Brews and Blues Beer and Smokin’ Blues

My First Apfelwein

This is my first ever batch of hard apple cider. It's called Apfelwein, and the recipe is rather simple. It contains 3 gallons of pure pasteurized apple juice (no additives or preservatives) and 1.8 lbs (28.8 oz) of corn sugar (dextrose). This is scaled down from the 5 gallon recipe which calls for 5 gallons of juice and 3 lbs of corn sugar because I only had a 3 gallon fermenter available for this project. The yeast used for this fermentation is a single packet of Red Star Montrachet yeast.

The original gravity of this mixture was 1.062, and if all goes well, it should ferment down to a gravity of about 0.998 which will yield an alcohol by volume of about 8.4%. 

This recipe is directly attributed to "EdWort" over at HomeBrewTalk.com.  This recipe seems to have made him famous there.  In fact, today was named EdWort's Apfelwein Day in honor of the many gallons of this concoction that have been made since he originally posted the recpie.  As of this writing, people on that forum had signed up to make just under a total of 1,000 gallons today. 

Here is a mock up of a label design I created to put on a few bottles of this stuff when I get that far along...

The Apfelwein will probably be in the fermenter for at least six weeks. It should be in the bottle for at least four more weeks after that. From everything I have read, this stuff just gets better with time...