Cider

Started 30th August 2013

Our first windfall apples have dropped. It's been a very good year for apples - our tree is well loaded, hundreds more on the tree. I picked a couple of buckets of apples from a neighbour. A friend has a big bag of apples for us too.

I've decided to make a gallon of cider. It's not my usual drink, but as we have the apples and a fruit press, we've got to try it.

Our fruit press is quite small, so we can only press a small number of apples at a time. Windfall apples get bruised and damaged and won't keep, so I've used these first. The other apples are in temporary storage in apple boxes scrounged from a supermarket - they can stay there until I have time to press them.

We roughly chopped the apples and dropped them into a food processor, blitzing them into almost a puree. We first tried "finely chopped", but found that puree releases more juice. However, the juice from a puree also contains a lot of very small apple particles - the liquid is very dark, like gravy. Half a bucket of (small) apples gave us about 2 pints of liquid.

It takes time to chop, puree and press the apples, so we decided to get the cider going with just that 2 pints and to add more apple juice later. We poured the liquid into a demijohn and added some of my yeast starter liquid, then fitted a bung and airlock. By the following morning there was a thick froth on top of the liquid and the airlock was bubbling away. If we'd filled the demijohn before starting the ferment, it would have bubbled out and made a real mess!

I'll add more info later