Passover Alcohol Week! Part 2: Cider or Fruit Wine

To read Part 1, begin here. For the other recipes, click here and here.

Good old-fashioned hard apple cider! I actually wonder why they don’t sell kosher for Passover cider, because basic hard cider only has one ingredient: apples.

Ingredients

• 100% apple juice
• Other fruit juices or fruits for flavor, if you so wish. Some good choices are pear juice, tart cherry juice, pomegranate juice, and pureed blackberries.

You can grind your own apples, but that usually takes an entire day. If you want to venture down that road, here’s instructions I’ve published.

Pour the juices into a carboy. Add the yeast, add yeast nutrient, then put the bung on.

Add a little bit of water to the airlock- about halfway – and place it in the hole. Leave for two weeks in a warm, dry place, like under the sink. You should notice change after a few days – there should be bubbles in the airlock. If not, the yeast might be dead, and you should get another one.

When It’s Ready

After two weeks, put the entire carboy in the fridge to cold-crash for 24 hours. This will slow down the yeast and stop the fermentation. It will not, however, stop it completely.

Assemble your auto-siphon by carefully heating the flexible tubing so it creates an air-tight seal. Do the same thing on the other end of the tube attaching to the bottling wand.

Using the auto-siphon and a friend, bottle your drinks in a flexible plastic bottle, like a seltzer bottle, that has also been sanitized. This will allow some flex room for the leftover yeast to still carbonate, and it will not explode.

Auto-siphons can be tricky, but let gravity do the work: place your carboy on a higher surface and bottle on the floor. Pump the siphon and it should start to suck the liquid from the bottle. Press the spring-loaded tip of the bottling wand in the bottom of your bottle and lift it when the bottle is filled. Repeat until there is no more to bottle. There will be sediment at the bottom of your carboy, and you don’t really want this in your drink, so don’t empty the carboy completely; leave about an inch or so of liquid.

Put your home-made alcohols in the fridge, and enjoy (responsibly)! They’ll get slightly boozier as they sit, and they should all be good to drink for about 2-3 weeks— in time for the Seder.

Rachel Jacobs is a podcast and radio producer in food media. She is the most Brooklyn.

Editor’s Note: Stay tuned tomorrow for another kosher-for-Passover alcohol recipe!

Photo credits: Rachel Jacobs and Gabriela Geselowitz