As Final Preppers, we need to be ever resourceful, and growing our own food and making our own medicines certainly is part of that mindset. Here are some simple instructions in making two things – first, hard apple cider (cider with alcohol) and secondly, further fermenting the hard cider to make apple cider vinegar.

Making Hard Apple Cider

The first thing you need, naturally, are apples. Not just any apple will do, you will need apples that ripen in the fall or winter. These apples contain more sugar than summer and green apples, which don’t make good cider. In a pinch you can use any apples; you might just have to increase the sugar content of your ferment, more on this later. Let us begin:

1. Gather up the fruit you need and wash it to remove any dirt and debris from the skins of the apples.
2. Now, take the fruit and crush it into pulp, if you have an apple press it will be much easier.
3. Drain off the juice from the pulp. If you don’t have an apple press, use cheesecloth to strain the juice and separate it from the pulp.

You can also make your hard cider from apple cider that you have bought. It can be from commercial ciders because they are usually pasteurized and this will ultimately affect the flavor.

There are two kinds of pasteurization, cold and hot.

Cold pasteurization is done with ultraviolet light to kill o the microorganisms and this is the preferred method because it impacts the flavor less than heat pasteurization.

At this point you have two choices.

You can put the juice in a large glass bottle and cover the top with a double layer of cheesecloth and secure it with a rubber band and place it in a dark, cool place for several months, the ideal temperature being around 60 degrees F. Natural wild yeasts in the air will enter the juice and start the fermentation process. Is slower than the second method of adding active yeast cultures to your juice.

Note: Bread yeasts are not good for this. You can use dry wine yeasts that work fine; these can be found online or from any home-brew store. Dry wine yeast packs are very inexpensive and work just as well as cider yeasts.

You can also make your own starter. This is your own active culture which you can add to lots of batches of cider. The formula for your own starter is:

• First, pour out about one-fifth of your cider out of its bottle; you will need this room for fermentation.
• Crumble one cake of cultivated yeast into the remaining one quart of cider.
• Reseal the bottle and shake it vigorously for a few seconds and then reseal the bottle.
• Within five or six hours you should start to see bubbling in the bottle; now fermentation has begun.
• Once you see this, lift a corner of the bottle’s lid to release the pent up gases within the bottle and then reseal it and put it in the refrigerator.
• To use it as a starter you will need to take it out of the refrigerator again and let it sit at room temperature for a few hours before you add it to your next batch of cider.

This will make enough starter for approximately five gallons of cider. Doing this step is optional, but I recommend doing it because if you have a bad batch of yeast then you have not ruined a large bottle of cider. You will know if it is a bad or dead batch of yeast because it will not begin the bubbling signifying that fermentation has begun.