Making Cider

Today we harvested all the apples off the Tropical Apple tree roughly about 50 KG. This is the best harvest ever. Partially because more fruit was bagged against fruit fly and partly because of the dry weather that assisted in fruit set and growth. 



 

The scratter that was made from information on web a couple of years ago is designed to process a large amount of fruit. And today it received its first volume test. What a great machine. The task was completed very quickly and the whole unit taken outside (it is on wheels) and hosed clean in minutes. The scratter is almost completely made of recycled material. The timber is harvested from old pallets, The motor and pulleys from old washing machines and the drum holding the stainless steel teeth is an old Ironbark fence post put through a lathe.

Normally the volume is so small we only use a small press but for once we were able to utilise the larger wine press. The only difference was using a cloth liner for the smaller pulp. An old nylon curtain worked perfectly.

The scratter in action. A bucket of apples emptied into the feed in tray and about a dozen apples dropped into the hopper, then adding a few at a time as the stainless steel teeth shred the apples.

The pulp is pressed and the juice loaded into the demijohn. Roughly about 60% yield of juice. After the first hard pressing the pulp is loosened and pressed a second time. This produces a few more litres.

The pH was tested at 3.48 which is perfect as the ideal is between 3,.0 and 3.8.

The Brix was 11.5 and ordinary sugar was added to chaptalize to 16.5. This will produce an alcohol level of 9% which is the minimum recommended for flavour and aging. It is possible to make a lower alcohol but it will not mature as well and requires higher levels of Sulphur. Potassium metabisulphite was added at the rate of 50 ppm to kill off any bad bugs and the yeast will be added in 24 hours.

Two different batches will be put down with different yeasts and once the yeasts start their work the demijohns will be refrigerated to 15 C. The fermentation at lower temperatures produces better nose and mouth flavours. Higher temperatures can boil off the better esters.

A few apples were put aside for eating fresh. They go really well with blue cheese.

Perry

Harvested the Beurre Bosc pears on March 7th, a reasonable crop given the heavy rain. Sugar was a bit down but chaptalized to bring it back to a potential alcohol of 10.0%. Adjusted pH from 4.19 to 3.25 with the addition of Tartaric. There were a few apples ripe on other trees and they went into the mix. Sweet Alford, Stokes Red, Kingston Black and Rich Red as well as a few Williams and Packham pears the cows had knocked down.

Because of fruit fly and birds we bag the fruit in cotton bags just after flowering. This seems to work well although there is a little lost fruit if the bags get wet as it weighs heavily on the branch. Some of the apples mentioned above are true cider apples but we have never had enough of all varieties to make a traditional cider blend but we have managed a few varietal ciders occasionally.
The Beurre Bosc , Williams and Packham pears all do well here as does the Tropical apple and they make acceptable cider and Perry.

The homemade Scratter works well and we had enough fruit to use the big basket press. When time permits I might try to make some finer adjustments to the Scratter to get an even finer pulp but as it is measurements have shown it results in 50-60% juice yield. It looks like we have about 10-12 litres fermenting away in a 25 litre demijohn using NWS Chardonnay yeast.

Spent some time adding extra rows of screws to the Scratter drum. A quick test showed an enormous improvement in performance. The fruit chips are much smaller and resulted in better yields of juice.



Beurre Bosc Pears



Scratter Drum

Home Made Scratter

Pressing Pears in the baby press

Freshly modified Scratter Drum with additional rows of screws