My 2012 cider day - 6 October

[reebok]

I love autumn and especially look forward to that most special time - the start of cider making!

My cider day was last Saturday and the sun shone on our work, as it always seems to do. As everybody seems to be finding, this has been a pretty poor year. Really struggled to find apples in any quantity worth harvesting so ended up having to take bits and pieces from many wilding trees. Quality was poor too, fruit much smaller than normal and often very scabby. And as for pears - nil to be had. Just about managed to scratch together about 500lbs of apples which after pressing gave me 18 gallons of juice. To put it in context, last year I made 56 gallons of cider and 14 gallons of perry.
I tested the juice and as I expected, the SG was rather low, only 1.045, doubtless natural sugar levels being low due to lack of sunshine. What I didn't expect was that the amount of free juice in the apples was also low: the flesh was unusually 'dry' which was really surprising as the only thing trees haven't been short of this year is water!

All the juice is now fermenting nicely, if a little slowly. Bring on autumn 2013 - it surely has to be better! :pray:

 

[RobWalker]

It has been a rough year indeed. The guy from our LHBS was telling my dad how his chemical sales have dropped massively because there's no fruit, and he usually makes a killing this time of year!

A shame indeed, but glad you got some out of it at least :thumb:

 

[tazuk]

my cider this year was up on last year 181 ltr at 7.2 % apples was picked then stored for 2 weeks :thumb: