Bottling again…

Tonight we will be bottling our first batch of hard cider. If you haven’t made hard cider before it is extremely easy to do. Hard cider is essentially comprised of cider and yeast. We added sugar to ours as well as a bit of back sweeteners once the fermentation was complete. The apples we used for this batch were very tart and the cider fermented out to be extremely dry. Back sweetening is a process of adding back in sugar or sweetener once fermentation has been stopped. Our back sweeteners consisted of apple juice concentrate and a little Splenda. Hard cider tastes best when it has been allowed to sit after bottling for a few months. I will keep you posted as to how our cider tastes in the months to come. We will be starting another batch tonight with cider from much sweeter apples which should end up not being quite so dry.