bad rotten apples??

[cranky]

My personal experience is that pressed is better then through a juicer. My juicer gets the juice out so fast it doesn't have time to oxidize and turn brown. It also seems to strip something out of the juice. The hand pressed stuff has a richness the juiced stuff seems to be lacking.

[freshwaterjellyfish]

i couldnt tell you how true that is. im getting another 5 gal for the third run. we save a gal for the fridge. its almost like theres cinnamon in it..
...theres lots of apple trees wild out of town..im wondering what the cider will taste like compared to what i got from the Portuguese.

[epplimp]

all my apples come from the country road side. i figure most are the result of a pitched apple core some 80 years ago. theyre a little gnarley but they make great cider and free is great. i also get pears and crabapples free in the back 40.

[freshwaterjellyfish]

..ive sampled many good apples in the last few weeks that are free for the taking, but havent got my shit together getting a good contact to press them nor have i attempted to build one yet. worse comes to worse the good old wine store sells cider by the 5 gal pail.

[cranky]

Personally I think I could probably get about half of what I do without the press which could still be a significant amount if the apples are free.

[FreeMountainHermit]

As a child,..... I wuz a bad rotten apple ,....

[Farside]

Reviving this old thread...
My grandmother was from Normandy and her family used to make calvados. They were peasants not some big calvados producer so take this with a grain of salt.

She always insisted that apples destined for calvados were unfit for eating. Old, bruised, wormy windfall apples that were starting to rot. She was adamant that they made the best product.

[NZChris]

In my garden, apples that have started to rot have the flavor through most of the flesh and I don't use them for anything except composting.

That said, some of the ester precursors for fine rums and whiskeys are pretty objectionable during the lead up to the stripping run, so I wouldn't be in a hurry to discount Grandma Farside's theory if I had too many apples dropping off my trees and was bored enough to try it.

I suspect that no apple brandy could officially be called Calvados if it contained such apples, but home distillers can write whatever they want on their bottles.

[cranky]

If you watch videos of Calvados making `you'll see them using some apples that look pretty rough, they do separate out most of the really rotten ones but if you watch there are plenty of bad ones that make it through.

[cayars]

Yea, totally agree.

BTW, I've talked to the manager of my local super market and have an agreement with them to purchase apples, pears, grapes, pineapple, coconut they will discard.
Basically roughly 1/6th the price of new fruit. I could care less what the fruit looks like. I only care what SG I get from them and this work GREAT for me. I get very ripe to over-ripe fruits which I want at far lower price! I may ask them to not save coconut for me as that doesn't seem to work as well.

I've only been getting 20 to 30 pounds per week so not to bad on my wallet and great for my distilling of brandy or making coconut rums.

So I'd suggest talking to the manger of any local super market and see if you can get a deal on their fruits. Simple conversation that could yield you a lot of fruit cheap.

[Farside]

This year I crushed quite a few apples that were beginning to ferment all on their own. I use windfalls I get for free, and sometimes they've been sitting on the ground longer than I would like. To be fair, I was a bit afraid to follow her advice myself as she was one of those eccentric French women

The fresh juice certainly tasted funky and if I was making cider, or hard cider I wouldn't have used it.

That being said, the cider has been in the fermenter for 3 months, and that "terroir" flavor has gone. It's amazing what yeast can do sometimes.

I recently jacked a 5 gallon pail of this fermented pulp and ran it through my still earlier in the week. It's really good. Much better than the apple brandy I made on my first try using cheap apple juice from the store.

[cranky]

Cheap juice is usually Chinese and they tend to water it down more than American juice plus the way commercial juice is pressed and pasteurized tends to take flavor away so just pressing your own apples makes a big difference.