Category Archive: Brew

Feb 18

Pasteurizing bottles of hard cider (Or: How to avoid bottle bombs)

Recently, I decided to bottle my hard cider. Like most hard ciders, when it finishes fermenting, you’re left with a Final Gravity (FG) of 1.000 and it tastes very dry. To make it taste more like cider, we back-sweeten. In my case, I had brewed 3 gallons of hard cider and then added 3/4 of …

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Sep 09

Results from the hard cider yeast experiment

In the last post, it was written that a hard cider yeast experiment had been devised. Primarily, the concern was that of which yeast to use. For the experiment, a standard sweet cider was used and an amount of brown sugar was added to raise the starting gravity to 1.067. After this, two different yeasts …

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Aug 25

A hard cider yeast experiment

It’s still summer-time, yet I was getting a hankering for some hard cider. I don’t know why. It seems incredibly popular these days, but I’ve been brewing it for 7 years now, so I don’t see what the big deal is. That said, a curiosity struck me recently regarding cider. Traditionally, I’ve always aimed for …

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Feb 24

Stopping the cider fermentation and re-sweetening (or: How to brew hard cider, part 3)

The last post on brewing hard cider was on monitoring the fermentation. It was observed that after a week, the gravity was around 1.030 and it looked like it needed a few more days to reach the 1.012 range. Well, unfortunately, I fell sick and had trouble getting out of bed for a few days. …

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Feb 01

Monitoring the fermentation of hard cider (Or: How to brew hard cider, part 2)

The first post in this series covered a very simple way to start the fermentation of hard cider where it was noted that sweet cider has a specific gravity of around 1.050. It has now been about 3 days and the cider has started up quite well and fermentation is really going well. The airlock …

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Jan 26

Sweet Cider has a 1.050 specific gravity (or: How to brew hard cider)

As many of my friends can attest, I have a knack for brewing hard cider. It’s fun and it’s different than brewing craft beer. It can be a simple straight hard cider, or adjuncts like ginger or pear can be added for more fun. This post is to show that sweet cider has a starting …

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