A Home Brew Journey

 I thought I would have a stab at making a Turbo Cider. It gets the name because its fast and easy to do, although the fact that you can make it like rocket fuel also adds to the theme. I am finding that doing the 40 pint brews are good if they turn out ok but if its a failed or just a bad brew its a waste. I mean who really wants to pour away beer.

So I went and invested in some small 1 gallon demijohn's as its my turn this year to host the Halloween party these brews should be easy in time for that.

New bit of kit

I also made a trip to the local Lidl's for the juice and picked up some Cider yeast at my local home brew store

All ingredients and gear together

I will be brewing 3 different types of cider on this run. There is a plain apple juice that i will be adding black current juice to creating a pre mixed Diesel. There is a apple and cranberry juice and a pear juice.


 First job is to rehydrate the yeast. As it will only be 12L in total one packet spit between all 3 brews is more than enough.

Filled with juice

While everything was sterilising I measured and poured around 170g of sugar into each demijon. This is where a funnel would come in handy but as per I did not have one so a make shift one was made out of a leaflet that was lying about. Not really all that sterile but I am sure it will work out ok.


I could only take original gravity readings for the two apple based brews as the pear one was a denser liquid in fact it was more like a pulp. Perhaps I should have strained this through a muslim bag first of all but I did not have any so that idea was a bust.

All that was lest to do was to add the yeast to the demijons give it a quick stir and job done. In total it only took about one hour to do all 3 so jobs a good un.

Ready to ferment

After only two hours you can see the fermentation process has already started by the layer of scum forming on top of the juice. It will be left in there for about a week before bottling.

All that is required now is patience and some luck