A five gallon carboy of pure Macintosh cider.
Like everything else here this is not intended to be a how to guide, just what works for me.
One of my friends from work is a amateur beer maker and offered to ferment a batch of cider for me. After trying his hard cider made from pure Macintosh apples I was hooked ;-) I have made wine before so most of the equipment needed was in my basement waiting to go back to work. I am fortunate to have a good homebrew supply in driving distance from my home. My hard cider has a low alcohol content of around 3.5%-4%. The best way to describe it is like apple champagne. I make mine quite effervescent.
A good tutorial on making hard cider is here at EatTheWeeds.com, he has lots of great information.
Making hard cider is amazingly simple. Really all that's required is clean equipment, yeast and time. I buy liquid cider yeast from my local homebrew store and make a 5 gallon batch at a time. In the above picture you can see the yeast going to work on the cider after 24 hours. You can also save your yeast to use on the next batch, and I have made several batches using the same yeast.
Syphon out the cider into a clean 5 gallon bucket.
Here I am filling bottles with apple goodness after waiting two weeks for the cider to ferment. I just installed a plastic spout into a 5 gallon bucket.
I cap the bottles using my drill press. The drill press is not running, it just provides pressure for the caper attachment.
One 5 gallon carboy works out to around 50, 12 OZ bottles. The bottles sit out in a warm place for a week to build up pressure. I like it very effervescent so a week works for me at around 70 degrees. From here they need to be refrigerated to keep the yeast from over pressurizing the bottles.
In the fall we "can" apple cider into Ball half gallon mason jars. I have more time in the winter to make hard cider and the house is a constant temperature. I just grab enough jars to make a fresh batch when I bottle the last round.