How To Hard Apple Cider With Ginger and Lemon From Scratch ish

All right, so today we're gonna make some hard cider. Never made hard cider before, but Tommy's a chef, and we're gonna razzle-dazzle this sh-t, so. Ginger, lemongrass, and agave syrup. So we're gonna use about 60 pounds of apples. First step here is to grind your apples up. We're using the Maximizer grinder. Let's grind. Go! Pro tip, clamps just right. We're adding these apples, stems, seeds, and all. The seeds are not getting ground up. Yeah. So, and they're not gonna get smashed in the press either. So they'll just get filtered out in the basket. So no need to cut these apples, core them, whatever. Good for now. Oh, God! So we got about, I don't know, six gallons of pulp here. Our press is only four gallons, so we're gonna scoop some out, and then we'll throw this bag in the press. Our sweet clawhammer bucket has gallon markers on the side here, so we know how much we have. Looks like we're at, like, four now. Do what you want, man. I'm going down halfway. It's your party, bro. Yeah, I like to party. Ooh, that's juicy right there. And go. Ooh, yeah. Possible, well, it's not bad for you, man. Yeah, it's not too bad. Leverage-wise. Ooh, yeah! She's a juicer. So we started with 35 pounds of apples. We pressed about half of them. We've got about a gallon and a half, so I'm guessing we're gonna end up with about two and a half gallons of pressed juice. We don't have all day to do this, unfortunately. I like to use 100% juice from the apples that we press. So we're actually gonna supplement this with some apple cider that we bought from the store. In fact, you don't even have to press your own apples. You can just buy apple cider and make your own hard cider from that. We'll know exactly how much pressed juice we have here in a few minutes once we're done with this. I'm gonna say that it's pressed. Yeah. All right, so it looks like we've got about two and a quarter gallons of juice from our apples. So we're gonna go ahead and add that to our kettle here. Then we'll throw the rest of the ingredients in there as well. I think this thing worked pretty well. Got a lot of juice out of those apples. A lot of juice. We'll put a link to this. You can find this on Amazon. We'll put a link in the description. So we're gonna be adding ginger root to our cider. And the first thing you wanna do is peel all the skin off it. You can use a knife or a peeler. And you're just trying to get relatively clean pieces here. We're gonna be juicing this. It's the best way to part the flavor into the cider. If you were to just cut this into pieces and add it when you're pasteurizing it, you would not get as much flavor. So we want ours real gingery, so we're gonna add a bunch of ginger. Have about three pounds here. This will probably trim down to about two. Now that we've peeled all of our ginger, we're gonna go ahead and juice it. All right, so we're gonna add the juice from our apples to the kettle here. We have the screen in the kettle to allow us to fluffy out the little bit of chunks and whatnot that did make it in there. And Tommy's juiced our ginger. We're gonna dump that in there as well? Yeah, we're gonna dump that in. So it looks like we've got about two and a half gallons in here. We're going to top this off with some cider that we bought. We're shooting for about five and a half gallons. Their gallon markers are etched on the inside of our kettle here. So we're not quite there yet. So we're at five and a half gallons here and we will now add our agave. We're gonna add the entire bottle. That'll also help with the water that we added too. So yeah, this is going to add a little bit of agave flavor. Plus it's going to boost the fermentable sugar content which means it's going to be a bit higher ABV than it would be if we were just using straight cider. The agave will match nicely with the apples. It kind of has that caramel background notes that you would find in apples. Now we're gonna add our lemongrass stalks. You need to take the stalk and we're gonna bruise it with the back of the knife. It's gonna release some of the oils. So you want these kind of split like this just so that they're able to release their full flavor. Agave dissolves pretty well in room temp water. I'm gonna stir this up a little bit just to make sure it's dissolved. And I'm gonna grab a sample of this just so we know what our starting gravity is gonna be. We're at 10 to 50 here. So we're gonna dump this back in here. Back in, we'll leave a little bit out. Very good. Get a little bit of ginger, spice, nice and pulpy. It's gonna be spicy. So our system has a built-in heat thermometer port and is powered by this controller. So all we need to do is set the temperature we want on the controller here, which is gonna be a pasteurization temperature of 170 degrees. We'll set an alarm on here as well. Once we hit that temp, we'll be good to go to move on with the process. So we hit 170 here. We're going to cool this down here in a minute. But before we do that, we're gonna circulate some sanitizer solution through the lines, the pump and the wort chiller. So we've circulated the sanitizer through the pump and the lines and the chiller. Now I'm gonna move this over to the kettle. It's gonna pop it on the quick release here. Open this up. Let's go ahead and just run it through until we get the sanitizer out and then we'll start recirculating through here. So go ahead and pop that up in here. So again, the idea here is that we're gonna circulate this 170 degree cider, which is a pasteurization temp through the lines and the pump and the chiller. Again, we don't have the cooling water on. We want it to be hot at this point because the heat is gonna kill any bacteria that's in here, which is important for this. You don't want to boil cider necessarily. It can turn it cloudy. So it's fine if you don't mind that. So we'll let this circulate here for just a minute and then we'll cool it down. All right, so we've cooled the cider down to 80 degrees. We're using this Lalvin EC-1118 yeast. It's a wine yeast. It's also good for champagne style beverages. And it's telling me on the package to rehydrate at 95 to 98 degrees. Generally, I would always say, just follow the directions on the yeast package. However, I'm too lazy to make a yeast starter at this point in the day and we would have had to do it an hour ago anyway. So my plan is this. We've cooled this down to 80 degrees. We're gonna pitch this at 80. We'll then throw it in our fermentation chamber set to our actual fermentation temp, which is 63 degrees. I think it'll be fine. Yeah. We'll find out. Bucket sanitized, full of sanitizer solution. Use some starter sand for that. I'm just gonna like dip my hands in here. Let's just pop this down into here, I guess. All right, and then we'll just turn our pump back on and transfer this over. Generally, you use this basket for grain. Once you're done with the grain, you can fold the basket, pop some clips in. This time around, looks like we caught ourselves some lemongrass and a lot of ginger sediments. Real nice, man. Real nice. Excellent work, Tommy. Excellent. Proud of you, man. Yeah, high fives. All right, let's throw this in the fridge and we'll call it a day. Cool. Cider's done. Time to taste it. Cool. It's really dry. There's not a lot of sweetness. Some cider, you get a lot of sweetness. Yeah. I wonder if it's from the apples we used? Yeah, it's probably from the wine yeast we used. The ABV on this, 6.43, 1050 starting gravity, 1001 ending gravity. So the yeast just plowed through all the sugar that was in there, fermented all the way down to almost zero. So there's hardly any probably residual sugar left, which is why it's not very sweet and pretty dry. Yeah, I mean, I kind of like that. Yeah. It's real crisp. Yeah. You get a lot of ginger. You get a good amount of ginger. Not getting necessarily a ton of lemongrass in here. No, it's got a nice spice to it. I put it on tap four days ago or something, and the very first day, it was really strong. Like, it was overbearing. I didn't like it. It was bad. I was like, oh, dude, this is too much ginger, is what I thought. What happened, though, was I didn't cold crash it before I put it on tap, so there's a lot of stuff still in suspension. And I've noticed that every day that I've come in to drink more, I've had, like, my first pour has been really cloudy. Like, all the ginger and whatnot has settled out of it. So now, because we pureed the ginger, so now that its sediment's gone, it's much smoother than it was. So, if you happen to make this recipe and it's just overbearing at first, I'll just give it some time, and it'll mellow out. I like, also, that it's gluten-free. It's gluten-free. Which is, you know, we haven't made anything that's gluten-free yet. It means there's no gluten in there. It's good. Yeah, I like it. I like it. Yeah, you could drink this. Yeah, I could drink it. I have actually been drinking it. Kyle's been hanging out in the office, But anyway, nice job on this one. Awesome. Cheers. Thanks for coming up with this recipe. Thanks for watching, and give this a 10 out of 10. Again, definitely brew this beer. Brew this cider. Cider beer. Yeah, cider beer, if this is what you're into. Thanks for watching. See ya. Excellent. Crack, crack the seal off. Hey, it's gluten-free. It's gluten-free, man. It's gluten-free. Don't worry. It's gluten-free.