Making hard cider at home is something you can do year-round using store-bought juice,
and is especially popular during the fall harvest when apples are pressed into orchard fresh cider.
One of the most frequently asked questions we get from
new cider makers is: How do I backsweeten my hard cider?
In this video, we’ll take a look at the process of backsweetening,
borrowing a lesson from our Northern Brewer University Hard Cider 101 online video course.
A link to the full course can be found in the video description.
Prior to this section, the course covers sourcing cider, yeast selection, fermentation,
and stabilizing, a step that is key before you add any sugar back to your finished cider.
With your cider stabilized, it is now time to backsweeten. That is,
unless you want just a bone dry, tart hard cider, which is totally cool.
However, most cider makers we know and who work here at Northern Brewer University,
they believe that at least some degree of backsweetening is pretty much integral to
creating a well-balanced hard cider, no matter what degree of sweetness you want in there.
What is backsweetening? It’s the most common post-fermentation process that
cider makers perform to achieve a preferred flavor or level of sweetness. To backsweeten
is literally just what it sounds like -- adding sweetness back into the finished cider.
Generally speaking, hard cider will ferment to an extremely low final gravity, meaning it is likely
very dry, possibly a bit tart, and light-bodied on the palate. Adding some sweetness to the cider
can help to balance some of those flavors and mouthfeel, as well as add complexity to
the existing apple flavor. It helps the cider to become less dry and tart, and increases the body.
If you’ve decided to want to backsweeten your hard cider,
how do you go about it? The easy answer is, just add a sugar! There are many
different sources of sugar that will get you there; you can use just about anything:
table sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, honey, maple syrup, even Belgian candi syrup, or malt extract.
A good starting point is to add two pounds of sugar to as much hot water needed for
it to dissolve, allow it to cool, and add to cider in increments to your target flavor or
backsweetened gravity. More on that just ahead.
Some people also like to use wine conditioner,
which is basically a sugar solution often used to backsweeten wines.
You can even use non-fermenting artificial sweeteners like Splenda/sucralose or Stevia;
however these are often not suggested by cider makers because they can give off a fake,
almost plastic-y flavor. It’s better to go with a real sugar source.
The easiest thing to use – and what many cider makers start out using – is apple
juice concentrate. We’re talking about those frozen cans of juice concentrate you find in
the freezer section of your grocery store or market. The beauty with these is that they
definitely taste like apples and being concentrated they take up less volume
and don’t dilute the cider as much as some other options. You can even use concentrates
that include preservatives here; since we don’t want this new sugar to ferment anyway,
it doesn’t matter. If you want to play around with some other flavors, you could buy some
of the blended concentrates that include berries and other fruits. But we’d suggest
for your first batches to use an apple-only concentrate to get the feel for how they work.
To backsweeten using apple juice concentrate, simply sanitize the canister, open it,
pour it in, and give it a very gentle stir to incorporate. Then take a sample to taste and
get a gravity reading. While it seems very sweet right out of the canister, remember you’re putting
it into five-ish gallons of cider so it’s being greatly diluted. Some people use two or even three
canisters right out of the gate, but we suggest you take a sample after one can to see how you
like the flavor. Just remember, you can always add more sugar, but you can’t take it back out.
Using a hydrometer and thief, take a sample to taste and get a gravity reading.
While personal taste preference is the main gauge here, if you want to go by numbers, many cider
makers agree that the sweet spot (no pun intended) for backsweetening is a gravity of 1.008 to 1.014.
Remember, because specific gravity is a reading of how much sugar is in solution – with each
addition of sugar back into the finished cider, specific gravity will increase slightly. Add your
sugar source in increments until you hit your new gravity and/or your desired taste profile.
I won't go too deep into the weeds here, but I do want to mention that expert cider makers
who have been doing this for a lot of years, they can do other processes to even completely
avoid backsweetning. Maybe they chose to start at a much higher OG and control that fermentation in
way that leaves a higher final gravity to where the finished cider itself has the sweetness
that you would want and you don't have to add it back in. But those are some advanced, complex
processes that maybe we'll punt down the field to an advanced cider making class for another time.
The most important thing to take away from this lesson is to know that there
are a lot of different sugars that you can use, a lot of different sugar sources
that you can use for backsweetening, but we suggest apple juice concentrate
for its ease of use and for the high degree of apple flavor and sweetness it provides.
Again, this lesson is an excerpt from Northern Brewer University’s introductory online course,
Hard Cider 101: How to Make Hard Cider at Home. The course takes an in-depth look at all aspects
of making your first batches of hard cider – from choosing the best cider and yeast strain,
through fermentation, and al the way to bottling or kegging.
Find the course link in the video description or at northernbrewer.com/university.