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Cheap and Easy Cider That You Can Make At Home

These Brew Dudes are believers in expanding skill sets and exploring other fermented beverages. If you share that same mindset, we have a method of helping you spread your wings beyond brewing beer at home. This method knocks down a couple of the barriers of entry to the new world beyond beer: effort and monetary cost. Take a look at how you can make cheap and easy cider at home!

Mike’s Cheap and Easy Cider

So you may have this trouble too. You want to brew beer but you can’t find the time to do. Mike listened to a podcast and decided in the time he has available to him lately that he would put his experience and equipment to use on making cider.

The cider we tasted was made from store brand apple juice. It comes in 0.75 US gallon jugs (96 fluid ounces) and it’s made with apple juice concentrate, filtered water, and ascorbic acid.

The key to any juice you use for fermentation is that it does not contain chemical preservatives like potassium sorbate which will inhibit yeast from fermenting the juice.

Mike bought three of these apple juice jugs for less than 10 US dollars. He added the 2.25 gallons of juice to his 3 gallon sized fermentor. Then, he sprinkled 1 packet of Danstar Nottingham Ale Dry Beer Yeast and some yeast nutrient onto the juice and let it ride for a couple of months.

Once it was clear, he bottled it up using his bucket and added some table sugar so that the yeast could naturally carbonate in the bottle. In terms of effort, he probably spent most of his energy bottling the cider.

The cider was super clear and tasty along with being cheap and easy to make.

Why Should You Make Cider At Home

Many in our community brew beer only and we understand that, but we feel the opportunity to make other fermented beverages at home is too great to ignore. When you blend your home brew beer experience with making these other beverages, you’ll learn to appreciate the beer making process more because of how complex it is as compared to cider, mead, or wine making.

Use your skills to make other beverages and gain a greater understanding of a larger world. Plus, if you make other drinks beyond beer, you’ll most likely expand your circle of people who like your output.

Make cider for others if not for yourself and if you don’t want to invest too much, follow this cheap and easy way!

Mike has more of these flavored ciders on the way so be on the look out for them.

Brew on.

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4 Comments

  1. I recently discovered homemade cider, too! I have had good luck also with the “hazy” (but cheap) unfiltered apple juice from the grocery store in combination with the Mangrove Jack cider yeast strain. The result is a nice dry cider with some ample aromatic character…tasty! It’s _almost_ enough to make me wish I lived outside of southern California, to have more apple varieties to play with.

  2. Thanks Andrew. It’s good to hear that other homebrewers are making cider too.

  3. john p

    Hi Guys, Im going to make some apple cider. One question. When the fermenting is done and I bottle it, are camden tablets needed to stabilize the cider?

  4. No, I don’t think it’s necessary. I have added some priming sugar to the cider before bottling so that it would carbonate in the bottle. If I added a Campden tablet, the cider would not carbonate.

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