Sweet or Dry — finishing a cider your way

You will need

• Pure apple juice (from cartons, NO preservative)4.5 L
• Cider or wine yeast1 sachet
• Potassium sorbate + a campden tablet (to stabilise)per dose, only if sweetening
• Apple juice or sugar syrup (to sweeten at the end)to taste

Method

1. 1

   Sanitise, and make a dry cider exactly as in the easy carton cider — pitch woken yeast, ferment until two gravity readings a few days apart match, low and dry.

2. 2

   This wine's lesson is the beginner's most-asked question: how do I make it sweet without it exploding? A finished DRY wine is stable — the yeast has eaten the sugar. The danger is adding sugar back while live yeast is still there: it wakes up, ferments the new sugar in the sealed bottle, and pushes corks or bursts glass.

3. 3

   So the rule is STABILISE, THEN SWEETEN. Once your cider is dry and clear, stir in potassium sorbate and a crushed campden tablet together and wait 24 hours — the sorbate stops the yeast breeding, the campden mops up.

4. 4

   Now taste, and sweeten to where you like it with a little apple juice or sugar syrup, a bit at a time. Dry, off-dry, or properly sweet — your choice, made safely.

5. 5

   If you would rather keep it dry, skip the sorbate-and-sweeten step entirely and just bottle — a dry wine needs no stabilising.

6. 6

   Bottle. You now control the one thing that decides whether people enjoy a country wine: how sweet it is.