Can I make cider from eating and cooking apples?

Yes, all apples make cider, but the flavours from cider apples are better: most home cider brews are a mix of several varieties, the more, the merrier.

How to Make Cider

Here are two excellent videos on making your own cider at home.

MIT has a five-minute guide to brewing your own cider from apple juice if you have no apples of your own.

Why Make Your Own Cider?

• Using the best varieties: The vast majority of old cider apple trees have all but disappeared, with less than a dozen varieties remaining in large scale cultivation for the cider you buy in the shops. Commercial varieties are chosen for two main reasons: large yields, and disease resistance.
  The rarer varieties that we grow are almost all superior in terms of quality and taste than those grown in most modern orchards.
  Their smaller crop size is often preferable for the home brewer, and managing diseases is mainly achieved by choosing the right cultivars for your area, and being more attentive to the trees in your garden than a farmer could realistically be to their large orchard.
• Keep the ancient cider arts alive: Rarer cider varieties are only sold in a handful of nurseries; Ashridge maintains a broad collection, which is only possible if there is demand for them.
• The warm glow of satisfaction: After a day of labour in the garden, working up a good sweat, there is profound joy pulling a pint of your own cider, blended from 3 or 4 vintage varieties to your own recipe.

What do Tannin and Acidity do in Cider Making?

Tannin is found in the stems, seeds and skins of many fruits. It is a natural preservative that critically influences the ageing process of cider, as well as wine, leather, and other natural products. So, high tannin ciders have a longer shelf life than low tannin ones.

Tannins taste bitter and are astringent, which creates a dry feeling in the mouth. A lack of tannin will make your cider will taste too sweet and go off quickly, and too much will taste too bitter and make your mouth pucker (and it last forever to remind you of your mistake).

Tannins oxidise when the apples are milled, giving your cider a deeper orange colour.

Acidity is what makes a lemon taste sharp: in cider brewing, sharp equals acid. A sharp edge is key to a good cider flavour, and acidity is important for good fermentation: if it’s too low, your brew will be susceptible to fermentation “diseases”. If the brew is too acid, the resulting cider will make you wince. Good old Bramleys are hugely acidic, more than double what is needed, while Yarlington Mill has half the acidity you need for a good fermentation.

Kingston Black is almost perfectly balanced, but is canker prone in most parts of the UK, so our advice is to never put all your cider eggs in one basket.
Much better to choose a selection of trees that produce fruit you can blend to make your perfect ciders.

A cider maker’s equipment checklist

Once you have your apples, you will need:

• An apple crusher to pulp your crop (you will quickly get bored with chopping them up with a knife!)
• A press to juice the pulp. Some presses need bags inside the barrel of the press to hold the “cheese” (pulped & crushed apple).
• A scoop to handle the pulped apples. A grain scoop, available in any country store, works well.
• Containers with bungs and airlocks. The glass demijohns that amateur winemakers use are good, but any food grade plastic ware is fine too – they are also lighter, larger, cheaper, and almost unbreakable.
• Hydrometer to tell you how the fermenting is going.
• Siphon tube, or a little electric pump.
• Buckets. Always get a couple more than you think you will need!
• Funnel. A large one with a removable filter gauze is ideal
• Long rubber gloves.
• Juice proof apron to protect your clothes.

Optional:

• Yeast is only necessary if you pasteurise your juice, or if you don’t but are in a hurry – there should be plenty of natural yeasts on the apples themselves.
• Campden Tablets (either potassium metabisulfite, KMS, or sodium metabisulfite, SMS) are essential if you want to kill the yeasts (especially in still ciders) when they have done their job. Expert brewers might invest in a sulphur dioxide cylinder.

Please note: Apple juice is acidic and reacts unpleasantly with metals unless they are truly stainless. Lead is especially dangerous, but iron, regular steel and copper all rust or corrode quickly, discolour the booze and make it taste filthy.
Food grade is the operative phrase here, whether plastic, fibreglass, or stainless steel.
Wood is traditional, but it is hard to keep clean unless varnished, and glass is always safe but has the drawbacks of being heavy and easy to smash.

Chemistry of a good cider brew

You could make cider out of any apple. A large proportion of commercially produced ciders are made from everyday cooking apples such as Bramleys, or all-purpose apples like James Grieve.

However, the best cider is made from cider apples, which are generally fairly inedible. Cider apples are categorised by their combination of acid and tannin as follows:

Type	Tannin	Acidity
Sweet	Less than 0.2%	Less than 0.45%
Bittersweet	More than 0.2%	Less than 0.45%
Bittersharp	More than 0.2%	More than 0.45%
Sharp	Less than 0.2%	More than 0.45%

As a contrast, consider the widely used Bramley:

Type	Tannin	Acidity
Bramley Apple	Less than 0.05%	More than 1.00%

Even without knowing what tannin and acid really do, it is obvious that cider made from Bramleys will be sweet (tannin is bitter) and very acidic.

The perfect cider apple is supposed to have a composition like this:

Type	Tannin	Acidity
“Perfect Apple”	Exactly 0.2%	Exactly 0.40%

Kingston Black (the perfect cider apple) comes very close to this analysis. But life is not perfect, and Kingston’s yields tend to be too low for farmers.

Most of the best cider brews are blends. Generally, top-notch cider is made using either a Bittersweet or a Bittersharp as a base, and then getting the acidity right using Sharps or Sweets respectively.

What is a vintage cider apple? In the cider world, vintage means “very well-balanced tannin and acidity”, as opposed to old. You can make a good cider brew using only one vintage variety. They also tend to ferment less rapidly, possibly because they absorb less nitrogen than other varieties, which improves the flavour. Most of our cider varieties are vintage – if they are, this will be noted in their description.

Further Reading & Resources

“A Somerset Pomona” by Liz Kopas is great for cider apple history, subtleties and esoteric varieties.