After much too much prevarication, we've finally got round to some respectable cider-making. There is nothing to it whatsoever, honest. We borrowed a small press from farming friends and with it a large plastic bucket and a fence post with a metal bar set cross-ways through one end. Using the fence post, we mashed the apples to a fine pulp in the plastic bucket and loaded the mash into the net curtain, which forms an inner bag to the press.
Next we squeezed the pulp into a jug until no more juice could come out of it, and poured the juice into a pressurised 40 litre plastic beer barrel (see below). We repeated this until the barrel was full, then screwed the cap down tight. No sugar, no yeast, no ham, no rats. It took a surprising number of apples, but a relatively short period of time to accomplish.
Cider in its pressurised barrel, ready to drink by December.
(Note the sediment settled out at the base)
(Note the sediment settled out at the base)
Having filled the barrel with pure cold-pressed apple juice, we sat the barrel on a windowsill in the cool larder and left it. The pressure built up, the apple juice corrupted slowly, and fermented. With a little taste-testing along the way, we have found that fermentation ceased by the end of November (when the temperature fell). The juice is no longer sugary at all, and what we have in the barrel is a dry apply cider of a moderate strength. No doubt we could increase the strength by adding wine-making yeast and sugar. But it doesn't seem like we need to. The end result is very pleasing, but unlikely to last until Christmas for supply and demand reasons. There was a lot of talk about secondary fermentation in May, when the larger warms up again, but since the cider is unlikely to survive that long, any questions on that theme are academic. Theoretically it would keep on improving until next summer.
