We’re trying something new this week: making cider. There is an apple tree a couple of minutes’ walk from home, down by the river in the nature reserve, which is heavy with apples right now; it seems a shame to let them all fall off and go to waste.
So we’ve been out picking them before they become windfall and start to rot. It’s easier said than done in some cases as there is a healthy crop of nettles surrounding the tree, but we’ve gathered enough to three-quarter fill a demijohn.
How many apples is that? A lot. This was about a quarter of the haul:
You don’t need to peel them, but you do need to slice and core them before putting them in the blender.
Ideally, after blending them, you’d put them into a proper press to extract the juice, but not having one of them we turned to the muslin jelly bag we use in jam making and relied on the weight of the apple pulp itself to squeeze out the juice. It worked surprisingly well. Particularly when we gave the dregs a bit of a manual squeeze.
This was the result:
Most of a demijohn full of apple juice. It makes you realise how much work goes into making a carton of juice.
As you can see from the picture above, it is already starting to ferment. This is because the apples are full of natural sugar, and their skins have natural yeast on them, which is why we only lightly wiped them clean with dry kitchen roll: we didn’t want to wash off the yeast.
We popped a bung and air lock in the top to keep out the flies and sat it in a warm part of the kitchen to brew.
Eventually, when the fermentation has calmed down (after, perhaps, the addition of a little more yeast) we’ll rack it up into bottles, and then the wait begins. For how long? Until about Easter. A long time.
In the meantime, there is one more job to do: dispose of the mashed up remains of the apples. When we tipped them out of the muslin bag they were quite dry (below), so we popped them into the chickens’ scraps tray, and they loved them, leaving us with no waste at all.
We’ll keep you updated with how our experimental cider progresses.
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