2021 Cider Season

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Moonraker

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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 of effort to mill only 20kg of apples at a time anyway. Doing 6 gallons of juice took a good 12 hours because the pomace had to be put through the mill twice to get it fine enough for pressing.

So my slogan this year is less effort, more juice!

Looking into apple scratters has been an education, there's everything out there ranging from food industry-standard space-age stainless steel and alumium cold-fusion/hydrogen-cell powered contraptions - to home-built wooden framed hand-cranked old skool hoppers and drums, sometimes containing parts of re-purposed electric wheelchair motors, garden shredders, washing machine drums or lawn mower motors and blades, sometimes not. Prices range to match from nearly a grand to mere pennies. As it happened I did have a spare electric lawnmower and an old bench grinder that I could use the motor from and was considering lashing an electric motor-powered hopper/drum arrangement together on an old table frame.

But fortunately on balance it seemed that simplest of all and delivering throughput and a well-ground pomace is an electric sink waste disposal unit. A few youtube videos later and I'm ready to give it a stab.

The frame is built with bits from the leftover timber offcuts stash - the last of the 15mm structural hardwood sheet ply and some reclaimed model railway layout timbers.

01 IMG_4568.JPG


Brand-new waste disposal units in the power category I want are about £300-ish (which in my book is too much to spend on something that will spend its life knocking around the barn and only get used a couple of times per year, however second-hand ones do turn up on ebay so all I need to do is to look for a lightly-used example and a small square aluminuium kitchen sink, and nice and cheap too.

03 IMG_4572.JPG
04 IMG_4574.JPG


So there you go. An Insinkerator model 66 - 0.75hp and a 980ml grind chamber capacity, comes with a sink already attached! In good hardly-used condition and mine for just £63 delivery included, lucky me. :^)

07 scratter.JPG


The power cord comes off the redundant Flymo and so is a waterproof and toughened flex. An illuminated on/off switch provides power to the disposal unit and is put where it can easily be got at if something goes wrong. The unit itself is controlled by a push-button/vaccum servo switch located next to the on/off.

The pommace then drops down a pipe and into the bucket. I now can't wait to try it out in earnest! So I just need a harvest of apples. But wait, there's a problem with that.... :^(

It's not been a good year for apples up this end of the Nadder valley with a late frost having arrived at just the wrong moment. Nothing on any of the fruit trees and only a handful of eating apples and just a smattering of crabapples.

204 IMG_4615.JPG


But then, a saviour! A lady got in touch over the Nextdoor app who lives a few miles away across the border in Dorset in a sheltered valley and she has a mature orchard with about a dozen trees and has no use for the crop, might I be interested in helping myself?

So I have just had a very productive afternoon, 73kg of apples, 9kg of pears and 5kg of plums.

208 crop.JPG


That should keep me occupied for a while. The orchard is very overgrown and the trees rather neglected and even though I stripped 2 trees and made inroads on another 4, there was still a lot left and I didn't like driving away and just leaving it, I may have to buy a few more fermentation buckets and make another trip...

I feel a perry coming on and will have to do that first as some of the pears are getting a bit squishy. Not so sure about the plums, they may get used for jam.
 
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... :^)
 
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 swallowed them in seconds. Got just over 6 litres of juice, a full DJ plus a bottle of fresh pear juice for the fridge, delicious! O.G is 1060 so I'm not going to bother adding any sugar, will let it settle overnight with a campden tablet and add cider yeast in the morning.

monday IMG_4626.JPG
 
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 (og 1090), a DJ of single-source cider (og 1040) and a 5 gallon bucket of blended cider (og 1051) on the go.

IMG_4632.JPG


And I've still got 3 large bags of apples left over for next weekend...
 
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 dunk" another one into the aperture to get it going again, and there's also a "splatter radius" if an apple is a little over-ripe, so I found it best not to be leaning over and looking directly down into it...

"Little things amuse little minds" as my Dad used to say. :^)
 
Having just spent 4 hours with a bucket, 40kg of apples a big stick for pulping and a press... I am impressed and jealous.

Looks smart as fook
 
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 no slouch! If anything the taste is a little too mellow, I will add 1 teaspoon of sugar per litre when I come to bottle it in a couple of months' time, but is there anything I can add at this stage to pep the flavour up a bit?
 
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 of effort to mill only 20kg of apples at a time anyway. Doing 6 gallons of juice took a good 12 hours because the pomace had to be put through the mill twice to get it fine enough for pressing.

So my slogan this year is less effort, more juice!

Looking into apple scratters has been an education, there's everything out there ranging from food industry-standard space-age stainless steel and alumium cold-fusion/hydrogen-cell powered contraptions - to home-built wooden framed hand-cranked old skool hoppers and drums, sometimes containing parts of re-purposed electric wheelchair motors, garden shredders, washing machine drums or lawn mower motors and blades, sometimes not. Prices range to match from nearly a grand to mere pennies. As it happened I did have a spare electric lawnmower and an old bench grinder that I could use the motor from and was considering lashing an electric motor-powered hopper/drum arrangement together on an old table frame.

But fortunately on balance it seemed that simplest of all and delivering throughput and a well-ground pomace is an electric sink waste disposal unit. A few youtube videos later and I'm ready to give it a stab.

The frame is built with bits from the leftover timber offcuts stash - the last of the 15mm structural hardwood sheet ply and some reclaimed model railway layout timbers.

View attachment 54462

Brand-new waste disposal units in the power category I want are about £300-ish (which in my book is too much to spend on something that will spend its life knocking around the barn and only get used a couple of times per year, however second-hand ones do turn up on ebay so all I need to do is to look for a lightly-used example and a small square aluminuium kitchen sink, and nice and cheap too.

View attachment 54463View attachment 54464

So there you go. An Insinkerator model 66 - 0.75hp and a 980ml grind chamber capacity, comes with a sink already attached! In good hardly-used condition and mine for just £63 delivery included, lucky me. :^)

View attachment 54465

The power cord comes off the redundant Flymo and so is a waterproof and toughened flex. An illuminated on/off switch provides power to the disposal unit and is put where it can easily be got at if something goes wrong. The unit itself is controlled by a push-button/vaccum servo switch located next to the on/off.

The pommace then drops down a pipe and into the bucket. I now can't wait to try it out in earnest! So I just need a harvest of apples. But wait, there's a problem with that.... :^(

It's not been a good year for apples up this end of the Nadder valley with a late frost having arrived at just the wrong moment. Nothing on any of the fruit trees and only a handful of eating apples and just a smattering of crabapples.

View attachment 54467

But then, a saviour! A lady got in touch over the Nextdoor app who lives a few miles away across the border in Dorset in a sheltered valley and she has a mature orchard with about a dozen trees and has no use for the crop, might I be interested in helping myself?

So I have just had a very productive afternoon, 73kg of apples, 9kg of pears and 5kg of plums.

View attachment 54468

That should keep me occupied for a while. The orchard is very overgrown and the trees rather neglected and even though I stripped 2 trees and made inroads on another 4, there was still a lot left and I didn't like driving away and just leaving it, I may have to buy a few more fermentation buckets and make another trip...

I feel a perry coming on and will have to do that first as some of the pears are getting a bit squishy. Not so sure about the plums, they may get used for jam.
Eaters are not much use for cider-making. I simply chop apples up roughly and freeze them. You don't then need to spend money and time on any extra gear. Just defrost and put them into a FV on average 4lb apples to 1lb sugar and 1 gall water. Use Bramleys and crabs. Assuming of course you don't have access to those bygone true cider varieties.
 
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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 suspect something got in that shouldn't have as there was a milky-white substance floating on the surface after it fermented out. I racked it off with minimal disturbance and had a small sample. Yeuuch! Very sharp with an acetic bite at the back of the throat. Bearing in mind that everybody says "Never throw anything away!" I've put it in a clean DJ and added 100g of sugar to try to soften it a bit.

How long should I leave it? Will it ever be drinkable? What else can I do with it to make it palatable?
 
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