Hard Apple Cider

Every so often, I like to have apple juice around for the week.  It's technically a fruit, and reasonably healthy because I go for the unsweetened stuff.  So, I had a couple of cans of apple juice concentrate in the fridge this week...

On Tuesday night, I was a little bit bored, just hanging out with the baby and doing some cleaning in the kitchen, saw the apple juice and thought.. Hey, I've never made booze out of that!

Looking at a can of low-end apple juice and thinking hard apple cider may seem absurd, but I've made booze out of a lot of crap before.  And I really like hard apple cider (the stuff at the store is kind of expensive though).

This would be my first booze making experiment teaming up with my daughter (she's three months old, fyi).  Time to get down to business, and locate my *other* supplies.

I quickly located a couple of sources of yeast (brewers yeast in the fridge, the dehydrated baking stuff in the pantry).  I needed a vessel to ferment the brew in, something cheap that I wouldn't mind throwing out after the apple cider is completed.  Ah, in the recycle bin, an empty two liter sprite zero bottle.  Perfect.

So here's my general fermentation process:

1. Clean the container, and any other item I'll use in fermenting.
2. Make the juice, generally a little stronger (less water) that I would make normal juice.
3. Test for sugar content.  I use a "Hydromoter" that I bought cheaply a few years ago.  It floats in the water and allows me to calculate the initial sugar percentage.  From this I can calculate potential alcohol.
4. Add sugar (maybe).  In some cases (especially when I'm making bad wine) I want to add sugar to up the potential alcohol content.  In this case, step 3 yielded a potential alcohol of 8.5%, which is actually a little higher than most hard ciders.
5. Start the yeast.  A trick I've learned to jump start yeast is to put the yeast in bowl of warm water and a lot of sugar.  It will quickly start bubbling.
6. Add the yeast.  Just pour it into the sprite zero container.
7. Cap off the bottle.  Because of the way fermentation works, you need to allow this to breath, or it might explode.  I generally cover mine with a piece of cloth, held on with a rubberband. 

This whole process would have taken less than fifteen minutes, in theory.   Except after step 5, I remembered one key missing step.. I hadn't let the wife know I would be fermenting in the house.  And the garage wasn't an option for my fermenter, due to temps in Kansas this time of year.   She's usually cool with this type of thing, but I should probably check in first.

Checked in, wife was cool with it (after a quick eye roll) and I completed the final steps and I'm well on my way.

Here's a picture of the fermentation after a day: