/diy/ - Do It Yourself

Since you aren't looking for quality, cheap apple juice that doesn't contain any potassium-sorbate (just look for "100% juice"), brown sugar, and bread yeast should work fine.

Do yourself a favor and spend the extra couple dollars on a glass jug, drilled rubber stopper, and air lock. you will only need to buy these once so its not a huge investment (maybe $7 total), but reduces your risk of bacterial infection considerably. Be sure everything you use is clean, and sanitize everything with a solution of bleach and water, and rinse well (if you can still smell bleach you need to rinse more).

For 1 gallon:
Drink a glass or two of your juice, put the rest in a pot and get it warm (not boiling) then mix in 2 cups of brown sugar. allow it to cool to room temperature and transfer it to your jug. re-hydrate your yeast as is listed on its package then add that to the jug too, shake it a little, seal with rubber stopper and airlock, let sit in a dark place for 1-2 weeks. Pour carefully as to not disturb the yeast sediment on the bottom and enjoy.

You could use the jug the juice came in instead of the glass one, but then you risk your stopper not fitting properly. you can use white sugar instead of brown if you like, but brown is recommended.

Add sugar and invest in actual brewing yeast. A few good/cheap ones for cider are Lalvin EC 1118, Safale US-05, and Safale S-04. If the apple juice is pasteurized already (most store brand apple juice is) then you don't need to worry about microbes

>>551519
See >>549751

Would it work with this? Pic related, it's the ingredients. No harmful things will be made? Yes. I'm new in this field.

>>551519
Excuse for me to dump some shitty cider making pics? I think so.

First, acquire ingredients for making shitty cider, as mentioned before, you can use bread yeast, spring for real brewing yeast, or if you want to play roulette, grab a handful of raisins like this.

Side note, if you live in regions where apples are grown, right now is a good time to go shop for some quality cider to start off with for cheaper than this crappy juice.

>>551685
Next, I take that lid off and trace a circle around this here nylon hose barb that I had laying around, then use a cut a hole slightly smaller than that. Once that is done, a little bit of flame through the hole for a second or two will soften it up just enough to screw the barb though leaving it airtight.

>>551686
Now shove some tubing onto the hose barb, then when you put the lid back on you put the other end of the tubing into a glass off water. This is called a blow off tube, and is your airlock.

Pic of what it will all look like at the end.

>>551687
Go ahead and grab your bleach, and put pot of water on to boil. Mix the bleach with some regular water, clean EVERYTHING that is going to touch your cider with it. Then rinse off with water that you boiled.

>>551689
Pour off some of the cider, about pic related should do. Mix in your sugar and yeast.

As
>>551540 mentioned, two cups of sugar to the gallon is a good place to start, you can adjust this later to suit you/your yeast. Hell, if your yeast can take it, you might get away with adding a couple more cups of sugar halfway through fermentation for more alcohol content.

But for now, two cups will do.

>>551692
Cap it all up, and put it somewhere where the temperature is stable, if you're comfortable, your yeast probably is too. (I claim no responsibility if your yeast is one of those weird sweater wearing freaks that likes odd temperatures and you didn't do your research to find that out.) You can add a splash of bleach to the blowoff cup, but you don't have to. After a day or two your cider should be bubbling happily.

>>551695
Assuming you want your cider to be carbonated when the bubbling has slowed down to one bubble every 7-10 seconds use a tube to siphon off the cider into another container, leaving the trub (yeasty stuff that has settled out) on the bottom. From here you can either just put it in the fridge and drink right away, or bottle it up for aging/individual servings. Or if you don't want carbonation, just put the blowoff tube onto the new container and let it continue to ferment until no more bubbles are formed.

I seem to have lost my pics of the racking and bottling process, so have one of cider bottles aging in the closet.

>>551700
Now go ahead and enjoy your cider. If you have the patience to let it set for at least a couple of weeks it will be noticeably better tasting, but you're probably not to worried about that, are you?
But if you are, you might try changing up how much sugar you use, what yeast you use, using brown sugar, white sugar, or corn sugar if you're feeling fancy, adding some tea for tannins.

>>551703
Thanks for all the info! I made a composite of all your posts.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f25/man-i-love-apfelwein-14860/

>>551631

Looks OK. Basically, as long as there are no artificial preservatives in it (that would kill the yeast you see) it should be fine

>>551686
Nope. Way too much work for this level of brewing.

Get a balloon, a rubber band & something to poke holes with (needle, safety pin, bit of wire, etc).

Get a balloon, wash it inside and out with distilled vinegar or gin. Soap and water as a last resort. Poke a few holes in it.

Put the balloon inside the bottle, stretching the mouth of it over the bottle. Hold in place with a rubber band.

The balloon will pop up and inflate slightly, in a few hours to overnight. You will hear it hissing quietly the whole time cider ferments.

When the balloon falls down, active fermentation has stopped. Rack & drink. Or, very very slowly & gently pour off the cider, without disturbing the sediment, then stop before sediment gets in your container. If you're desperate, pour the last cloudy bit of liquid through a coffee filter, still trying to keep the bulk of the sediment out.

Here's a representative picture from the internet.

>>551540
>bread yeast
dont skimp out here, just order some champagne yeast or do a quick google on best cider yeast
Its cheap to mailorder and affects how much ABV you can reach and how fast you will get there
and if your brew works out, you can always reuse the yeast a few times

>>552328
>Its cheap to mailorder
It's cheap to buy in the store even. If there's a brew shop nearby, dry yeasts ranges from $0.50 to $4.00, and wet cultures are $5.00-$10.00.

I'm cheap, so I get the $0.50 red-star dry yeast. Once in a while I splurge on the wet, or a dystar brand dry (they're 5x the price!)

>>552336
Wet yeast isn't really better though, it just matters the kind of yeast.

>>551519
Two solutions for you.

1. Just want to get drunk fuck everything else.

Buy apple juice, sugar, balloons and Red Star champagne yeast(50c a package)

Pour sugar in juice with yeast (one packet five gallons). Put the balloon on top. If the balloon gets filled up too much take it off to let the gas go then put it back on. In two weeks gently pour the cider into an empty container leaving as much of the yeast on the bottom behind as possible. Drink.

This will get up to 18% if you put in a lot of sugar. It will taste like rocket fuel if you drink it right away but you will get plastered. The less sugar you add the better it will taste unless you age it.

2. Easy but taste okay. Buy glass jug of cheap wine about 5 liters. Drink wine and use as fermenter. Buy stopper and airlock for 2 dollars. Make as before and keep somewhere cool. You can now age it in the glass if you don't want to drink until later.

Bottling is the most work and most expensive so don't do it until you want to move deeper into cider making.

When you inevitably love making cider buy actual equipment and you can still make quality cider for cheaper than the store.

>>551519
One more thing. The apple juice must have NO PRESERVATIVES. Absobic acid is okay but some commercial juices have shit that will stop your yeast.
I recommend Musselmans apple cider from Walmart. Cheap and good.

>>552324
Seriously just buy an airlock they can't cost more than 50pence and you can re-use them. Also they work better than a balloon. Worse thing is to put in all that time and have bacteria get into your brew.

>>552377
For your first time a balloon is fine. As long as you don't spit in the juice it's going to be fine. It won't even be leaving the container until it's done so a balloon is no more likely to contaminate it than an airlock. The balloon is a time honored method, most people are just scared of using something different, my grandfather used balloons for every batch of his dandelion wine.

>>552411
Fair enough. I think I'm scared to get any of my brews contaminated...I even use spirits in my air locks!

>>552411
Yeah, balloons are fine.

>>552371
What would make it taste less like rocket fuel?
More aging?
More sugar?

>>552371
What sort of measurements am I supposed to be looking at here? How much sugar per gallon of juice, do I just add the entire thing of yeast to a single jug of juice, or do I spread it out over several jugs?

>>552411
>>552433
I as a homebrewer and the son of one, have never used a balloon because of the infinite airlocks and stoppers of every size, but the engineer in me says that balloons are awesome. If its just a pinhole, then as the balloon expands, so will the hole, letting more gas out, but as it contracts, the gas emission rate will lower, until when it empties, because of the elastic properties of a balloon, the hole will close up completely and become almost if not completely hermetically sealed. Go with a balloon.