Varieties like Red Delicious, Cortland, and Rome Beauty fall into this group. If you have a good selection of apple varieties available, including some cider types, you may tend toward a yeast with a simpler profile and build your complexity in the juice.Ĭulinary (eating) apples tend to be sweet with low acid and low tannin profiles, leading to a fairly bland cider if fermented alone with a clean, neutral yeast strain.

If you are using culinary apples, you may tilt your yeast choice toward adding complexity that the apples do not have. Among apples themselves, traditional fresh eating varieties or “culinary apples” are lower in tannin and acid than specific-purpose cider apples. For more on keeving, check out this link: Even in a conventional fermentation, your yeast choices may change if you decide to add other fruits to change the flavor and color of your cider or to add sugar to increase the final alcohol level. Because it is treated in this way, the fermentation will be very slow as most of the nutrients and indigenous yeast are left behind in the cap, making it easy to create a sweeter cider as the yeast will likely become stuck and leave behind residual sweetness. This causes a brown, gelatinous mass of the pectins to form and rise, which is known as the chapeau brun or “brown hat.” Once the brown hat rises, the clear cider underneath is racked away and fermented. There is also a traditional method from France and England known as “keeving.” To do this, calcium salts and table salt are added to the cider to coagulate the pectins. For example, fermentation can be carried out on the crushed apple pulp and the cider pressed off later. After you have your cider, add yeast and nutrients to get the fermentation started.Īlternative methods for making hard cider are available and some are of historic interest. Frozen cider is often available year-round in apple growing areas, and even store-bought bottled juice may be used if it is free of preservatives (like sorbate).

If you do not have apple trees but live in an area with orchards, you may be able to buy freshly pressed apple cider from a commercial grower. If you will be using a selected yeast strain (the point of this article), sulfiting the juice is advisable to retard growth of indigenous yeasts prior to the dominance of your cultivated strain. In that sequence, you may wish to add pectic enzymes to the pulp to increase juice yield and enhance the release of aromatic compounds. Cider SourcesĪ popular way to make cider at home is to pick or purchase apples at harvest time, crush them, and press the juice.

You can even take a shot in the dark and rely on indigenous yeast and see what you get, although that’s not a yeast choice that you will have much control over during fermentation. Even having decided that, you still have the choice of many strains with many effects. If that seems too basic, maybe you want to choose a yeast that contributes strongly to an exotic profile in the finished cider. The character of the apples themselves may also drive your decision, if you are seeking to express specific fruit characteristics or capture the characteristics of the apples in a specific region or orchard. In another direction, you may be a history buff and looking to re-create a historical category or style of hard cider. You may just have a large quantity of apples and want to turn them into a clean, straightforward adult beverage as simply as possible. Finally, you are faced with whatever range of yeasts you can obtain where you live.Ĭider objectives can be simple to complex. Choice is further influenced by the apples (or juice) that you will have available for the project. Prominent among these are your specific objectives for your particular beverage. Yeast choice for making the best hard cider requires a few considerations. Let’s explore some variables that go into the selection of a yeast strain for hard cider making, and then a range of specific alternatives. There are cider-specific selections from commercial yeast producers as well as a whole world of yeast strains originally selected for beer or wine that also can be applied to hard cider making. Older references for cider making often advise using Champagne yeast, but modern choices have gone far beyond that narrow focus.

Other fruits can be added, hopped ciders are becoming common, apple variety blending has long been a part of hard cider making, and then there is choosing the yeast. When you decide how to turn your apples (or apple juice) into this time-honored but also trendy beverage, you are faced with more choices than ever before. As the craft cider wave rolls across America, interest in home hard cider making is right there with it.

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