There’s nothing like a warm mug of apple cider on a cold winters day. It’s almost as good as the smell this recipe produces as it simmers on your stove for a few hours. Talk about Christmas in a cup! Homemade apple cider is actually such an easy recipe to brew that it only takes five ingredients to make it happen. Put these ingredients in a slow cooker in the morning and it will be ready when you’re home from work. There’s so many approaches and even a very resourceful way to make this recipe zero waste by using the apple scraps to make fruit leather.

Check out the full recipe for apple leather here!

Apple cider is commercially produced in two ways. One way is cold-pressed where they place apples in layers on a presser to exude as much pulp out of the apple itself and the other way is to cook the apples down in water to extrude the flavor from the apples into the water. These two methods produce two different results as the cold-pressed variety costs more because it produces less cider.

Homemade cooked apple cider like this is all about the way you spice it up as it cooks. Using whole spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, or star anise help to create depth of flavor to your apple cider. The spices slowly mull in the hot cider bringing out a symphony of flavor. A quick warning: Experiment with this simple version of apple cider before going too wild with the spices. The OG recipe is king!

Once your apple cider is cooked and strained, it is ready to be held in the fridge, mixed in a cocktail, frozen into a slushy, or reduced into a glaze. You can do so much with homemade apple cider and with it being so simple to execute, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR!