Cider

The cider season has arrived little earlier this year, by about 2 weeks. I've made cider for the last 3 years using apples from my and, in previous years, my neighbours garden.

I've got 4 apple trees in the garden. There were 5 but one that produced lovely little pink apples died this year. Last year my most fruitful tree tried to commit suicide by falling over. I had to use a system of pullies and the car jack to push it vertical again and now it is permenantly propped up by a 5 foot length of 4x4 - the problems of living on a hill with clay soil I guess.

Anyway this year we had a mixed crop. The small tree at the bottom of the drive by the garage was very early with its fairly large crop small red apples but I missed most of these and they were on the whole rotten by the time I did my first press 2 weeks ago. The larger small tree at the bottom of the garden had a huge crop on it - I filled a sack with its windfalls 2 weeks ago and 6 sacks last weekend with apples picked off the tree. The big cooker had not produced much of a crop - about sack full last weekend and a few dozen windfalls the weekend before. Its acient neighbour that produces pentangular apples only manged one apple this year! It needs pruning and was very much in the shade of the neighbours hedge. That's been trimmed in the last few weeks and I will try to get it pruned this winter so we will see next year.

I went out 2 weeks ago and bought an apple crusher from the local home brew shop for a massive £220. I've been trying to buy one on eBay for years but they are as rare as hens teeth and the three that came up for sale this season all went for around £200 - second hand!

I just collected 2 sack fulls (compost bags) last week - about 60lbs of apples and crushed them in the garden with a little help from Janet. As well as the crusher I've got a press

that I bought 3 years ago. I used the kitchen and a bucket and propeller aparatus that was attached to an electric drill to crush the apples in previous years, but after a number of disasters I've been banned from the kitchen (floods of apple juice, crushed apple up the wall, marks on the kitchen table).

The old crushing method was a misery - noisy, messy and inefficient. The new crusher was a wonder, though it does need a proper stand - I propped it between 2 garden chairs this year. It munched its way through 3 or 4 apples a time in about a minute or so. The resulting pulp was then placed in the press - about a gallon's worth and then the handle was turned until I was blue in the face and covered in apple juice. The press is lovely to look at, and a fine peice of equipment except for its spout which dribbles backwards, so a bit of plastic had to be taped to it otherwise most of the juice would have ended up on the floor. The pressing starts of easily, but towards the end when the bar that is used to turn the thread is about 1 inch from the top of the cage the amount of effort required is considerable, especially towards the end of the day!

I started late (after lunch) 2 weeks ago and didn't finish until after dark. The two bags yeilded a little over 2 gallons of juice that I put in my wine fermenter and added some yeast. When I came home last weekend I transferred the cider to 2 demijohns and had to ditch a pint or so of semi-fermented juice. It just wasn't worth keeping as I didn't want to cross contaminate any new cider if the last batch was bad.

I started early and picked all the apples before lunch - 7 sacks full, and a total weight of 209lbs! After lunch with some sterling help from Janet we crushed and pressed all of them. It was hard work and we finished in the dark again, this time illuminated by Janet's car headlights so we could see what we were doing. That lot yeilded a massive 8.5 gallons. 6 gallons of apple juice in the wine fermenter and the remaining 2.5 split between 3 demijohns.

I don't think I've ever had so much cider - I can't make up my mind whether this was a particulary good year for the apples - certainly I don't remember so many from previous years, or whether it was the new crusher that helped.

Anyway all the containers had yeast added and were left to it under airlocks - and they were all bubbling away the next morning. The cider, all 10.5 gallons, is in the garage and it will stay there, unheated and undisturbed until the end of winter - though I may rack it once. Then this year I intend to bottle it early in February. In previous years I've bottled at Easter, but last year that was too late and I missed the secondary fermentation that occurs when the temperature rises so last years cider is a little flat.

Oh, by the way an interesting chemical reaction: Apple juice + skin + soap = black stain. My hands every year at this time of year look as if they belong to a chimney sweep - stained black. After the pressing they don't look too bad, but even after rinsing as soon as they are washed in soap they turn black as coal. This year at Janet's suggestion I managed to reverse the reaction to a degree by rubbing them with vinegar, but a week later my nails are still pretty black!

On Sunday I took the five sacks of dry crushed and pressed apples across to Sarah-Jane's and fed a sack to the piglets and a sack each to the very pregnant sows. They loved it and gobbled the lot down while we watched. I guess by now they've had the rest too.

Now all I've got to do is to decide how to drink 10.5 gallons of cider next summer. What a terrible problem!