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.
