Cider Taste Test

It's a cold, raw day.
Too unpleasant to play outdoors.
So D suggested it was time to test the cider.
There are eight batches using various yeasts, including one of wild yeast.

Isn't the variety of shades and clarity interesting!
Here they are lined up in letter order - G is missing, because it was not decanted earlier.

Chris gave us a sample sanitizer to use - worked well - you need to have killed all the wild yeasts before you add the wine or beer yeasts. He also gave us a siphon to get the liquid from the five-gallon pails to bottles. D siphoned these a month ago. At that time, they all tasted either beery or like regular cider - some yeasts work slower than others.


Some are quite fizzy!!! Others are still.
This one had to be opened and reclosed several times before we could safely pour it.


This was much more fun than playing outside today!

In case you are wondering, these are water bottles left over from the power outage during Irene .

Low Tech Cider Making at Home

Last weekend we made 15 gallons of cider.

We saved out one gallon, and put the rest in the basement.

(That is a story for another day.)

But we have almost finished that gallon,

so we decided to see if it could be made in the kitchen.

We started with gemini apples.

(D has named all the apple trees - this is a twining pair.)

They are not very pretty, but they made a nice apple pie.

We chopped the apples and put them into the blender with a little cider.

Then we ground them to a fine texture in the vintage Osterizer.

The slurry was poured into a straining cloth in a colander over a pot.

The cloth could be cheesecloth, but I don't have any.

But I do have lots of old curtains.

A good wash, a brief bleach soak, and there you go.

It works really well.

In this case, it's folded over to quarters.

Once we had enough pomace, D began to squeeze.

Notice the before and after pictures.

This is the final squeeze.

After we were almost done,

D suggested we could have used the antique fruit press. . .

We'll save that for another time.

We got quite a bit.

We didn't pay attention to time,

but we think about 1/2 hour from start to cleaned up.

This will hold us until we do the next batch of cider this weekend.

This is a banner year for apples, so go pick some wild ones, and

do try this at home.

We recommend not using fallen apples

-

too much risk of picking up bacteria left by our wild friends.