2020 Cider season

[Moonraker]

Last year was a bit slapdash, I didn't weigh or measure things properly and didn't make any notes so not suprisingly the results were hit and miss. This year is going to more organised and hopefully writing it all down here will discipline me to be more structured. As the old adage says - If you don't measure, you can't manage.

Saturday was one of those perfect Wiltshire early-Autumn mornings; a bit of a chill in the air first thing but clear skies and the sun slanting across the lawn promising a bit of warmth later in the day, so high time to get the kit out and crank up the cider mill!

Batch 1 - Crabapple cider

My Crabapple tree was a bit poorly with apple scab and was starting to lose quite a lot of the fruit so I thought I'd better harvest them and got 14kg of rock-hard little pellets.

They spent a few days in the deep freeze (the wife was not impressed) and having thawed out overnight are now a nice juicy mushy consistency.

Looking online suggests that it's best to mix crabapples 50/50 with ordinary apples, so however much I get out of the two 10l buckets will dictate how much ordinary juice I need to press. It turns out that I get 2 gallons, way more than I'd expected!

So next up I press the 7kg of assorted windfalls I had ready, but they're a real faff as the majority have insect damage and I waste a lot of time cutting out the manky bits, quite a few are completely unusable and overall I only get just about half a DJ's worth out of them.

So although I hadn't intended to as it's still a little bit too early in the season, I have to go and pick a mix of apples from my 4 trees; an eating and a cooking apple, a Bramley and a Cox's orange pippin. The apples are washed, quartered and passed twice through the scratter to get a nice fine pulp for pressing

Et voila! Proto-cider. :^)

It took 13kg of picked apples to get 6 litres of juice and only 2 of those (both Cox's) were unusable, so I'm not going to bother collecting the windfalls in future.

After adding a campden tablet and letting them stand overnight the Crabapple juice OG comes out at 1.040 and the apple juice at 1.045. I heat and dissolve 1kg of Demerera sugar in 1 DJ's worth of juice and then blend equal parts from each into fresh DJs so that each effectively has 250g of sugar and the OG is now 1.070, add Vinclasse cider yeast and they are now all sitting there happily blubbing away. :^)

Oh, and if anyone is wondering what freshly-pressed crabapple juice tastes like -

 

[Moonraker]

Batch 2 - Blackberry & Elderberry wine

Having been inspired by @Nicks90 post about his blackberry & elderberry wine I thought I'd give it a try, never having made it before. Unfortunately I'd left it a little late and could only find 1 tree with any half-way decent berries left on it, just enough to get 1l of juice to go with 3l of blackberry juice I already had in the freezer, plus then another handful of berries I found by chance when out looking for more blackberries;

Boiled up in a pot with 1.2kg of sugar to give an OG of 1.140 then poured into a DJ with a cup of strong tea, pectolase, yeast nutrient and Gervin GV4 high alcohol yeast.

I hope it ends up tasting better than the smell given off by the elderberries when pulling them off the stalks! Days later my hands were still stained black and the aroma still in my nostrils - I now have a better appreciation for the old Monty Python insult:

 

[Nicks90]

1.140!!! Wow
If that ferments out fully it's going to be lethal......18%


Edited to add, the secret to getting elderberries off the stalks is to hold the stem and use a fork and scrape downwards, pulls them all off nice and clean from the stem

 

[Moonraker]

the secret to getting elderberries off the stalks is to hold the stem and use a fork and scrape downwards, pulls them all off nice and clean from the stem

D'oh! So obvious! Now I know for next year (assuming that there is one after drinking this lot....)

If that ferments out fully it's going to be lethal......18%

The first 24 hours were a bit slow with not much happening. Checked before we went out last night and was starting to froth a bit. Came home to find the krausen trying to climb out of the DJ with such pressure that the top half of the airlock had been ejected and was lying about 4 feet away. Swapped it over for the vertical column bubble type and the bubbles were a rapid blub-blub-blub like a WWI vickers machine gun. Came downstairs this morning and it had again overflowed through the airlock with a splatter radius of a couple of feet around it. The wife took one look and said "That's a feisty one". It's calmed down a bit now but still merrily blubbing away like a metronome, the GV4 yeast is advertised as producing up to 21%....

Batch 1 has now slowed right down and after 6 days is now producing a bubble roughly every 60 seconds or so, I'll give it a few more days and then think of racking it off into fresh DJs to clear.

 

[MattH1973]

nice work. unless the apples have gone black I dont worry about insect damage - I stick em in the scratter and figure the acidity in the juice will soon kill anything off..... its always worked for me!!

 

[freester]

Nothing to add except nice work and a reply to keep an eye / subscribe to this thread!

 

[Moonraker]

Busy day in the Brewhouse (utility room) today;

Batch 3 - Blackberry cider

This is a bit of an experimentation; the recipes I have seen recommend not adding the blackberry juice until after the initial fermentation as otherwise the fruity berry flavour can be lost, so I've had these two on the go since Wednesday last week:

They started at 1.060 and are now at 1.015 so they are already at just under 6%. I split the contents across 3 new DJs and topped up with sweetened blackberry juice;

I had been a little unsure how to calculate the OG given that the apple base has already been fermented, but following some very helpful discussions with @LED_ZEP and @johncrobinson this should work out as (let's see if I've got this right!):

Total sugar added = 1.2kg for a total volume of 3 gallons with a baseline of 1.040 equals 400g sugar per gallon which gives an overall OG of 1.072 (ish).

Whatever, in any case the yeast likes it and is now developing a nice foamy krausen. :^)

 

[Moonraker]

Batch 4 - Blackberry wine

Following on from the discussion on @Janulka098 thread Blackberry Abundance I found another bramble patch and had a last picking ramble on Tuesday, most berries are now a bit overripe and came apart making a mess when I pulled them off the stalks, so that really is the end of them down this way now, but got enough of them to boil up in a pot, filling the house with that yummy blackberry aroma.

After straining off the juice I added 750g of sugar, pectolase, yeast nutrient, mug of strong black tea, decanted into a DJ, added Gervin GV4 yeast and it's under starter's orders at OG 1.090.

I have particularly enjoyed making this as it has taken me back to blackberry picking as a little boy many many years ago, every Autumn weekend going blackberrying with my Dad down the old brickfields next to Kirby's scrapyard, coming home with scrapes, scratches, stained fingers and buckets full of them so that for weeks after Mum would be baking cakes, pies and tarts, making coulis, ice cream and blackberry jellies. Ahh, happy innocent days...

 

[goodolpete]

“Following on from the discussion on @Janulka098 thread Blackberry Abundance I found another bramble patch and had a last picking ramble on Tuesday, most berries are now a bit overripe and came apart making a mess when I pulled them off the stalks, so that really is the end of them down this way now, but got enough of them to boil up in a pot, filling the house with that yummy blackberry aroma.”

Even if you got a Kg of blackberrys, they’re only 5% sugar, 50g, so 800g of sugar in 4.5L gives only
about 9% alcohol. Maybe topup with 250g sugar in as little water as possible after a week?

 

[Moonraker]

@goodolpete - thanks for the suggestion, I did it a bit sooner than that; by Sunday there was already a good inch of gunk at the bottom of the DJ and fermentation was starting to slow, so I had a final forage in the brambles for another litre's worth of pressed blackberry juice and added 500g of sugar to it, racked off into a clean DJ and topped up with the juice. It's now happlily blubbing away again with fresh krausen starting to form.

Overall it's now had 1,250g of sugar so with the juice having a starting gravity of 1.040 I make that an OG of 1.140 with the sugar, so an ABV of around 18% if it ferments out?

 

[DavieC]

Had a good day at it today , apples from our tree and around the neighbourhood, got 35ltr juice, Ive added crushed campden tablets and pitching yeast, nutrient and pectolaise tomorrow night.

 

[MattH1973]

View attachment 33272
Had a good day at it today , apples from our tree and around the neighbourhood, got 35ltr juice, Ive added crushed campden tablets and pitching yeast, nutrient and pectolaise tomorrow night.

small point, but my understanding is pectolase should be added at the press stage, and not the yeast stage.

 

[Moonraker]

apples from our tree and around the neighbourhood

Word gets around, went round someone's house yesterday; "I hear you're making cider, here, I got a bag for you from our garden...."

 

[DavieC]

pectolase should be added at the press stage, and not the yeast stage.

Hi Matt, yes you may well be right, I was worried that the campden tabs might de activate the pectolase and so have left it 30 hrs. Just pitched the yeast,nutrient and pectolase so hoping to see activity tomorrow morning.

 

[BartonMillBrewer]

Had a great year for apples this year. Managed to get about 100L from 160Kg of local apples. Using an electric mill which over performs the press. Larger press next year!
I just leave the juice to ferment without any intervention and usually have great results.
Now looking forward to December so I can bottle it.

 

[DavieC]

Its definitely amateur hour at mine, I used a garden shredder to mill the apples and a little fruit press to extract the juice.

 

[BartonMillBrewer]

Its definitely amateur hour at mine, I used a garden shredder to mill the apples and a little fruit press to extract the juice.

A lot of people use garden shredders but the blades are usually made from mild steel which will be affected by the acid in the fruit and taint the juice. I would welcome your comments on past results. There's also the question about cleanliness. I'm sure you are scrupulous with cleaning the machine down before use, I just have reservations about putting a food product through a machine used for chopping up plants.

 

[freester]

A lot of people use garden shredders but the blades are usually made from mild steel which will be affected by the acid in the fruit and taint the juice. I would welcome your comments on past results. There's also the question about cleanliness. I'm sure you are scrupulous with cleaning the machine down before use, I just have reservations about putting a food product through a machine used for chopping up plants.

I use an old garden shredder. I have the blade off before every scratting session and scrub it with a wire brush. I notice no tainting of the juice.

There is the question of cleanliness. I rinse my apples before pulping but at the end of the day I'm sure there are a few grubs and beasties find their way into the pulp as well as the apples were gathered from the ground and not all are 100% not bruised. The apple juice is an acidic environment which is going to kill most horrible things IMHO. My opinion is if cider is made it's going to be clean by the time it's turned into cider, as long as it's a good product. Drinking unpasteurised Apple Juice as it comes out of the press is another matter. I'm happy to do it. Some wouldn't be...

 

[freester]

Those barrels you ferment in look interesting? What capacity?

Had a great year for apples this year. Managed to get about 100L from 160Kg of local apples. Using an electric mill which over performs the press. Larger press next year!
I just leave the juice to ferment without any intervention and usually have great results.
Now looking forward to December so I can bottle it.

 

[BartonMillBrewer]

Those barrels you ferment in look interesting? What capacity?

They are 120L food grade HDPE. The barrels consist of a tap and a blanking plug if you don't want to use the tap. The top consists of two parts, an insert with a lip which sits inside the barrel. That is held in place by a threaded collar which screws down on the outside of the barrel keeping the insert in place.
It was supplied with an air lock and a blanking plug both of which screw down to the lid. I can't remember how much I paid for them but I believe it was around £80 - £100 each. I think they were supplied by a French company but can't be certain.