Cider 2007

It was a bumper crop for apples this year in my garden in Dockenfield - the trees were positively groaning under the weight of apples, well all of them except the oldest tree that is close to the boundary and swamped by another apple tree, a layladi hedge and the neighbours beech hedge. It produced no apples again this year, which is a shame as its apples are pentangular (possibly "Crispin"s)!

Anyway the other trees more than made up for it with a total harvest of 275kg (43stone 4lbs, or 5.4hundredweight, or 1/4 of a ton) of apples from the three trees (not counting a few dozen or so I left on the 'cookers' tree that weren't quite ripe). The big old 'cookers' tree, nearest the house, produced 164kg alone.

The three apple trees are of different varieties. The one at the bottom of the garden, nearest the road is about 3 metres tall and almost spherical in shape with its branches starting out horizontally from its short trunk at about 1 metre from the ground. I think it might be a Blenheim Orange Apple Tree (Malus domestica `Blenheim Orange`).

This tree almost fell over 3 years ago and I had to winch it upright and prop it up with a wooden beam. The apples it produces are russet (golden) coloured, sweet to taste but tend to have thick skin and a chalky texture.

The apple tree by the drive on the hill above the garage is possibly a Cox`s Orange Pippin Apple Tree (Malus domestica `Cox`s Orange Pippin`). The tree is tall and willowy and produces small, sweet, almost perfumed very rosy apples in profusion. The crop was so heavy this year that one of the main branches split and bent.

The third tree, the largest apple tree in the garden is old, possibly a hundred years old.
Its stem splits just above the ground into 4 trunks. The tree grows vigorously and has been heavily pruned at least 3 times in the 7 years we have been living here. It produces what I thought were cooking apples (cookers) but this year the apples turned from green to a wonderful buttery yellow so they looked more like grapefruit when ripe. Some were even rosy and the flesh was pinkish. Unlike previous years when the apples had been green and sour this year the tasted sweet and aromatic. I think it may be an Early Victoria (Malus x domestica Early Victoria).

I picked all the apples in one day and left them in large plastic sacks dotted around the garden and then a few days later on 27th September we started the crushing and pressing. It took 4 days to get through all the apples, though we didn't do them all on consecutive days, it was too hard work for that.

This year we used rubber gloves when procesing the apples which prevented our hands from turning black as in previous years. Otherwise it was pretty much the same procedure as last year. All but the smallest apples were cut into quarters before being put into the crusher. This year we put the apples from the two smaller tree through the crusher twice. We tried that with the 'Early Victorias' but the pulp turned into a purée which was almost impossible to deal with as it oozed out the sides of the press!

When we had crushed about a bucket full of apples they were then put in the press and squeezed down to about half their size and the juice was collected in another bucket and then added to a wine fermenter or demijohn.

Crushing the is not particularly hard work, you just put the apples in the top, crank the handle and collect the crushed apples from the bottom, but bending to crank the handle and the cutting of the apples, not to mention getting apple juice squirted at you as the go through the crushers makes it a tiresome activity, especially when done for hours and hours.

Pressing is a lot more physical. The crushed apples have to be put carefully into the wooden basket, trying to avoid dropping any. When the basket is crammed full the wooden pressing blocks are placed on the top and the wooden chocks and the threaded crank are attached and the whole lot wound down slowly with a metal bar in the crank. It is pretty easy going for the first 20 or 30 turns of the handle and the juice positively gushes out the sides of the basket, but the last 20 or 30 turns are hard physical labour especially for the harder Blenheims and Coxs which are springy and tough even when crushed. My shoulder are still aching!

I started with one 5 gallon wine fermenter but quickly realised that was not going to be enough and ended up buying too more. We finished pressing on 4th October. The 275kg of apples filled the three 5 gallon wine fermenters (probably with 7 gallons in each as I over filled them) and seven 1 gallon demijohns with apple juice; an estimated 120 litres (26 gallons(UK)).

I used cider yeast on the first demijohn, but as my homebrew shop had run out of that when I returned for more and additional wine fermenters I used champagne yeast on the remaining fermenters and demijohns.

The pressed crushed apples, all 155kgs, of them, were not wasted. I took them down to Sarah-Jane's house and they were fed to her pigs.

The storeroom above the garage is now a harmonious place to be with the gentle 'plop plop plop' of the airlocks. The cider will ferment there until the new year when I will bottle it; if I can find enough bottles.

This years crop has made last years 10.5 gallons look trivial. I still am drinking last years cider - it is excellent. I've got about 36 bottles of it left.