BREW: Crabby Apple Cyser Homemade Hard Cider
If you aren’t pressing your own fruit, hard cider is one of the easiest ferments for beginners, or for quickly putting bottles in your cellar.Â
How Do You Make Hard Cider?
- Sterilize the juice (or not)
- Add pectic enzyme and a bit of tannin (or not)
- Pitch your yeast (or not, if you are doing a wild ferment and didn’t sterilize- it’s already in there)…
- Wait, taste and adjust the acidity to taste (or not)
- Add priming sugar (or not)
- And bottle or keg it.Â
Easy. As long as you have good sanitation and start with quality juice that doesn’t have preservatives, it’s practically foolproof.
This crabapple cyser recipe makes a much more complex and interesting homebrewed cider, without needing a fruit press! I’m adding whole crabapples gathered from the neighborhood to the ferment, and honey, making this a cyser.
What’s a cyser?
Cyser is a mead brewed with cider instead of water for the liquid component, or hard cider with added honey. It’s got a bit more oomph than a regular hard cider, and a more complex flavor than a plain mead. It’s an easy hard drink (I know, sounds like an oxymoron but it isn’t) that you can bottle still or sparkling.Â
We’re using CL-23, a higher alcohol tolerance wine yeast (up to 18%) that is a slower fermenter, but it should highlight the fruit flavors and give a little more complexity than a fast fermenting bone dry champagne yeast.
The crabapples will add acidity, a tannic backbone, and hopefully a bit of rosy color to our finished tipple. Now, enough talk, let’s get brewing!Â
CrabbyApple Cyser
Ingredients
- 1 gallon apple cider no preservatives
- 1 lb crabapples picked over and rinsed
- 1 lb light honey clover or wildflower
- 1 each campden tablet KMS
- 1 packet Wine or beer yeast I used CL-23
- 1 tsp Pectic enzyme divided
- Go-ferm or other yeast nutrient optional
- ½ tsp. Bentonite optional
Instructions
- Crush the Camden tablet and add to the cider. Shake well and leave for 24 hours.
- Freeze the crabapples... This will start to break down the cell walls and increase juice extraction.
- Sanitize a wide-mouth primary fermenter- either a large fermentation jar that is more than one gallon, or a 2-3 gallon bucket.
- Heat 4 cups of water to a boil, and add the frozen crabapples. Bring back to a simmer and then remove from the heat and let cool.
- Add 1/2 tsp pectic enzyme to the pot, and 1/2 tsp to the jug of cider & mix well. Let sit one hour so the enzyme can do it's work.
- Meanwhile, measure the honey into the fermenter, and hydrate the yeast in 4 oz of water (boiled and then cooled- If you are using Go-ferm, add that to the water before the yeast).
- Pour the crabapple mixture into a nylon or muslin bag in the fermenter. With clean hands, tie off the bag and squeeze the crabapples into a pulp to release their flavor and color. Mix well with a sanitized spoon to dissolve the honey.
- Add the cider and stir well. If you are using bentonite, add now, dissolved in a few oz of warm water.
- Pitch the hydrated yeast, check and record the SG and seal the fermenter with an airlock.
- After 7-14 days, remove the bag with the crabapples. Let the cyser settle a day or two so the sediment can drop out and rack into a 1 gallon carboy. Check SG.
- When cyser is clear and fermentation is complete, bottle. Rack again before bottling if you like or especially if there is a lot of sediment in the carboy.
- Add priming sugar and use heavy bottles if sparkling cyser is desired- leave the bottles at fermentation temperature for 7-14 days before cellaring or chilling. Don't overdo the priming sugar- be precise and use a priming sugar calculator online if you aren't sure.
