Store-bought is not enough: My first hard cider homebrew
I enjoy beer and cider so much, I decided to start rolling my own.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/store-bought-is-not-enough-my-first-hard-cider-homebrew/
My relationship with beer has grown too comfortable. We share an easy routine: I buy it at the store—a different kind almost every time—take it home, and drink it. I'm not sure how the beer feels about this, but it seems happy. Still, things have gotten boring. So I'm taking the next step: making my own hard cider.
I chose cider for my first foray into home brewing for a couple of reasons. First, much as I would like to make beer, it involves a more extended process and more specialized ingredients. Wine is closer to cider in simplicity, but I envision cheaply made homebrewed wine tasting much worse than cheaply made cider. Furthermore, autumn comes but once a year; I can buy a wine or beer kit any time, but there’s only a couple of months during which I can get good soft cider.
Plenty of decent small-scale kits let you brew a small batch of beer/cider yourself. Here, I made a somewhat hacked-together solution—maybe a little more cumbersome than buying a kit, but it was cheaper. Most kits worth buying run $100-150 to make five gallons of whatever poison you choose. I want to have a go at this without potentially dumping five whole gallons of bad-tasting liquid, getting discouraged, and ultimately wasting my money on a kit I barely have room for and might not use again. With that in mind, I am starting small, with a gallon.
Our cast of characters
Two glass growlers, 2L size: $5 or free—To have two growlers at home, you only have to have decided on a whim at a bar that you really want to take a lot of one beer home twice, and the second time, you have to have forgotten your first growler at home. I actually have three growlers. They are starting to just appear here like stray cats, waiting to be fed with new and interesting beers. I am still too young to be the neighborhood growler lady. Having a third growler (or a second gallon glass jug) is not strictly necessary for this process but will vastly help with the amount of musical chairs you have to play with your cider later. I highly recommend you get one.
For growlers, you can substitute any glass jug of reasonable size, a fancy fermentation bucket, or anything in between. You can’t just use any old bucket because there is such a thing as food-grade plastic, so it’s safest to stick to glass unless you happen to have bought your materials from a homebrew store where people know what they’re talking about.
A gallon of soft cider, preferably from a quaint local farm: $6-8—Technically you can accomplish cider with preservative-free apple juice if that's your thing (or you can't find the real stuff). But that's no fun at all. You need cider that is preservative-free (no sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate as one of the ingredients). If you have the option of pasteurized or unpasteurized cider, either works, and I’ll discuss the benefits of each later.
A can of apple juice concentrate: $2—This doesn’t have to be concentrate, but concentrate is sugarier, which sugar-hungry yeast likes, and is virtually guaranteed to be preservative-free. Mott’s apple juice also has no preservatives. You’ll use this to make a starter.
Dry wine yeast, Lalvin EC-1118: $6-7 for 10 packets—This is a common, cheap, easy-to-find yeast that works for cider. That few dollars gets you enough to make 10 batches of a recipe this size, so the actual cost of what you use is less than a dollar. Champagne yeast is similarly cheap. There are liquid yeasts made specifically for cider, but they are about ten times more expensive.
A cup of sugar: Free—I’m guessing you have some around. Honey or brown sugar also works. If you don't have sugar, you can try to borrow it from a neighbor, but there's a 60 percent chance they will think you're up to no good.
Two airlocks: $1 each—These are little plastic pieces that let the gas generated from fermentation flow out and prevent new air from flowing in. There are a couple of different designs, but this one is simple and cheap. It is also possible to just cover the mouths of your fermentation jugs with a balloon and let the air of it when necessary, if you happen to have a lot of balloons lying around because you are more fun than I am. But a packet of balloons costs about as much as the reusable, real-equipment versions, which are airlocks and…
Stoppers/bungs: $1 each—These are stoppers with holes in the middle of them to stick your airlocks in. Different jug mouths need different sizes, but you just need to measure the mouth and then look at this chart to see what size you need.
You will need later:
A length of food-grade tubing, $4-10—this is unfortunately one of the most expensive items on this list, but the price varies; here is a length for $4 shipped on Amazon. This is not strictly necessary, either, but it will make removing sediment from the cider equation much easier later.
Optional:
Beer bottles, free—you can save these from your own personal retail beer journeys. For the purposes of this highly experimental project, I will suggest this as not the primary way to go about bottling. Since I'm using growlers, I can "bottle" the cider in those without having to invest in...
Bottle caps (100-144ct), $4-5—far more material than you need, though they take up less space than you might think.
A bottle capper, $13—this is a nice Ars Technica orange, but the process of bottling edges cider-making into an even more expensive/cumbersome endeavor.
You can also bottle your cider in saved-up plastic soda bottles, if presentation doesn't matter. I will show both growler-bottling and bottle-bottling processes in later steps, but know there are ways around bottling in conventional bottles if you don't want to bother with caps, cappers, and sterilizing all those tiny vessels.
Total equipment cost: $11-19
Total materials cost: $14-17 at the outset, $9-11 per batch
One gallon of cider works out to almost 11 bottles of cider. This isn’t the cheapest way to get drunk, but hopefully the final product will be at least comparable to what you can get off the shelf (everyone shake your fist at the inescapable Original Sin and Angry Orchard ciders) and, with the homesteading tendencies of our nation’s youth, you get to feel like you made something. (When it comes time to bottle, if the final product is not-so-tasty, I’ll try a couple of modifications to see if I can’t improve the flavor with stuff I've got on hand.)
On sanitizing
Sanitizing everything that is going to touch your cider or any ingredient of your cider is necessary. At best, your cider will taste bad, at worst, it will make you sick.* The easiest way to sanitize is to make a bleach solution of 1 tablespoon of bleach in a gallon of water and soak everything in there for at least 20 minutes, or put that solution inside anything that can’t be soaked (your fermentation vessels). Keep some boiled water to rinse these things as you take them out to use.
There are more sanitizing materials you can buy, but I’m specifically suggesting bleach because I have it on hand, and you probably do, too. Sanitizers like Star San and Iodophor are quicker but also small investments you may want to wait to pick up down the line if you decide homebrewing is fun.
* Evidence I’ve turned up suggests it will not actually make you sick, but if there’s even a small risk, no Arsians are falling ill on my watch. Sanitize your stuff.
The beginning
The first step is to make a starter, which will allow you see that your yeast is alive and well. This step isn’t strictly necessary, but you don’t want to go through even the small number of brewing steps necessary here only to see your yeast just lying there motionless.
I add a packet of dry wine yeast to the juice (in a sanitized container) and shake it around a little to integrate them, leaving the top cracked so gas can escape if the yeast does turn out to be viable. After about two hours, the juice is bubbling on the surface—when it comes to action, it’s not exactly Fred Astaire, but it is alive. The starter can go in the fridge until tomorrow.
The next day...
I take the starter out of the fridge and add a cup of sugar, shaking to integrate. The yeast, understandably, is loving this—adding sugar gives it more to feed on and will boost the alcohol content of the final product.
Now, if I were using cider that had not been pasteurized, this is the time when I’d cook it to kill off the natural yeasts hanging around inside it to bring this science experiment a little more under my control. Unpasteurized cider needs to be simmered—not boiled, or the pectins will start to set—for about 45 minutes prior to bottling. This also makes it slightly easier to dissolve your extra sugar.
Even if you do have unpasteurized cider, it’s not unheard of to start it without cooking—as a few guides I’ve read said, this “may or may not improve” the flavor. Hence, if you lack the equipment or time to cook a large vat of liquid for an hour, skipping the cook will, in the end, still produce alcohol. No one is promising flavor, only the entirely bearable lightness of being slightly or very inebriated, as suits you.
Now that my equipment is sanitized, I dump it out, rinse it (using boiled water), and split my starter between the two growlers I’m using. My pasteurized cider follows it in, filled to about where the neck starts. I stir the two jugs with a sanitized sharpening steel, because it is the longest and sturdiest thing I have lying around for stirring, but any decently long sanitized stick works (chopstick, cooking spoon handle, and so on) for integrating the rest of the sugar, the yeast, and the cider. I fill my airlocks about halfway with water, stick them in the bungs, stick the bungs in the growlers, and stick the growlers in a relatively cool place. Cider and yeast need an environment between 60-75ºF, or a coolish room temperature, to do their best work.
And my work is done for at least a week, maybe two. From here, I monitor and refill the water in the airlocks, if necessary, and wait patiently for booze to develop. In next week's installment, I'll cover maintaining and bottling the cider. The third and last installment will cover the final product triumphs and regrets. Follow along at home if you're so inclined.
Promoted Comments
mad_ludvigSmack-Fu Master, in training
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Finally something I feel qualified to comment on! A couple of thoughts/tips.
If you're at all serious about this, spend the 10 bucks and get some decent sanitizer. It'll last forever, and you won't have to worry about rinsing your bleach off and re-introducing bacteria, mold spores or wild yeast.
Secondly, you're probably going to have to age this batch for around 6-9 months in order to have something drinkable that doesn't resemble rocket fuel. EC-1118 is a super dry champagne yeast and will chew up all of the apple flavor. If you want to have something done more quickly I would recommend a dry English ale yeast such as Lallemand's Nottingham or Safale's S-04. These won't ferment all of the complex sugars, and you'll have something drinkable in a couple of months.
Finally, nutrient. Get some Fermaid-K and DAP and add about a teaspoon per gallon. This will help keep your yeast healthy and again, your cider will be drinkable quicker.
Unless you live somewhere remote, you probably have a local homebrewing store where you can get all of this. There are also numerous online stores that are a bit more economical than Amazon for homebrewing stuff.
Feel free to PM me if anyone has questions. Also, HomeBrewTalk and the homebrewing subreddit are great resources.
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Homebrewing cider, part 2: We lose control
The trickiest part isn't getting cider into fermentation. It's getting it out again.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/homebrewing-cider-part-2-we-lose-control/
My cider has been in its growlers for not half an hour, and already it’s misbehaving. Specifically, it’s trying to crawl out of one of the airlocks as the fermentation gas leaks out. I get that Chinese-water-torture feeling where you see exactly what is about to happen but are powerless to stop it.
In case you missed it, I set about my first ever homebrew experiment a few weeks ago. Things were going well then, and I thought the rest of the experiment would go smoothly. Exactly when I started to relax, the cider started to get up to tricks.
Disaster strikes
I suspect the cider was creeping out of the jug because it was too warm in my apartment—as I stated in part one, cider optimally ferments at 60-75 degrees, and warmer temperatures will put the yeast in overdrive. I conveniently picked the first week of 80-degree weather in a solid month of moderate-to-crisp autumn temperatures to start this project. Woe.
Typically, more experienced and better-equipped homebrewers solve this by installing a “blowoff valve” over the mouth of their fermentation jugs, which is basically a large version of an airlock that feeds fermentation gases and gunk into a cup of water via tubing. I still have yet to buy my tubing, so I take some random Internet forum advice suggesting that if I remove the valve and leave the stopper opening covered with tin-foil, it’s off-gassing enough that fresh air sneaking in isn’t so much of a concern. I leave the cider like this overnight.
By the next morning it appears to have stopped overreacting, so I re-sanitize and replace the valves. For a while, they’re bubbling along fine, but as the temperature rises, the cider starts to creep into the valves again. A couple of times I flush, re-sanitize, and replace them, while covering the stopper openings with tinfoil. The cider keeps creeping in, so I decide to just let them overflow for a while.
So much for this project being not much work; it’s like babysitting an endlessly gurgling infant. Let this be a warning: if you do have cooler parts to your house, like a basement or garage, having your cider somewhere relatively cool is not a trivial matter. Otherwise your yeast will do its terrible impression of a volcano all over whatever surface you’re storing the jugs on.
Furthermore, the need for repeated santizings is a vote for having some dedicated sanitizing solution on hand that doesn’t require this onerous soak-in-bleach, rinse-in-boiled-water workflow. But since blow-off gunk started collecting within the airlocks and in the bungs, they did kind of need a soak anyway. It’s also a vote for more easily disassembled airlocks, as the continuous tube ones are difficult to clean once they’ve been violated by cider-creep.
Eventually, the blow-off dies down, and my cider settles into a gentle bubbling. I actually find myself mesmerized by the gurgle when I sit down to check it. It's hypnotic.
More disaster strikes, but this is all my fault
After about a week, the airlocks have nearly ceased bubbling—at less than a bubble a minute, the yeast inside has more or less chewed all of the sugar it can into alcohol. There are many directions you can go from this point, including adding more sugar to increase the alcohol content, flavors, carbonation, and so forth, but I’m trying to keep this simple.
The next step is to transfer the cider to a secondary fermentation vessel. At this point, much of the yeast has settled out to the bottom of the growlers, and moving the cider to new growlers before bottling it will help separate it better. It’s not absolutely essential, but if you have the time and the extra vessel for it, it’s worth getting as much yeast out as you can.
But here is also where problems start with the lo-fi methods I’ve chosen. I’ve read that it is possible to strain cider, rather than trying to siphon it away from the dregs, but that recommendation was… unusual, to say the least. Hence, I’m using the tubing I mentioned in the last installment to siphon the cider into new growlers. Siphoning turns out to be both the niftiest and the simplest thing I’ve seen in terms of physics principles at work, and it's the thing most likely to turn on you before you even understand what’s going on.
Siphoning can be done with an auto-siphon, which, like much homebrew equipment, is kind of expensive for being a somewhat complex piece of plastic, but it gives you some control over the forces at work. I instead opt to risk spilling cider all over my floor.
Siphoning is a lot of physics. I could explain it, or I could just tell you to try to get a sense of it by playing around with some water first. Basically, you’re going to create an uneven pressure situation in your tubing using water, suck cider into the tube behind the water, dump the water, and then work the uneven pressure to your advantage to pull cider out of one growler and into another.
You “prime” the tubing by filling it with some water. If you stick one end in the growler full of cider and stick another end into a bowl at a slightly lower elevation, the cider will travel from the growler to the bowl. Practice first with some bottles or bowls and water to get a sense of how it works.
Because I have no auto-siphoning tool, I have to start and stop the flow by holding the low end of the tube up, stopping one end with my finger, or some combination thereof. It’s tricky, and unless you are many times more dextrous and coordinated than I, you’re going to spill some (or a lot) of cider.
So I prime my (sanitized) hose, stick one end in a growler full of cider, and point the other end into a large bowl to draw in the cider and let the priming water out. Once the cider is drawn through, I plug it, move it to the new (sanitized) growler, and let the cider flow.
Of course, gravity works against me, and there’s not enough of a pressure difference between the two ends to get the cider moving, so I pick the end-growler up and move it closer to the floor. This gets the flow going again. I try to pluck the end of the hose in the starting growler away when the level gets too close to the dregs, but I’m sure some made the transfer. I have to leave behind a painful amount of cider.
Originally I thought I was going to get about 10 bottles out of this equation, but with the quantity of cider I’m going to have to leave behind for filtration purposes (twice, now), it will be less. Naturally, I also spill some cider on the floor during this process, when it starts coming too fast into the priming water bowl, and I jerk the hose around in panic spasms. Like I said, practice. Since I only had three growlers, I had to play a bit of musical chairs, siphoning out of the first into the third, then washing and re-sanitizing the first to siphon the second’s cider into it.
After the brew sits for another week in its new vessels, yet more yeast has settled out of it, and it’s time to bottle. I’ve saved a bunch of cider and beer bottles, picked up some caps for $4, and bought one of those clunky, expensive bottle cappers.
Bottling, or more accurately, flooring
As I said in part one, you can technically “bottle” into a growler as long as you still have the cap for it. Since this is still cider we’re making, you wouldn’t even have to drink it all in one sitting, technically. So that process is easy—re-siphon again into new growlers, cap, and store.
Bottling with the old-fashioned siphon method proved to be extremely cumbersome, as I had to stop and start the flow between every 12 ounces of beer. If you watch the video above, you can see that I do the first two bottles perfectly. Things go downhill from there.
I have two main problems: Usually I can get the priming water out OK and start flow into a bottle. But if I don’t time ending the flow right, the bottle overflows, cider goes everywhere. Even if that doesn’t happen, I tend to lose the siphon balance in my hose and have to re-prime it with new water. Just go into this expecting to lose and to re-do several steps—there are no winners, except the cider that wanted to be on your floor. Or cheat and just get an auto-siphon tool.
By the end, there is cider on my floor, on my table, on my socks, surprisingly none on my person, but a good amount of it in the bottles. There are eight bottles in total, which I capped and put in the refrigerator.
There are few benefits to tiny-batch homebrewing—ask the hours I’ve spent ferrying cider between glass vessels to net eight measly bottles—but one is that you can stash it all in your fridge, where you know that any residual yeast will be too cold to rouse itself to action, so none of your bottles will burst. Yes, that is a danger, so you could bottle in plastic soda bottles, which will at least give you some warning by swelling into weird shapes before popping.
Here’s to doing things we might regret
The last thing I do is taste the cider, so I can find out whether to give up now and dump everything into the gutter. I pour off a little into a tiny glass and… hesitantly… sip.
Shockingly, it’s not revolting. The flavor is not terribly off, and it still does taste like apples. I’d read not to expect that. It’s pretty sour—makes sense, since the yeast would have eaten all the sugar—but it doesn’t taste funky, or like bleach, which I’d feared after many warnings about using bleach as a sanitizer. It’s not super-alcoholic, either; in fact it's pretty drinkable, on the whole. The last sip or two are pretty yeasty, which means there is probably yet more spent yeast I’ll have to avoid at the bottom of the bottles. But yes, I think I could stomach this knowing it will lead to inebriation. Small victories.
In part three, I’m going to taste the cider again, extensively (too extensively, probably) to see if the flavor improves at all. Supposedly, aging can help a lot. I’ll also cover flavor alteration methods, triumphs, regrets, and what advice you, the readers, have to offer to those of us who are new to homebrewing. Until then, here’s a toast to making things far more difficult than they need to be.
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Homebrewing cider, part 3: The final taste, regrets, and reader advice
Recapping the triumphs and failures of the brew, and reading some comments.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013...-3-the-final-taste-regrets-and-reader-advice/
A few weeks ago, I set about turning some fresh-pressed cider into alcohol. I tried to keep costs and equipment minimal, the process simple, and the product drinkable.
In part one, I collected materials, began the intensive sanitizing, and set up the cider to ferment. In part two I encountered a handful of disasters but managed to successfully transfer to cider to bottles.
While I made some compromises that weren’t worth the time or space saved (see: trying to bottle cider the old-fashioned way without a siphon clamp, sanitizing with bleach), and took some risks (covering the opening of overflowing fermentation jugs with tin foil), and made a mess (all over the floor), I did ultimately end up with something I could drink without following up with a spit-take.
I tried my cider again this past week, after letting it set in the refrigerator for a week after bottling it. The first bottle I opened had some very yeasty sips, and there was a lot of sediment on the bottom; looks like I was even sloppier about siphoning than all the cider I spilled would suggest. Some of my bottles will be worse than others for this, but I’ll be trying to decant the ones with the most sediment in hopes that some of the gross stuff will settle out.
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.
Another piece of the problem may be that I’m keeping these bottles in a drawer in my fridge that I interact with regularly. If I put the bottles in more static positions, the yeast would settle out better.
Next steps for better flavor
So my first cider is hardly an elixir of the gods; even in a taste test against Miller High Life, it seems watery. It’s not sweet, by any stretch. 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. There is still yeast in there that wants to eat yet more sugar and produce yet more alcohol, so it’s possible to keep driving this process with more and more sugar until eventually, you have wine. You don’t want wine, this isn’t wine class, but that is the relationship at work. 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.
If you don’t like flat cider, you can also add brown sugar, more apple juice concentrate, or dextrose during the bottling stage in order to carbonate it. 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.
These carbonation materials are added in small amounts for a gallon’s worth of cider: 1/8-1/4 cup of brown sugar (dissolved in half a cup of boiled water), 1/4 can of apple juice concentrate, or 1/8 cup of dextrose. You also don’t want to add this stuff until the cider has aged a month or so.
So then the question is, if you use sugar to booze up or carbonate your cider, how do you sweeten it? I’ve seen a number of products to this end but the best recommendation I’ve seen is xylitol. 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.
In defense of just getting started
I’m surprised how simple, if messy, homebrewing can actually be. 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.
The homebrewing community is fortunate to have so many people who can describe the process in a rigorous and detail-oriented way, as most of the guides I encountered do (though most were short on the why’s and how’s of the process decisions). But for what the bounty of resources on the Internet gives, it also takes away: the involvement and commitment that reads from some of the more intensive guides out there can be intimidating for first-timers. I wanted to cut through the expensive and complicated parts of homebrewing to what was absolutely necessary, begin at the beginning.
In a way, it’s comparable to programming: no one is going to learn to code if they start with Volume I of The Art of Computer Programming. But sit them down in front of Code Academy, and even if some things they learn aren’t immediately useful for a modern software engineering career, the curve is shallow enough that there’s a better chance they’ll have the patience to get there. That’s no judgment on The Art of Computer Programming; I’m sure it’s a great set of tomes that are inscrutable for most of humanity. But sometimes you need to shrink the distance between yourself and that first stepping stone.
I made some of what more experienced homebrewers would call outright mistakes. Certainly some of the choices I made did put the quality of the product at risk in the interest of saving money, space, and time, but the best defense of my methods is that the cider I am currently drinking, which again is no prize, is not bad for a first attempt.
I’m sure there’s an element of luck involved, but with preparation, I wouldn’t need it. A number of commenters experienced with homebrewing had some great advice for what I could do differently next time to not lean so hard on good fortune and ensure a better result and experience next time. It wouldn’t take much.
Mistakes, regrets, and things to do differently
Many of you were horrified that I used bleach to sanitize things, because of the potential for bleach-y flavor and contamination. By the end, I became horrified too, but more because of the time commitment that bleach sanitization is rather than simply buying StarSan. Some of you suggested sanitizing in a boiling pot of water or by cooking things in the stove; both are good cheap methods, but my kitchen is a little small for it. I declare an $8 bottle of StarSan and a $4 spritzer to put it in a worthy investment.
Some of you, like Pocky is God, also suggested using champagne yeast instead of the dry wine one I used. My impression is that champagne yeast somehow does a better job of making more alcohol, and it’s about the same price, so this will be interesting to try the next time I’m in the yeast market.
SoCalBoomer suggested, among several good points of guidance, that I put the overactive cider in a water bath to cool it down and stop the cider pressing out of the airlocks. I didn’t even think of this and would definitely try it next time, though I am also now equipped to set up a blow-off valve in the event of overactivity.
Many of you pointed out I never needed an auto-siphon, which runs $12-15, but I could have used a siphon clamp, which is $2-4, or a bottling wand, which is apparently $0.50. I regret not looking further into that. Pour some cider out for all the cider that was lost in the line of duty.
One of you (allanj37) suggested “sanitizing” my mouth with whiskey and priming the hose that way, rather than drawing the cider into the tube with priming water. Much as I like whiskey, I think I’ll keep my mouth germs out of the bottles and stick to the priming water.
A question came up in the comments about using mason jars to bottle cider. I thought about doing this myself, but as others pointed out, mason jars are not built for the pressure situation that bottling alcohol creates: their lids are meant to be sucked in, not pushed out. They’re also clear, which allows alcohol to spoil more easily in light and become skunked.
Helmingstay noted that 5-gallon brews are a much better investment of time and energy. I support this, and if you have the space for it, you should go for it—the output of a gallon brew is pitiful.
But I have a tiny apartment that can’t really accommodate a slate of 5-gallon-size brewing equipment, and as I stated at the outset, I intended to pursue this without spending a ton of money. Full-size brewing equipment kits are expensive. I wanted to see if I could get by without all of that expense, and I could, and you can too, even if you are not so solvent or aren’t rolling in vast acreages of space.
For all the difficulty, I could see this being fun and a fruitful endeavor once I get the hang of a few more aspects. My point is, you should try making some alcohol. You will need it by the time you’re done making yourself some alcohol.
-t
With my current setup, at max I can process 1 drum a day; I've yet to do that though. It would require I press half way, refill another cheese, and press again. Long day, but I'd probably get 20 gallons out of it... there always seems to be something else besides pressing apples on the agenda.
