It’s that time of year again when thousands of people in the Northern hemisphere are looking at all those apples ripening on the trees soon to fall and starting to think….hmmmm what a shame if they should go to waste again. So hundreds of people every day go onto the internet and look up “homemade cider presses“, “Plans for making a cider press“, “do it yourself apple crusher” and similar phrases. Many of them have a look at what’s on the cider wiki and some end up building their own version of Ray’s adaptation there. I like to think there’s a whole load of apples being pressed and made into homemade cider for the first every year. It seems as if hundreds of new craft cider enthusiasts are being drawn in to the hobby and a maybe a large handful starting out on the road to setting up a real cottage industry. In turn, many of their friends, neighbours and eventually customers will be exposed to the interesting and individual flavours of full juice craft ciders and so will be demanding of more of the same instead of the fake industrial versions which are currently monopolising the supermarket shelf cider sections and even the so called cider festivals put on by some pub chains and landlords.
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For anyone making cider for the first time, I would recommend “Making Cider” by Jo Deal.
Written in 1976, it covers all the main points.
I am making cider for the first time this year.
Last weekend (18th/19th October) my partner and I pressed 45 gallons of apple juce at my mothers house in Worcestershire. We had made a press that looks quite traditional but it uses a 10 tonne hydrolic jack to exhert the force instead of a screw. Initally I started with cheese cloths but they tore so nylon pillow slips were quickly utalised instead and were very effective, although we did get through a few of those before the weekend was out. We were making about 3 gallons of juce per press, I think that we could have done much more if we had racked up the pulp but it seemed like an easy enough weight of pulp then juce to be moving about. We used a wood chipper to pulp the apples, it was very very effective indeed.
After a bit of a slow start, possibly due to the cool snap, it is now bubling away. We didn’t sulphate or paturise the juce just washed the apples which had been picked and stored for between 3 and 6 weeks. The apples used were cox, blenheim, a green dessert apple which wasn’t so sweet, crispen, bramley, worcesters and possibly summerset apples and a bitter sweet cider apple which we have never identified properly. We had a PH of 3.35 and an OG or 1042, we added 8 kg of sugar to bring the gravity in our 40 gallon barrel to 1050 we also added a pectic enzyme as we had used quite a lot of dessert apples which had been stored for a while, mainly the worceters as they are an early cropper.
The juice is fermenting in an oak whisky barrel which is in the garage under some blankets and is put to bed with 4 hot water bottles each night, maybe just for the time being as the weather is only 11 degrees during the day and I was a bit worried about the slow start, 3-4 days before any real activity.
One thing that I wasn’t very sure of was the tannin level, there doesn’t seem to be a scientific test for the corret level and having no experience of knowing what it should taste like I decided to leave it as it was. From what I’ve read if your mouth puckers up when you drink it you have too much tannin in it, this wasn’t the case.
I have no real practical experience experience in making cider beyond visiting the cider museum in Hereford and reading ‘Real Cidermaking on a small scale’ and research in the internet, wikipedia etc. So I might be making 45 gallons of poison, only time will tell.
I expect a slow fermentation so in 4-6 weeks I will be racking it, I might add some extra sugar at that point if it has cleared and stopped fermenting, to make it a medium cider. If not I will leave it for some time and have another look at Christmas. I think that if I can get a fermentation in the spring that turns the malic into lactic acid I will have a better cider, I don’t base that on any previous experience it’s just a hunch.
I still have vast quatities of bramly apples so I’m off to make some chutney now.
Good luck with the cider everyone.
Mike
Well, three of us from our village have built a press, scrounged half a ton or so of apples and so far have pressed 60 gallons of juice, half of which we have frozen. The rest is fermenting in 5 gallon buckets and will be racked to demijohns then bottled. We are using both natural & cultured yeasts to see what works best. Am a bit concerned that one of the buckets smells a bit of rotten eggs, but we expect there will be some that does not work out well.
We hope to learn before using the frozen juice what is best way.
I heard a lot about apple cider , with friends , in books in movies but I honestly never tried one. Even now while reading this article questions swim in m mind like ” Is it a kind of juice?? or is it considered liquor?? ”
I’ll look at my local store maybe they have cider available so that I can finally give it a taste.
yours truly
Dino Delellis
REALLY?!?! Youve never tried cider?!?!?!