Canning Apple Cider

And other Ways to Put up the Taste of Autumn

Canning apple cider is my favorite way to preserve fresh-pressed cider, and it’s perfect for a cup of hot mulled cider all winter long. Don't fill up the freezer with cider when you can store it on the pantry shelf instead.

Our orchard produces apples by the truckload, and we work to preserve them all season long using just about every method possible. 

I pack fresh apples into our basement root cellar using our homemade apple storage rack, and they can last up to a year if I only use the best storage apple varieties.

Then my pantry gets filled with home-canned applesauce, apple pie filling, and my kid's favorite apple jam.

Finally, we pull out our Double-barreled cider press, and we’ll press fruit for hard cider and apple wine.  Once the carboys are finally filled and bubbling away, we usually still have yet more apples!

This past year, we had several hundred pounds left over for canning apple cider, and we put up more than ten gallons of canned apple cider.

If you do it right, gently heating the cider, it retains its cider flavor, color and character in the jar.  Ball Canning developed this process, and you only heat the fresh pressed cider to 190 F to sterilize it before sealing the jars in a water bath canner.

Since it doesn’t boil, the pectin doesn’t set, and the cider keeps its cider flavor.

Read more: How to Can Apple Cider

Autumn Canning Recipes

Keep your canner running this fall with these seasonal canning recipes:

• Cranberry Apple Jam

• How to Make Fruit Butter

• Pear Butter

• Pear Sauce

• Pear Jam

• Pickled Green Tomatoes

• Canning Pumpkin

• Canning Sweet Potatoes

• Sweet Cider Apple Butter

• Pear Butter

• Caramelized Onion Jam

• Butternut Squash and White Bean Soup

• Butternut Squash Soup Base

• Thai Butternut Squash Soup

Happy Canning!

-Ashley at Creative Canning

(Ps. I also run the blog Practical Self Reliance, which has information on all manner of food preservation techniques (cheesemaking, salt curing, fermenting) as well as just about everything else you’d need to learn to be self-reliant in this modern world. It has its own substack as well, and you can subscribe to practical self-reliance separately as well. That newsletter comes out weekly and covers canning, as well as everything else.)