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Guides

Guides

14 ordered paths through the site, in 100 steps — each one handing off to the chemistry, the equipment and the fault records underneath it.

A guide here is an ordering, not an article. Everything a guide says about fermentation chemistry, pressing, microbiology or fault mechanism already exists on this site with its own sources and its own audit. What did not exist was a path through it in the order the decisions actually arrive — because somebody who wants to make cider does not want the compound pages, they want to know what to do on the day the fruit is ripe, and then to be able to go as deep as they like at the point where the question occurs to them.

So each step carries a short authored passage — what happens, why it matters, what you are actually deciding — and then hands off. The links underneath a step are the point of the format. Where a step involves a genuine hazard, the warning is on that step rather than in a page you might not open.

What these will not do

No guide here gives an additive dosage. An addition is a food-safety decision that depends on legal limits, on the juice in front of you and on what you are protecting against, and the right figure comes from your supplier or your regulator rather than from a general reference. Where a step needs a number you do not have, it names the tool that computes it from your own readings instead.

Start here

If you have never made cider and want to, this is the one. It assumes no equipment you would not buy for a first attempt, and it says which of the usual advice does not matter.

Start here · 8 steps

Your first batch of cider

A first fermentation done with the smallest defensible set of equipment, with the decisions reduced to the ones that actually change the outcome and the rest deferred.

Begins: Get juice, one of two ways

Or start with perry

Perry is not cider made from pears. The ripeness window is days rather than weeks, the sorbitol never ferments, and the gravity arithmetic from cider does not transfer.

Assumes some experience · 8 steps

Making perry

Perry from perry pears, following the fruit rather than the cider process: a ripeness window measured in days, sorbitol that sweetens without sugar, and gravity arithmetic that does not transfer.

Begins: Perry pears are not eating pears, and the difference is larger than with apples

Making

From a first fermentation to the decisions that separate sound cider from good cider, plus perry — which diverges from cider at enough points to need its own path rather than a section inside one.

Measuring

Every calculator here takes a number you have to obtain from somewhere. These say where each one comes from, what it actually detects, and the specific ways each is commonly taken wrongly.

Tasting and assessment

Assessment rather than appreciation: an order of operations, a neutral way of recording what you found, and what a small panel can and cannot conclude.

Food

The mechanisms rather than a list. Acid against fat, tannin against protein, sweetness against heat — each with what it rests on, including the ones that rest on very little.

Diagnosis

What to do with a batch that is not right, in the order that matters: pressure first, then whether it is a fault at all, then narrowing it.

Where the guides stop

These describe how cider and perry are made and assessed. They do not encourage anyone to drink either. The position CiderHQ takes on alcohol and health follows the World Health Organization rather than the trade and is set out under alcohol and health.

They also stop at the point where making becomes selling. Cider produced for sale is a dutiable product with a legal definition, registration requirements and labelling law attached, and none of that is covered here beyond saying that it exists and arrives at the first sale rather than at some threshold of seriousness.

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