October: pressing

    So it's the big month in a cider maker's year. October, when we press apples to yield juice for fermentation. Fermentation that'll happen slowly over the winter in time for racking and eventual bottling in the spring. Cider making's a waiting game.
    My pressing started in September, though I wasn't pressing then for cider. The first pressing I do is usually for apple juice which I'll pastuerise and decant into plastic milk cartons to be frozen for winter drinking. I usually use cooking apples for that because I like my drinking juice tart; dessert apple juice is too sweet to be refreshing in my view. Besides, the dessert apples can be used for cider and the cookers can't.
    I'll normally spend three of four weekends pressing, but in 2012 due to the poor yields I only managed two.One in September for juice, and one a week ago in mid October for cider. It's a simple enough process, the apples are chopped up in a machine called a scratter before being pressed to release the juice. Our scratter is home made, with a big electric motor driving a spinning stainless steel blade. It produces pomace formed from small chips of apple and sometimes very thin apple slices. Whether it would be better if it crushed the apples as well isn't proven, but it at least allows the juice to come out readily enough.

    Our press is a fairly unexciting Vigo basket press. Not the largest scale set-up, but about right for the size of our harvest and the throughput of our scratter. The juice is collected in a stainless steel bowl before being transferred to the plastic jerry cans I use as fermenters. Our orchard is old so I'll add a bit of yeast nutrient to it as well as some sulphite to kill bacteria. The spent pomace meanwhile goes to the compost heap in a wheelbarrow. One day I'll try steeping it for a second pressing, but I usually just don't have the time.
    Yeast is another matter. Natural yeast or cultured yeast? To be honest I've used both, often side by side on the same pressing of juice. Both seem to produce good cider, but I've had film yeast infestations with the natural yeasts. Your yeast experience may vary.
     So there it is. Cider, busily fermenting. The press carefully cleaned, its wooden bits drying out to stop them going mouldy. And I'm thinking ahead to my next task in a couple of months: pruning the orchard in the January frosts.

Unexpectedly cloudy

    I finally completed bottling my 2011 pressing on Sunday. That's right, in August.
    My reason for such a late finish is simple: back in April I managed to trip over one of the plastic jerrycans I use for fermentation, disturbing the settled yeast and turning the cider within from the usual beautifully clear to a murky yellow cloudy cider. I thought a few months standing would settle it out, but sadly that was not the case and to cut my losses I bottled the resulting batch of cloudy cider last weekend.
    I don't like cloudy cider. For me it has too many associations with either badly kept Weston's Old Rosie, cloudy fake Real Ciders whose brand names I won't mention here, and the public fixation with "scrumpy" as some kind of gold standard of authenticity. My ciders have always been as clear as I can make them.
    So I'm left with 40-odd bottles of cloudy cider. An interesting pressing that suits cloudiness as it happens, an experimental mixture of dessert apples and a hedgerow find of an unusually bittersharp crab apple. I guess you'd have to taste it to understand where I'm going with it, but for the apples that went into it I think I've got the taste I was trying for. I hope after a year or more in the bottle, particularly if I let them get really cold this winter, the cloudiness will have settled a bit and I can pour a mostly clear glass from them.
    Looking at the remains of the yeast at the bottom it was clear what had happened. Dead cider yeast creates a skin on top of itself when it settles, and the unexpected violent agitation had broken that skin. Pieces of it were visible, in contrast to the intact mat of yeast that is normally left after bottling.
    I'll be doing my first pressing in a few weeks, the orchard is full of ripening apples. Unexpected to be bottling so close to harvest.

Belated racking

    I should have been doing this six weeks ago.
    Racking, that is. Syphoning the young cider off the spent yeast into a clean container, ready for a further few months settling. An easy enough job, except for the final moments in which care has to be taken to ensure that yeast isn't sucked up the pipe. There is always a bit of yeasty cider left at the bottom that gets wasted.
    The 2011 pressing is shaping up well, though it tasted as you'd expect from a young cider it was very palatable and showed plenty of promise.
    I ferment my cider in big plastic jerry-cans sold to caravanners to carry drinking water. Not very conducive to photography I'm afraid. I did however ferment one demijohn of a special cider, of which more on this blog in due course. The picture shows the spent yeast immediately after racking, the texture being exactly as it was under the cider. I have no idea what mechanism makes the yeast settle with holes in the upper surface like that.