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My re-purposed sink and waste disposal unit:

Absolutely brilliant this year thanks. Blackcurrants, wild strawberries, raspberries and blackberries galore. So many pears that I have 5 gallons of Perry on the go, pressed 7 gallons of apples yesterday and still have a couple of large bags to go and started 4 gallons of a Quince/Pear/Apple...

So, 2 years later. Didn't get any quince at all last year due to the late frost, gave the tree a prune last winter and was rewarded with 50 fruit this year. Hagrid is right, I left them to ripen in the utility room and it was filled with a delicious scent. Froze, thawed and scratted them to...

Having pressed the juice in batches up to late November I'm still working my way through the process of racking off and bottling. 8 gallons of cider bottled to date with another 4 and 1 gallon of plum wine still to go. I had my doubts about 1 DJ of a apple/pear juice mix (pider/cerry?) as I...

Almost, but not quite. You will need to turn your cut apples into a pulp before you press them in order to get the juice out of them, using a "scratter". This can be simple as a bucket and a length of 4 by 2 that you then ram up and down into the bucket of chopped apples, or there's a rotating...

For the past year every time a banana has been past its best I've thrown it into the freezer together with any other fruit that was getting a bit squishy. I'm planning a "Manky Fruit" wine at some future point.

I'm planning Earl Grey tea wine once my current batch of cider is finished.

I racked off the Perry into a fresh DJ this afternoon, it was clearing nicely with a thick sediment and there hadn't been any activity in the airlock for a few days. The taste is mellow and already quite rounded so has real promise. Gravity is now down to 1.010 which comes out at 6.55% so it's...

@uDicko It's the 20 litre capacity Inox press from Lovebrewing, but seems to be out of stock at the moment: Presses For Winemaking - Love Brewing

Thanks, it's really fun to use too! Sometimes when loading 3 apples simultaneously they bounce around and the top one bounces right out again before rolling around the sink and falling back into the aperture again (like crazy golf), or one gets jammed in the grinder and I have to forcibly "slam...

I see you've got exactly the same press as me, do you find that the holes get clogged with the pomace? Mine gets to a certain point when as I increase the pressure there is a squelchy popping noise and pellets of pomace are fired out with a spurt of apple juice in random directions. I now line...

A busy weekend out in the barn; 6 gallons of apple juice pressed in 5 hours (it took me 12 hours for the same volume last year), the waste-disposal scratter swallows apples whole in mere seconds and the new press is far more effective. So now in addition to the perry I've got a DJ of plum wine...

Forgot to say that I have added more yeast in the past when a brew didn't seem to be getting it's act together; drew a bit off into a glass, added the yeast and waited until there were signs of life before tipping it back into the DJ. But that may just be my impatience.... :cool:

Hi Rick, welcome to the forum, and homebrewing! 4 days does seem like rather a long time, I tipped a whole sachet (5g) of cider yeast into this DJ of pear juice (O.G 1060) at 08:30 this morning and 9 hours later it is frothing nicely and I'm getting a bubble in the air lock at the rate of...

Had a bit of spare time this afternoon so thought I'd do a test run with the new cross beam press I got from the missus as a combined xmas/birthday present. Took just 35 minutes start to finish to mill and press the bag of pears, the slowest job was quartering them, the sink disposal then just...

Madame has just said that she doesn't like plum jam, "can't you make plum brandy instead?" I think it may have to be a fortified plum wine then... :^)

At one point I thought there wasn't even going to be a season this year; With learnings from last year I've been playing with the idea of making a home-built scratter for a while. The borrowed hand-cranked one I had last year went back to the owner and it had been very time consuming and a lot...

Hi John, how do you store between gatherings and what proportoin black/elder/apple are you aiming for?

Went camping with the kids last week. Took a 500ml bottle of my Black/Elderberry wine. They mixed it with cheapo shop cider. Wasn't half bad! 🙂 There's a lot of blackberries out there this year...

It's the weather. Spring still had frosts quite late as the blossom was just budding or flowering. I've got a few apples on one tree but nothing on the others and no gooseberries, plums, pears, quince or mirabelles on the other trees, nothing. Hoping for a better harvest next year. However in...