Gold Rush Hard Cider

You know what's easier to make than beer? Hard cider! The beer-related posts below have so many steps and ingredients, which is pretty awesome I have to say, but for a cramped schedule cider is just the trick.

My wife Beth, who is a genius, decided that we needed to brew together and wanted to make apple cider. That was brilliant, I thought, so I started researching. I knew my favorite apple cider of all time was the Gold Rush cider from North Star Orchard, and it just so happened that I could mass-order the stuff and that it doesn't contain preservatives! I ordered 7 gallons - two for drinking/mulling, and five for fermenting. We picked it up at Clark Park less than 10 days ago. (The non-fermented cider is already gone...)

The next day I went to Home Sweet Homebrew, my local brew store of choice. I walked around a bit, forgetting where everything was since I hadn't brewed in months. After picking up a packed of the wrong wine yeast, someone asked if I was making cider (obviously not making wine at this time of year, I guess). I said I was, and started talking about "the best cider I've ever had". Nancy overheard me and asked which one. When I told her she got very excited and exclaimed that she was making the same stuff! Apparently she's made it for a few years, and has experimented with different sugars, and with bottling and kegging, with great success. She was also generous enough to give me her recipe, and helped me pick out all the ingredients. Here it is:

5 gallons Gold Rush cider
5 campden tablets
2 packets of D47 dry yeast
1 packet of yeast nutrients
5 lbs of sugar (turbinado, demerara, glucose, etc.) - I chose turbinado
1 packet of acid blend (citric, malic, and tartaric)

Crush a campden tablet into each cider jug, and refrigerate for 24 hours. Sanitize a 5-gallon carboy, and dump in the sugar, yeast, nutrients, and cider. Stir it, airlock it, and let it go!

Ours didn't start bubbling for a few days, but I think our house was too cold (60F), and after I turned the heat up to 65F the yeast got busy and now it's going nuts. The D47 is non-foaming, so an airlock in a 5-gallon carboy was completely sufficient.

I haven't figured out bottling or racking yet, but will update this when that is all done.