Making homemade hard cider is a fun and rewarding hobby. It’s easy to get started and relatively inexpensive. Most of us start by making a good basic cider. Something similar to what you find on your supermarket shelves. After doing this a few times and feeling comfortable with the cider making process there’s a natural tendency to start to experiment. This is where the fun begins.

Before you know it you’re making cider with honey, pears, maple syrup, cinnamon and more. The results are delicious flavorful ciders that can’t be bought from a store. One of our family favorites is a Cran-Apple Cider that is just yummy.

Before we jump in just a note of nomenclature. Cider is apple juice that is fermented, commonly called hard cider in the US. Apple juice is any unfermented juice pressed from apples. Those were the terms everyone used, including the US, up until prohibition. When the US passed the 18th amendment in 1920 outlawing the production of alcohol, folks in the US started calling cloudy, unfiltered apple juice cider. Today in the US hard cider refers to fermented apple juice and sweet cider refers to cloudy, unfiltered apple juice. For purposed of this site we’re going to refer to unfermented apple juice, both “apple juice” and “sweet cider” as apple juice, and we’ll refer to fermented apple juice as cider.

OK enough with the etymology lesson, let’s make some cider