The cider owes its origin to French peasants who found an excellent way to process the apple harvest. Over time, apple wine has become widely known far beyond France, the number of its varieties sold is hardly quantifiable. You can also try making your own cider.
Preparation for cooking
To make cider at home, you will need a juicer, sugar, wine yeast, plastic containers, a special curved wine tube and, of course, apples. From 50 kilograms of fruit, you should get about 30 liters of finished wine. The apples, of course, must be ripe and free from any visible damage. The variety is not very important, cider can be made from any apples, even sour ones, but you will need to increase the amount of sugar used for cooking.
Sugar in cider can be replaced by adding pears in the amount of 10-30% of the total weight of the fruit.
Apple juice
Prepare the apples for juicing. You can simply cut them into pieces and pass them through a juicer, or you can do with them in the same way as the French peasants did - finely chop them, place them in a container, crush them into gruel, put them on a linen towel, squeeze the juice out of the resulting mass thoroughly. Pour the finished juice into a plastic container, the role of which can be played by a small canister or ordinary plastic bottles.
It is best to leave the cider to ferment at a temperature slightly below room temperature, about 16-18 ° C.
Clogging
But both the canister and the bottles should be able to seal them with a special wine tube, the role of which is to allow the gas released during fermentation to be freely diverted outside and at the same time to prevent the penetration of external air to the fermenting liquid. In the most extreme case, you can do without such a tube by wrapping the bottle with the most ordinary cork. But then you will have to turn it half a turn every day and immediately, as soon as the gas comes out from the inside, turn it back so as not to let the air inside.
Some highly aged ciders can mature for almost a year.
Cider ripening
Add sugar to the juice at the rate of 1-1.5 kg per kilogram of apples. In principle, no further additives are required. Apples already contain a certain amount of yeast necessary for fermentation, you just have to wait and periodically monitor the removal of the resulting gases. It takes about 3 months for the cider to fully mature. If you want to speed up the process a little, you can purchase special wine yeast. With their help, the cider will be ready in 2-3 weeks from the start of preparation.
