Apple trees for cider

In November of last year my wife and I bought a house. Prior to that we owned a Town-home with a zero lot line, so I never really got to start my garden or the various hippy ideas that floated in my head. The new home is on .38 acre, which isn't huge by any stretch, but will let me have a garden and plant some fruit trees. I've been shopping for heirloom varieties for cider making and have a few that seem interesting.

I found a site called Trees of Antiquity that specializes in heirloom varieties that will ship trees ready to plant.

First is the Manchurian Crab. I'm particularly interested in a crab variety that works well in my cooler summers and has a somewhat early harvest, that will also act as a pollinator for an eating or dessert apple tree that I would like to plant.

The second apple tree that is interesting is a Cox's Orange Pippin. It's supposed to be quite tasty and it appears to be compatible with the crab apple for bloom time and fertility, so they should do a good job of helping to keep each other pollinated. I also read that the Cox tree is good for espalier which could be useful to give me a little bit of a privacy screen between my home and the neighbors.  Previous owners of this house cut down some privacy bushes that were on the fence line so a tree that could do double duty of fruit and privacy seems like a win.

Cider's done

So I finally got around to bottling my hard cider and I ended up with 75 12oz bottles and 1 22oz bottle.  The OG was 1.066 and the FG was 1.004 for and ABV of 8.5%.  Due to my unfortunate acid blend additions early on I was afraid that I would have to throw it out, but after the champagne yeast got done the cider is a little tart less so than a Mikes Hard Lemonade or similar beverage.  I expect that this will be the best batch I've made.  The champagne yeast makes it so dry that most people think it tastes more like a sparkling wine than cider.  This way there is still some tartness that pairs well with the dryness.  Letting the yeast attenuate to 1.004 was not the plan, but I didn't think I had any star san to sanitize my bottles with and snowpocalypse messed with my local home brew store's supply chain.  Keep in mind that I didn't think I had any, I was cleaning my kitchen and hidden behind some spices was my star san, so I was in business this weekend.

This bottling marks the second time that I've had help bottling, my Dad was in town so the sanitizing, filling and capping only took about an hour and a half versus the normal 3 or 4 hours it takes me.  I decided that because the cider was still bubbling slowly when I bottled it to only had about 3/4 of a teaspoon of corn sugar.  The juice of apples has so much sugar in it already I didn't want to make bottle bombs

Hard Cider and other Beer news

So the hard cider is still bubbling away down in my basement.  The cooler temps have kept the fermentation a little on the slow side, but this champagne yeast is a beast even too much acid cannot keep it down.  Anyhow I hope to bottle this week or maybe the weekend, you don't want to leave too much sugar when you put it in the bottle or you will get bottle bombs (bottles that pop their caps) but I don't want to get the cider too dry again.  I'm hoping that the huge acid blend is going to keep it from being as dry as the last batch was.

Once that is done I have a double barrel plan to enact with a 3 gallon sour batch and 5 gallon pumpkin cranberry ale to work on.  If any kind of luck comes my way I may come into possession of another (or maybe a couple of) carboys to keep bottlenecks like this from happening.  Horror or horrors I had to buy beer because my kegs are empty!  The good news is New Belgium had a deal where if you buy 2 12packs you get 2 free beer glasses.  Given that I don't have any glasses of that style I thought it would be a decent trade off and I tend to like New Belgium brewing.  Don't tell anyone though I also bought some Bridgeport Hop Czar and even though it's 87IBU's and  NBB Ranger is only 70IBU's vs Hop Czar is much more drinkable for some reason.  The Hop Czar should be much more bitter than the Ranger, but it drinks better in my opinion.

Anyhow I swear I have beer stuff in the pipeline!  I bought a cooler and got a ball valve and kettle screen installed on my keggle, and did the same for my new cooler.  I need to take some pictures and get the nipple and silicon tubing so I can use them more effectively.  The only thing I have left to buy to make my little setup perfect is a hot liquor pump.  They make food grade pumps that can tolerate boiling fluids so I can pump from one vessel into the other rather than having to rely on gravity to do the work.  Until then gravity will have to do the trick.

Cider Syrup update

After I wrote about it the other day, I decided to try my hand at making cider syrup.  The first lesson I learned is that you don't have to be afraid of applying heat, I had it at a fairly low boil and after an hour it was not even reduced by half.  After turning it up and letting it get to a rolling boil things progressed faster, but it still took me about 3.5 hours to get 1.75 gallons reduced.  I ended with more than 32oz of syrup so I'm only at 1/8 or so.  It's a little runny, very sweet and packs a heck of an apple punch.

And now for some strange boiling pictures.

In the first picture, if your crazy like me you will see a huge monster mouth, and see that this pot was really full when I started.  (this is a perspective shot)

Now you cannot see anything because the damn pot is boiling and steam is hard to see through.

Finally you will see the end product, the reduced cider cooling down so I could pour it into something and not burn the F#ck out of my hand.

Cider is bubbling away still

From humble beginnings I started this little cider journey I'm on.

But a heavy hand with the acid blend gave me a cider that was still.

Patience, planning and hard work paid off and you can now see the milky and cloudy color as evidence the yeast is working away.

I've been a bit of a lazy blogger and not getting pictures as I go, so here you go, pictures of my cider in process. It's been bubbling away pretty actively so it may be several weeks before it's ready for the bottle. From the one gravity reading that I took of 1.071 on just the raw juice, and I was 1.066 or more on the brown sugar water the final product will be in the range of 7-9%abv. The first gallon of brown sugar water I measured really nicely by weight and after that things got a little loose.

Cider Making

So this weekend we made it out to the Grandparents to check out the cider press that they purchased for my Aunt several years ago.  It is quite the contraption, and with a single 20is pound box of Gala apples we managed to make a pretty nice tasting single variety apple cider.  In all I cannot complain about the machine, though the apple macerating hopper leaves some rather large chunks in the pomace.  The press is a Happy Valley Ranch homesteader press.  The Jaffrey Cider Press looks very similar. 

All in all the press worked pretty well, though I do think that it would have been more efficient if I had some HDPE press rings in the layers of pomace.  The drainage tray that we had is pretty old and needs to be resealed as it leaked in several places and would have wasted 1/3rd of the yield, but with the use of many small cups to catch the runaway drips we managed to salvage the majority of the juice.  For only about $12 worth of apples we managed about 1 gallon worth of Juice.