Canning Cranberry Juice

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One of my favorite things about canning is that once you start doing it, it’s easy to pick up and do more things. A lot of the methods are the  same or super similar which makes it even easier to continue to expand into more and more items. The benefit is clear, you know where even more of your food comes from. Honestly, it’s almost a little addicting to keep doing more and more! We started canning grape juice and now we’re hooked on canning cranberry juice too! 

Cranberries

We opt for fresh cranberries but I think you could use frozen if needed, too. The best time to start canning cranberry juice is right around Thanksgiving. Cranberries typically go on sale super cheap and it makes it worth it to can them into juice. 

We got our bags of cranberries for 99 cents at Aldi this year! We got around 20 jars of juice from all those cranberries. Cranberry juice is $13.60 at Azure. We got 10 bags of cranberries, effectively saving us around $250 on this juice. It’s not organic but I still think there would be savings. I wrote a post about all the savings we get from canning, this is just another situation where it’s totally worth it.

Sugar Free

We make our cranberry juice sugar free. Cranberry juice is very tart this way but we do it for a couple reasons. 

The first is that cranberry juice can be used medicinally. If you start to feel any sort of UTI or urinary irritation, cranberry juice can help. The last thing your body needs when you are trying to heal is sugar. Your body needs cranberries but not much more than that. 

The second is that we like to mix it with other beverages to cut them a bit. For instance, our grape juice is very sweet due to the type of grape and when we pick them. The cranberry juice helps us cut the sweetness to make it perfect. It’s also great with ginger ale for a special treat too!

Canning Cranberry Juice Process

• Wash the cranberries.
• Add 2 cups cranberries per quart.
• Fill quarts with hot water.
• Add lids & rings.
• Water bath for 15 minutes.

Let them sit for 4-6 weeks before using. 

Adding Sugar

If you do want to add sugar, you definitely can. Add a ¼ or ½ cup to each quart. For this step you’d just add it to the jars after adding the berries and before adding the water.

In Summary: Canning Cranberry Juice

Juice is one of the very easiest to can and it’s definitely one of the most cost effective. A little bit of fruit goes a long way and, for some reason, organic juice is very expensive. Heck, everything is expensive these days. It’s totally worth it to start canning your own food just to save some money. Who knows, you might just get addicted like us! As one last note here, you can mix your grape juice and your cranberry juice for a delicious treat. We find this to be especially good if we have a sweet grape juice because it balances is out a bit.