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Malted Cider Recipe

Last weekend a quick trip to a local farm had me pondering hard cider.  I wanted to make a cider last year but never got around to it.  But I took the plunge and made my own variant of a cider based beverage.  I wanted to go with a malted cider to be different and to not worry as much about trying to get a good healthy ferment of just apple juice.  I was thinking the malt addition would help add some needed nitrogen sources for healthy fermentation.

Here’s my recipe and process:

3 Gallons apple cider
2lbs Extra Light DME
1lb Turbinado Sugar
1.5 gal water
S-04 English ale yeast repitched from slurry.

The cider had an OG of 1.040 on its own.  I wanted to get a little higher than that, so I added the sugar and only a gallon and a half of water to the DME.  My resultant OG was ~1.058.

The cider was preservative free yet pasteurized.  My process was to boil the DME in the 1.5 gallons of water for 30 minutes to sterilize.  I then added the 3 gallons of cider (at 55F).  I continued to heat the cider slightly until it was at 165F and held it there for 20 minutes to pseudo-repasteurize the mix.  I cooled it to 74F and pitched the yeast.

I am actually fermenting the cider in a water bath in the garage which is holding a steady 64F the last couple days.  It’s supposed to get warmer this weekend.  The water bath should only warm up slowly, so I think that should really help dry out the cider as it comes towards the end of its fermentation.  As of last night there was a good 6 inch head of Krausen on the cider and it was chugging along nicely at 65F.
We’ll see how it turns out.

I have some ideas for what to do with this post ferment, but I’ll save that for future posts.

BREW ON!

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10 Comments

  1. I’ve never made cider before, with malt or without. Please let me know how it turns out.

  2. CanadaBrew

    I was just about to post the link that Scott had already put up. I’ve read about it, but never tried it. Curious to see how it turns out.

  3. Martin

    Hey guys,

    check out my video tutorial no how to make malted cider (Graff)

    Cheers,
    Martin

  4. John Caulk

    Howdy–very interesting site! Regarding the recipe for Malted Cider. I want to make a ONE GALLON batch.
    So, how much of each indgredient would I need?
    Thanks–John

  5. Hi John,

    For a one gallon batch, I would take all the ingredient measures and divide them by 5.

  6. Brent Thompson

    This fall I built a rudimentary press and extracted 27 litres of juice from about 25 gallons of apples from our trees. I froze them until I had time to extract the juice and I think that really helped with yield. Hydrometer indicated about 7% potential alcohol and titration put acid at about 0.7% similar to white wines.

    I bottled 23 litres with 300g of malted barley extract as a primer and kept the rest to try and make apple cider vinegar.

    I think I’m going to âge in the bottle until spring before I give it a try. Wish me luck!

  7. Best of luck, Brent. We really liked the malted cider we made. We’re sure yours will be great!

  8. Mikey

    I’ve had great luck with a Pilsen dme addition and belle saisaon yeast fermented hot to bone dry…some nice phenolic funk.

    This autumn’s experiment has been munich lme (50% munich, 50% pilsener) pitched on a S-04 yeast cake right after it had finished a Willamette hopped English Pale Mild.

    It’s the first bite of a caramel apple without being cloying.

    Graf! Who knew?

  9. Tremendous – Thanks for the comment!

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