This year I decided to take advantage of access to an apple press and do up a batch of hard cider. My dad acquired a really nice press a few years ago and used it for the first time last year. As a purveyor of all things alcohol, I wanted to bring my homebrew know how to the table and see what we could do. Due to inclement weather, we lost a day picking up the apples but once we got started it didn’t take too long.
My dad (who we all call Daush) and I started by stopping by a local orchard with a truckfull of buckets to pickup the apples. Toward the end of the season the orchard will let you pick up the apples that have fallen on the ground (called drops) for a reduced price ($4/half bushel with a half bushel being a 5 gallon bucket). Since different apples drop at different times, we ended up using the Northern Spy variety as these had just fallen and were most abundant on the ground. The orchard described these as sweetly tart, other websites describe them as mildly tart. I thought they were really sweet, frankly one of the best apples I’ve tasted. Either way, this variety is really juicy, helping for the next step.
So with buckets full of apples we headed back to the homestead and dug out the apple press from it’s corner in the barn. The press itself is an interesting contraption. Rather than just a press, on top it has a pretty serious apple crusher with a hopper and a wooden drum with metal teeth to grind the apples. The crusher is powered by an electric motor Daush hooked up last year. The motor mount ended up breaking off after the first batch so we had to rig up a new mount which worked much better. Underneath the hopper there are wooden slatted baskets that we lined with burlap and filled up with the crushed apple. When the baseket is filled, you cover the apple puree with the burlap, add a wooden press plate and move it to the front of press to do the actual pressing. The press portion screws down and requires a little leverage to get those last few turns in. The cider strains out through the burlap and wooden slatted basket and drains to the brewpot I had sitting under the “juice catch” I guess you’d call it. There were a few leaks we had issues containing, but overall it worked well and gave us the juice we wanted.
As we were starting my sister stopped by to help out and it was a good thing she did. The extra hands helped out quite a bit as my lack of how the pressed worked and the fact I didn’t realize the importance of straining the juice required an extra set up hands. So the process was this: Start up on motor to get the crusher going and you just feed the apples into the hopper. The hopper wasn’t too efficient in feeding the apples to the crusher so we found that adding a few handfuls of apples and then have someone push down the apples to the crusher worked the best. The crusher dropped the apple puree into the basket and required about three five gallon buckets to fill up the apple basket. From there you move it to the front and actually press down the apples and get the majority of the juice. At the end of the process we ended up with about 13 gallons of cider from 55 gallons of apples. Meaning, a bit over 1 gallon for each bucket of apples. That was more than I expected but luckily I had three fermenting buckets and I split it all between all three buckets.
Once in the bucket, I added different ingredients to experiment with what the final product is. Here is a breakdown:
Batch #1: White Labs English Cider Yeast WL775, 1lb of light brown sugar, 1/2 green raisins, 2 cinnamon sticks and some whole cloves.
Batch #2: The same as #1 but with the addition of an additional of Wyeast Pasteur Champagne ACT4201. This was an accident, I meant to use both WL775 in #1 but wasn’t paying attention.
Batch #3: Cider Activator Wyeast ACT4766, 1 lb of honey, whole cloves and cinnamon sticks.
I left batch #2 and #3 at my dad’s place and brought #1 home with me. After a day the cider was at full krusen and smelled great. Here’s a pic after day two, the krusen has died down but the airlock is still just a bubbling away:
Fermentation isn’t a pretty process in general, but to me there is nothing more exciting. I’m such a dork.
Although fermentation hasn’t finished and the final cider is yet to be tasted, this process has given me a good idea how to improve on the next round.
1) Sanitation: Due to various circumstances such as lack of time and lack of apple pressing knowledge, the sanitation required in normal brewing was almost non-existent for this cider. The biggest issue I had was lack of time and abundant water supply to do a boil on the cider. I read different instructions on how to do the cider and some boil, some don’t. I would prefer to do at least a 15 minute boil, but I just didn’t have the time and for cooling, running the water through my immersion chiller for a few hours just wouldn’t work.
2) Straining: To give you an idea of our jerry rigged straining apparatus, it consisted of burlap and a couple of old pillow cases. Next time around it will be cheese cloth all around.
Overall it turned out to be a good learning experience. With a few adjustment to our gear and some additional equipment, I think I can dial the pressing process in much tighter. We’ll see how the actual cider turns out and then we can adjust accordingly.
