Strong bow

So my favorite commercial cider is strong bow. I am curious if anyone out there has a detailed recipe for cider that tastes the same or very similar to strong bow.

Not yet, cider recipes seem to be hard to clone because the apple blends don't seem to be easy to duplicate or aren't even disclosed.


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I have always loved ciders in France, and was told they require high tannin apples that we would consider inedible and don't grow.

The new Strongbow recipe or the original one? I spent a summer in London in 2005 and drank my fair share of the original Strongbow. I think Graham's English Cider recipe is a good approximation - it is slightly drier, higher ABV, and a touch more astringent. Link: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f81/grahams-english-cider-107152/

Haven't had the rebranded new recipe versions, so can't comment on those.

I don't much care for the new recipe. I prefer the old strong bow it was less sweet and slightly dryer

Its going to be hard to ferment anything like Strongbow at home. It's a what we would call "industrial cider". In other words it has nothing to do with cider, apart from marketing. Strongbow (and its ilk) are made roughly following process like this:

1. The corporatiion buys zillion litres of juice concentrate. In some of these industrial ciders they also use other concentrates besides apple.

2. The concentrate is rehydrated.

3. Sugar content is doubled or tribled and industrial class yeast strain is added.

4. End result from 3. is strong apple wine with high achohol content.

5. This strong apple wine is dilluted with water, roughly 1:3 dillutioin. End result is beer strenght liquid with some resembles to something that maybe once had something do with apples.

6. Into this dilluted and tasteless apple wine they then add artificial apple flavors, apple juice colour like food coloring agents, helluva lot sweeteners (unless its going to marketed as dry 'cider'), it gets carbonated and various amounts additives with various E-codes get added as well.

7. Market this piss as cider and make huge profit.

Anyway, thats roughly what you should do, and it is (luckily!!!!!) quite hard to achieve with home equipment.

What Rauhallinen said. Strongbow is the bud light of cider. Not wanting to put you off

They have the largest beverage vat in the world, comes in at 15 million gallons or so. It's mass produced and therefore quite hard to replicate in a homebrew setting I suppose.

There are some reasonably large producers who make some decent cider, try Thatchers, Aspalls, Weston's, Thistly Cross, Gwynt Y Ddraig, Hecks, Sheppy's etc for british ciders. The smaller producers can be even better, but you'd have to visit their locale for them

I think the OP was asking about a recipe for sweet cider, not a rant against Strongbow.

OP, search for sweet cider in the recipes. There are several, including a caramel.

I don't mean to be rude but you're summary seems over zealous. While bulk cider may not be our favorite you're painting an inaccurate picture (though I'm not saying it's all wrong either).
I'm not familiar with UK regs but TTB definition of hard cider is:

"Hard cider. Still wine derived primarily from apples or apple concentrate and water (apple juice, or the equivalent amount of concentrate reconstituted to the original brix of the juice prior to concentration, must represent more than 50 percent of the volume of the finished product) containing no other fruit product nor any artificial product which imparts a fruit flavor other than apple; containing at least one-half of 1 percent and less than 7 percent alcohol by volume; having the taste, aroma, and characteristics generally attributed to hard cider; and sold or offered for sale as hard cider."

It's only 35% apple juice pre and post fermentation in the uk, so there is a lot more leeway to call something cider which to most cider fans is anything but

hence the likes of kopparberg being called cider in the uk, but it's just an alcopop really

Strongbow in the UK is only made from 37% apple juice for example,

I'd argue against anything with less than about 90% pressed apple juice being cider, personally


Sorry for the thread hijack OP

Fleabite, your reliance on the above TTB definition is a little misplaced. Its also permissible to advertise (lable) other beverages as "hard cider" even though they do not exactly meet that definition, e.g. look at all the carbonated hard ciders produced by Angry Orchard, Woodchuck, Strongbow, Johnny Appleseed, etc. they are not "still". I believe that definition relates to a very limited class of hard cider for excise tax purposes, but I'm no expert.

Archer said:

Fleabite, your reliance on the above TTB definition is a little misplaced. Its also permissible to advertise (lable) other beverages as "hard cider" even though they do not exactly meet that definition, e.g. look at all the carbonated hard ciders produced by Angry Orchard, Woodchuck, Strongbow, Johnny Appleseed, etc. they are not "still". I believe that definition relates to a very limited class of hard cider for excise tax purposes, but I'm no expert.

Click to expand...

Found this thread just now. I explained the tax structure in a new thread.

JohnnyJumpUp22 said:

So my favorite commercial cider is strong bow. I am curious if anyone out there has a detailed recipe for cider that tastes the same or very similar to strong bow.

Click to expand...

Not very detailed it was my first try at cider and It came out pretty damn close to strongbow.

1 Gallon of 365 organic apple juice (from Whole foods) http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/61/ea/df/61eadff658f9fbbfa6f67b12c73718ea.jpg
1 Cup of Corn sugar
1 packet of Safle S04 yeast

Pop on airlock let it the yeast **** out its yummy goodness

Shake every day

3 weeks later Rack
2 days later bottle
chill and drink

I did something similar to Voodoo Charlie.

I experimented and started with 1gal of 100% pure Apple juice that was pasteurized. Tossed in half a package of lalvin k1-v1116 wine yeast. Let it ferment for a month. Racked off. Added a litre of 100% pure Apple juice that was pasteurized in order to carb. Put it into 300ml PET bottles and let it carb for about four days until they were hard.

To me they tasted extremely close to strong bow ciders. I'm pretty sure the alcohol content is around 5.5%. The SG of the apple juice before I tossed the yeast was 1.048 and it was .990 after the month of fermenting.