We have just spent our entire Sunday pressing apples from our tree in the back garden to have a go at making Cider. The following photos illustrate the steps we have gone through today while following the cider making book we bought from CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ales). EnjoyI was up and picking apples at 9am.
Carrying Apples
So here I am coming back from the tree with a load of apples (having already thrown the obviously rotten ones on the compost heap).
The Picked Apples
Following further sorting, we end up with the apples we are going to chop up and make cider with.
Chopping the Apples
Next job is to wash the apples and quarter them into a huge tub ready to pulp them. Again, you throw away all the rotten bits or bugs you discover at this point.
Pulping the Apples
The hard part. Lumping a bloody great fence post up in the air 500 times to pulp the quartered apples. Pulping the apples helps extract much more juice from them.
The Pulped Apples
And here’s the result - the pulped apples.
Pressing the Apples
Finally the apples get as far as the press - we only have a small press because we’re only going to make a couple of batches
per year. One run of apple pulp through the press generates about 1 pint of juice.
The Pressed Juice
Nearly there - this is the raw juice as it pours out of the press.
The Finished Product
Well - not quite finished (that will take several months of fermentation), but following filtering the pressed juice through a seive and some old tights, and adding a couple of spoons of yeast, we sit the bottles in the dark until Christmas time - checking now and again if they need filtering, or sugar adding to aid the fermentation process.
Of course there is always the risk that the cider will turn out horrible, but then if we don’t try we’ll never know, and we’ll never learn how we might make it better next year…