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Best common US apples for hard cider?

Basically any non-grainy apple (no red or golden delicious) will work. Exact blends are often jealously guarded by their makers.

You want a good mix of acidity and sugar....depending on how you want to drink the final product will determine what you use for apples as well. For a sweet cider you will want to use more acidic apples.....or if you want ot let it go through a malolactic fermentation you can use the mopre acidic apples as well.

Sorry I could not give you specific examples.....I usually just get cider and cheat at the sugar and acidity by using additions.

Reply to
Droopy
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What are the best apples, or blend of apples, commonly available in the US, for making hard cider? I've got my own juicer, so I can make any blend of juice I need.

Thanks,

--arne

Reply to
arne thormodsen

Reply to
STEPHEN PEEK

Try

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Actually, I googled for apple varieties for (regular) cider, expecting to get nurseries, but ended up with the first link being exactly what you were asking for. 0-o

Woods

Reply to
Woodswun

Thanks, tho' this confirms my suspicion that most apples you can buy in stores aren't very good for making hard cider.

I was originally planning to use the wild "volunteer" apples that grow all over where I live (Corvallis, OR), but for some reason the crop was very poor this year. Last year it was great, I picked 20 lbs in about 1/2 hour in one field.

--arne

Reply to
arne thormodsen

Just a followup. I decided to use 1/2 Granny Smith and 1/2 Tydman. The latter variety I'd never heard of, but the guy in the produce section recommended it as a not-to-sweet apple good for cooking.

I bought 10 Lbs of each and ran them through a Champion Juicer. I also bought an apple core-and-section tool, without which the job would have been darn near impossible. The yield was about 1 1/4 gallons of juice. The gravity was about 1.05 (I'm a beer maker, one of you wine guys will have to translate this to Brix... ;-). This was a bit shy of what I wanted so I added about 6 oz. of table sugar to bring the gravity to 1.06. Pitched Cote de Blancs and let it go.

Racked it last night after 5 days. Even at this point it's easily the best cider I've ever made. Maybe not the best I've tasted, but certainly the best I've made and one I'd be happy to serve to guests (unlike some of my other experiments).

I'm going to let it sit in secondary until it clears and see how it finally ends up. So far so good. Thanks for the help from this group.

--arne

Reply to
arne thormodsen

Winesap, cox pippins and russets are other good choices If you have a friend with crab apple or can get wild crabs adding 1 pound of these to your mix really improve the cider.

Reply to
JF

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