When I was in Ireland last summer for our Cycling the Emerald Isle tour, I noticed an interesting thing: as it got hotter, people were drinking less Guinness and more hard cider. No disrespect to the legendary Irish stout, which is one of my favorite beers, but as a cider fan myself I can understand why. Cider has a lighter, more refreshing character than stout that makes it better suited to a summertime thirst.

Having brewed a few batches of beer at home, I’ve been eager to find a recipe I could make myself that would produce a similar drink. Many brewing supply stores I spoke with indicated that, since cider is basically a wine made from apples rather than grapes, I should use storebought juice and champagne yeast and "wing it." But I’m a relative novice and was hoping for a little more guidance with my first batch of cider, so I was happy when I came across a handful of cider recipes at MrBeer.com. Eric, one of their brewmasters, was kind enough to let us use one of their recipes, and even sent along a kit complete with ingredients, equipment and instructions for making what they call "Aunt Emma’s Autumn Elixir." Here’s the recipe and a little about my experience brewing it.

Aunt Emma’s Autumn Elixir (Apple Beer)

(makes 2 gallons)

Ingredients:

• 1 can Archer’s Orchard Hard Cider (about 1.2 pounds of juice concentrate)
• 1 can Mellow Amber unhopped malt extract
• 1/2 cup honey
• 1 oz Liberty Hops
• 1 packet Cider Yeast

Equipment:

• Mr. Beer 2-gallon fermenter
• muslin bag for hops
• stainless spoon or ladle
• sanitizing solution
• large kettle, plate, measuring cup
• bottles and caps

The Brewing Process:

1. Clean and sanitize your equipment, including the measuring cup and a plate to rest your spoon on.
2. Boil 1 quart of water, stir in the honey, and remove from heat.
3. Add the juice concentrate and malt syrup and stir well.
4. Put one gallon of cold tap water in the fermenter.
5. Add the juice/malt/honey solution ("wort") to the fermenter, and top off with more cold tap water to the 2 gallon mark.
6. Add the hops (in their muslin bag), and stir well to aerate the wort.
7. Sprinkle the yeast into the fermenter, let it sit for five minutes, and then stir it again.
8. Cap the fermenter and gently set it in a warm, dark place. (73-81° F is ideal.)

Fermenting

You’ll want to allow the cider to ferment for a week or more before bottling; you can tell when it’s ready when the wort is clear, with little or no foam on top and a heavy sediment at the bottom. Bottling too early carries a risk of bursting bottles, so it’s best to err on the side of caution here.

The Bottling Process:

1. Sanitize your bottles and caps
2. Add the correct amount of white sugar to each bottle. Mr. Beer’s plastic 32-oz bottles take 2 ½ teaspoons each; glass 12-oz bottles take ¾ teaspoon each. You can add the sugar dry, or dissolve it into a small amount of boiling water as an extra precaution against contamination.
3. Fill the bottles to within an inch of the top, cap them, and bottle-condition the cider in the refrigerator for two to four weeks.

Does it end up tasting similar to the ciders I’ve enjoyed in Ireland and the USA? We’ll have to see; as of this writing, the cider is bottle conditioning in the fridge and won’t be truly finished until mid-April. We’ll post a followup with our impressions.

Final Thoughts:

Sanitation is critically important in brewing, because you want your specially bred yeast to have the fermenter to itself. Competition from wild yeasts that might be floating around your kitchen can result in strong off-flavors or outright spoilage. For this reason, the most important aspect of homebrewing is sterilizing your equipment.

On the whole, the Mr. Beer kit is a great introduction to brewing. The two-gallon translucent brown plastic fermenter makes it easy to see what’s going on inside, and the plastic bottles allowed me to gauge the internal pressure during the carbonation stage with a simple squeeze test. The whole brewing process took only about 90 minutes, about half the time it takes me to brew five gallons of beer with my own equipment. Small batches are also a plus for mistake-prone novices because it means there’s less wasted when a batch turns out badly. Experienced home-brewers trying cider for the first time might choose to stick with their favorite fermenting container and just get the ingredients from Mr. Beer, scaling the recipe up appropriately.

Finally, ciders of various kinds are traditional wherever apples are grown, and it’s easy to get drawn into an argument about what constitutes "real" hard cider. Further complicating matters are the regulations about what we call alcoholic beverages in the USA – technically, apple/malt hybrids are "malt beverages" rather than true ciders. Bulmer’s, the brand I found most often at pubs in Ireland, is an all-apple recipe, with a moderate alcohol content and a sweet finish. This recipe, on the other hand, uses apple juice, malt syrup and honey as sources of fermentable sugars. The use of malt and especially of hops (the bittering agent in beers and not often used in ciders) makes it an "apple beer" according to Mr. Beer. Providing so much sugar (and the characteristics of the yeast provided with the recipe) means that it will have a fairly sweet taste, yet contain about 7% alcohol. This is stronger than most beers but weaker than most wines.

Rich Young is a cyclist, bike mechanic, ExperiencePlus! programmer and occasional tour leader who has written on bike maintenance, equipment selection and his more memorable cycling experiences in previous newsletters. If you have a question about our bike fleet or our web site, Rich is a great person to ask: rich@experienceplus.com.