A friend of mine has a huge apple press every year on his farm. The makes a big deal out of it with a family-friendly party. Everyone helps out washing apples, carrying them to the homemade press (this huge hydraulic press) and bottling. I suggested to him that we should turn some of it into hard cider and he was more than excited to offer up 5 gallons.
So right now I have 5 gallons starting to ferment. I decided to go with Nottingham yeast (my LHBS didn't have US-05) for my first shot at this. If I'm successful then I'll likely go with a cider yeast next year and likely make more than 1 batch.
My first step was to get all of the cider into my bucket and I put in 5 campden tablets (1 tablet per gallon of juice). The potassium in the campden tablet will help to stop any natural yeast/molds/fungus in the apples from eating on the sugars. With putting those in however, you need to give it time to dissipate out. They say at least 24 hours. Due to timing constraints, I let it go 48 hours.
It did take some time to see some active fermentation and even now, 3 days since pitching, the fermentation is still VERY slow. I can see some krausen starting to form on the surface but it seems much slower than beer. I was expecting this but was hoping it didn't take this long. Lots of people on the forums mention a delayed start to fermentation. I'll just keep watching it for the next few days and maybe take a reading (OG 1.051) to make sure it is actually fermenting.
After around 2 week I'll plan to transfer the cider to a carboy and add some pectic enzyme to help clear out the cider. I'll then let it sit for around 4 to 6 months before kegging.
So now its just a waiting came on this. I'm very excited to see how this turns out over the winter/spring.
I'll post some updates during the process.
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