What should hard cider taste like

Traditional cider is made from fresh pressed apple juice full of natural sugars which is left to ferment, similar to how wine was made using natural yeast. But these days, the best ciders in the UK use local Somerset cider-making apple varieties known for their high quality and balanced taste. Choosing a good cider can be as tricky as buying quality wine. Sometimes you end up with cooking wine when you really wanted a crisp Chardonnay.

The mix of cider apple varieties used account for the different flavours and tones found in the finished cider.

Cider can mean different things to people. So, while it can taste sweetly of apples to one person, to someone else, they enjoy drinking cider for the sharp, acidic edge that pleasantly cuts through their thirst on a hot summers day.

The base flavours of English ciders come from the bittersweet apple varieties sourced from traditional cider orchards. These varieties are grown explicitly for cider-making and some are believed to be centuries old native apple varieties. Brothers Cider use a combination of apple varieties to strike the right balance of bitter and sweet.

We mainly use apples from Somerset Orchards that are just a few short miles from our cider mill. Cider is now becoming a drink for the connoisseurs, and has always been a great match with food. The broad appeal of modern cider transcends all class barriers and is a perfect mix of old cider-making practices with a modern take on flavours and blends.

To put it simply, cider appeals to everyone — from discerning drinkers enjoying a glass on its own or pairing it with food to a growing audience choosing the wide variety of cider flavours over more traditional drinks such as beer and lager.

Again, this isn't an easy question to answer. Because ciders can be still, naturally sparkling or carbonated, the first impact on the tongue can deliver a different first taste. Otherwise, the cider is sour and apple-y tasting. The yeasty sips are very unpleasant, so if you attempt this, take a lot more care than I did about keeping the yeast out of your final product.

It will taste like bread smells, if the bread were half-baked and then left in a dark, dank place for days. If I put the bottles in more static positions, the yeast would settle out better. So my first cider is hardly an elixir of the gods; even in a taste test against Miller High Life, it seems watery.

But if I were interested, there are a number of steps I could have taken to remedy this. Home brewers can up the alcohol content in their cider by adding sugar when transferring the cider to its secondary fermentation vessel, if they transfer the settled yeast too.

A cup of sugar a week at a time will nudge this process along; you can repeat this multiple times until the desired alcohol content is reached. This is where we get into an iffy pressure situation—the carbonation stage will create pressure inside the glass bottles and can cause explosions, if improperly managed.

Someday I may get so far as this, but for now I choose flat apple cider in my mouth over carbonated cider on the ceiling of my apartment. So then the question is, if you use sugar to booze up or carbonate your cider, how do you sweeten it?

Xylitol sounds chemical-y, and you probably recognize it as a flavoring in gum, but it is a naturally occurring plant sugar that yeast cannot eat. Normally you would add this prior to the bottling stage, stirring a small amount in and then letting the yeast dregs settle out before bottling it. Three tablespoons per gallon gets you a light, sweet flavor, but you can add more or less and adjust to your tastes.

Sanitization is the most tedious part, but beyond that, micro-batch cider making was neither egregiously time-intensive, nor did it have a very steep learning curve. I turned out something drinkable on my first try without either a full-blown set of equipment or the most orthodox of methods.

Anyone could do the same, provided they have a couple free hours of time on a few consecutive weekends. Is the product still at the end. Fermenting cold is ideal in NY so this is interesting. Anytime I want to slow the fermentation way down, I hit with gelatin to knock out most of the yeast, and rack it. For example, if I start at 1. But if after a week it's still in the 1. When the cider hits very close to 1. Then let it sit for a month or three.

Then after that I can drink it still, or hit it with a little sugar and hope that it carbonates a tad. Sometimes it does, sometimes not. Natural carbonation of cider is always a crapshoot. Even if you hit with sorbate and sulfite, sometimes it will carbonate and even go to dryness I'm still learning.

If I wanted to guarantee perfect carbonation, then I'd keg it. But I don't care. If it carbs, great. If not, just as well, I love it either way. I have never tried dishwasher pasteurization. I might have to give that a try if any of my current batches starts to overcarb.

It should work, in theory, although I have a feeling that it might cause haze and possible cooked apple flavors, which may or may not be a detriment, I dunno. Carbonating without the risk of bottles blowing up is what I worry about as someone new to cider making. Multiple racks seems like a great idea. Rebuilt Cellars also has a wealth of info on cider making.

Lots of very knowledgable folks here I haven't done multiple rackings but I assume if we leave a good inch for the lees at the bottom everytime you rack you have more and more air. If you compensate with more juice aren't you shooting yourself in the foot and restarting fermentation?

OR increasing risk of Vinegar? Yes there are some risks. It hasn't been a real big issue for my small batches but with bigger batches I can see where less intrusive action might be desirable. On the other hand the cider will have more tendency of dryness if you don' t rack often. So it might be a tough decision. I decided to sample it yesterday after 5 days of sitting in secondary. Sure enough after adding the extra apple juice it has started fermenting again but slower thankfylly since Ive lowered the storage temperature.

The alcohol smell has dissipated a bit but so has the apple flavor a little. To be honest, it smells like piss, lol, which was freaking me out until my wife smelled it and said it smelled like wine!! Then I totally smelled wine. How normal is this type of smell? I also bottled 3 bottles so I can more easily sample in the coming weeks.