugar alcohol. How about that? We aren't even going to mention artificial sweeteners, but we do suggest 2-3 tablespoons of xylitol as a "back sweetener". If you have pets, be sure to keep xylitol far from their reach. Xylitol is extremely toxic to dogs. It can even be fatal in very small amounts.An Explosive Topic

Does anyone have experience using cherries for cider? Recipes?