Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Discussions of fruits, veggies and grains other then just mashing

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cranky
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by cranky »

Yesterday I had planned on getting a stripping run in since I finally found all the parts to my pot head but things happened and I didn't get around to it. Then my plan was to try to get 2 stripping runs in while cleaning the garage today. Unfortunately I woke up to a strange object in the sky that put a damper on my plans...the sun. Where the hell did that come from? I have a bunch of crap to do in the yard and I think this has been the first sunny day in more than a month so my priorities changed. So I spent the day cleaning at the back/side yard and trying to get things organized out there and smoking a couple chickens for dinner. You know what the hardest thing about smoking chickens is?...Keeping them lit :moresarcasm:

Anyway, a little before dinner was ready I went ahead and got the still loaded and set up. I chose 3 buckets of of what I thought were apple cider and started siphoning them into the boiler. I tasted each one before racking it and noticed one of them was quite different tasting but couldn't really place the flavor. I just chalked the difference up to a different strain of yeast.

After dinner I did a fast stripping run collecting everything in a couple of big lightning jars. After the run was well underway I stuck my finger in the stream and gave it a little taste and realized why the cider tasted different :shock: it wasn't cider, it was pery. I was kind of on the fence about how I was going to proceed with the pear brandy but this little mistake kind of made that decision for me, I guess the apple and pear are going to be mixed together this year.

I actually liked how the mistake last year turned out so I think in the end it will be a nice final product. :D
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by goose eye »

Round here they usually mix 70 30 Apple to pear.
Some of the old ones like pineapple pear moonglow instead of bartlet.
That for cider.

So I'm tole
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by cranky »

Like the apples, I use whatever pears are fee for the taking. I don't exactly know what varieties they are but there are at least 5 different ones in the mix. I have a few lines on a couple more pear trees in the area and hope to get more this year than last. One of the guys I work with spends a lot of time on Orcas Island and knows a fruit expert there who has a huge orchard. I am hoping he can get me an Orcas pear to add to my small orchard and future brandy.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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Three days ago one of my plum trees finally started blooming :D It's been a cold wet winter here which should be good for fruit but everything seems to be running late. I got my first plum bloom Saturday and now there are a few dozen. The apples and cherries hardly show any signs of even trying to bloom but the pears are getting close. I looked back through my posts from last year and see the plums started blooming on Feb 10th, 43 days earlier :esurprised: So it looks like it is going to be a late year for fruit.

In addition to that I transplanted my blueberries and my blackberries have pretty much been taken out :( So I am going to have to pick in the park if I want blackberries this year and probably next year since it generally takes them 2 years to recover. I'm actually hoping I still have enough of the evergreens left that they manage to recover from this retaining wall being built. I love my evergreen blackberries :D The blueberries should be producing next year and since I moved them to my garden spot where they should grow and produce like crazy. Of course my garden got sacrificed for the most part but hopefully I can make due with pots and buckets.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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Getting ready to fertilize my blueberries, starting a whole new bed in the garden for plants to use in my essential oil still. Pulling out my strawberries as it is easier to go to the farm and pick it myself. Heading out to the island next month to check out the apple orchards and see how the trees weathered this last winter. This is a great time of the year as our expectations start to grow. Reminds me of when I was a commercial fisherman and the hopes everytime you brought in your net.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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It really is a time of anticipation :D I'm starting to turn my mind towards summer and what I want to accomplish. Because I transplanted them I won't be able to let my blueberries produce this year but hopefully I can get down to the blueberry park and at least pick a few gallons. My blackberries are also going to be greatly missed this year because I have never had blackberries that were that good but hopefully they will be back next year.

Right now the yard is in the hands of the landscaper and is a huge muddy mess so there isn't anything for me to do out there besides stay out of the way and let them work so today I did yet another apple/pear stripping run which is good. I think I have 2 or3 more runs and all the apple and pear will be done. One of the things I decided to do was run the one poorly sealed bucket I have, which was a bucket of pears. By bucket of pears I mean this
PEARS 2016 -C.JPG
At least that's what it looked like after it had been drained, I know at the time I did that bucket of pears I was getting pretty behind in things. I thought I had squished up the pears but I guess not, I know it was full of liquid as well as pears and I dumped some yeast in it, put a poorly fitting lid on it, because that's the only thing I had, set a bucket full of something on top of it to hold the lid down and let it go. A couple days later I had a big mess on the floor of the garage where it overflowed but I left it alone until today. I was happy when I opened it up and found it wasn't vinegar :D and the run went well.

I also cleaned 4 carboys in preparation of racking the plum wine that is in carboys and buckets. I have no idea which buckets have the plum in it but at this point there are only 4 to choose from and I think 2 have plum and 2 apple so tomorrow I will sanitize the carboys and check the buckets, whats not plum gets run and what is plum gets racked. The plum should be just about ready for bottling, I know the stuff in the carboys is clear but I usually stir up a little bit of sediment when I rack so I will let it sit for yet another month after racking and then bottle. Just in time too, I am down to my last bottle of plum wine from last year, that stuff is really good but with this batch I have been trying to duplicate a mistake I made a number of years ago that resulted in a phenomenal wine.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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Today I managed to get in another apple stripping run. Only one more strip to go then a spirit run and the apple will be done and the barrel should be full. I also finally got all the plum wine racked and am waiting on some simple syrup to cool to sweeten some of it a bit. So far I have 18 gallons of plum wine but I will still lose a gallon or two before it's all done, usually I make 8 gallons to wind up with 5. Right now I have 18 and expect to wind up with 16 or 17. One of the carboys has the exact sweetness I want, another needs just a bit more, the other 8 gallons are far short, in fact they are completely dry so they will get back sweetened and hopefully come around. That's one of the problems with the plums, they go through a period where they taste awful but come around some months down the road. I figure that wine needs another couple months to come around the other 2 carboys will be ready in a few more weeks to a month. This will keep the wife in plum wine for at least the next year and should help make her happy and be willing to let me get carried away with fruity goodness, just in time for fruit season to come around again :D
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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A couple days ago I managed to make my final apple stripping run. Today I took about 3 gallons of pery that didn't fit in the previous runs and added that to the boiler, then poured in all the apple/pear low wines and fired it up. I was a little close to the top on this one, probably had 14 gallons in there and the thing puked as soon as it got hot but that was easy enough to deal with, shut down and start back up slowly and everything was good from then on out. I've never actually had apple puke on me before this season but this season it happened 3 times so maybe I need to be more careful about how high I fill it.

Anyway, I dialed everything back to 9.0-9.5 amps and everything ran fine. Collected at a rate of about a quart every 15 minutes or so and many hours later I finally had this
06 APR 17 #2 - C.JPG
I don't know exactly how many jars that is but it is just about every jar that didn't have anything in, in preparation for this run I even emptied jars of Unicorn Sweat into Patrone bottles for a future neutral run so I could use them for this apple run. Over the next few days I will blend this and use it to top up the barrel and with that my 2016 apple season will finally be finished, just in time to start my 2017 apple season.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by yakattack »

Cranky, I got a question for you. You've been doing apples for quite a long time, jave you considered making cuts while running? Or do the cut points year to year change that much?
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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yakattack wrote:Cranky, I got a question for you. You've been doing apples for quite a long time, jave you considered making cuts while running? Or do the cut points year to year change that much?
I have considered it but my apple mix varies greatly from year to year and the smell and taste of the distillate changes dramatically from when it comes off the still and the next day when I blend and I keep trying different yeast which also can make the cuts hard, plus last year I did it all on the flute and cuts on the flute are way different than on the pot. I actually had to relearn the way I do things on the pot. Plus because the pears were mixed into this batch the cuts are a bit different. The pear bomb is actually in the early tails where the apple bomb is in the heads. This year I am planning on giving S-04 another go and maybe US-05 and Nottingham if I can get enough juice. The wife is already not happy about my apple obsession but we now thanks to the new retaining wall we have a much larger and more usable yard and room for a shed so I can get my mess all in order :D
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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A couple days ago I finished blending the apple run. I will say this time it was very difficult. I've never had this much trouble before but now that it's done it tastes really good, the apple flavor didn't want to show up while blending but I just tried it and both the apple and pear have decided to start showing up. I just finished adding it to the barrel with what I had in there from last year and I am still a little short of filling it :( So I guess I will just have to keep making this stuff until it does fill it. I am real tempted to put another jar or two from both the heads and the tails but I'm so happy with the flavor now I don't think I want to chance it. I am also considering watering down the feints and doing one more run using the flute and see if I can get a little more that way.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by Tapeman »

Definitely should do blueberries! I made a batch a year ago and it's been sitting on oak since then. Mine were local lowbush wild blueberries but the result is very good. Been sampling it right along, Just getting better with time and white oak

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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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I'd like to do a blueberry brandy but as I think I've mentioned before they tend to be just a little too precious for other things like jelly and wine. I think I have a couple gallons of them in the freezer from nearly two years ago and they will probably wind up in a black and blueberry brandy this summer. I moved my own blueberry plants last month and although they seem to be recovering nicely they won't be allowed to produce this year. I do plan on getting out to the blueberry park at least once or twice this summer but it probably more than that :( Fortunetly blackberries are everywhere so they will be easy to pick and I should get plenty.

I drove by the big plum thicket today and all the early plums are in bloom, I think about 2 months late, no apple trees are yet in bloom but my 2 pear trees have finally begun. The cherries are finally starting to bloom as well. I finally got a break in the weather yesterday so I went out and tried my hand at grafting once again.

Last winter I took cuttings from the KD and antique apple and have been waiting for my little trees to get to the point of waking up so I could once again try grafting. So once again I went to work trying to convert a red delicious to a KD and added in some antiques here and there as well as well as grafted a few onto the other trees I have just for diversity. I took the cuttings from those trees and gave them to a guy I work with who has also been trying to learn grafting.

This afternoon I was in the garage trying to get the apple feints from this year sorted out. I am actually considering putting them all back the still and seeing if I can get some more out if it and maybe top up the barrel. I smelled all the jars and tossed 4 into the cleaning fluid jars because they had that acetone smell, I added the obvious heads and tails to the feints jar and still have 6 jars or so that may just go into the barrel. I tries one of them and it was so good it went right into the barrel. I think if I rerun these through the flute I can probably get at least one more quart to add to the barrel.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by Jimbo »

cranky wrote:I'd like to do a blueberry brandy
I made a blueberry wine once. Then like most wines Ive made, I never drank it. So I dumped the 2 finely aged dust laden cases or so of bottles in the still and made an eau de vie. Its pretty nice, actually. But cant say I drink much of that either. Its funny some things, just cause you 'can' do em, doesn't always mean you should. I no longer make wine.

My cherry tree is about ready to explode, maybe tomorrow. Its a beautiful sight.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by raketemensch »

I've been in England for the last 10 days, and have developed a real appreciation for cider. I think I've maybe had 2 beers since I got here, and have had probably 4 or 5 ciders a day. SO much tastier, I wish they were more readily available in the states.

This country truly understands fruity goodness. Also, pretty much everything is dog-friendly.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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This past week I sent MCH a sample of PNW fruity goodness :D The last of my 2014(?) apple brandy, A good portion of Bearrivers 100pr plum vodka, also 2014 I think, (or was that 15?) and 2 bottles of barrel aged ( barrel conditioned) cider, and a sample of my well aged Unicorn Sweat, which is whiskeyish and not cider but was included. I feel kind of guilty because I still owe Medstiller and HDNB some brandy but hadn't gotten my 2015 on oak yet because I was saving it for the barrel I eventually got. I never seem to have enough to go around, one of the problems was getting enough apples pressed back then was a huge ordeal and I gave Bear a bottle of the brandy that was aged for a while then brought another bottle to the 2nd BRBBQ and left it behind because I like to leave what I bring behind for the host. I forgot to include a bottle of the iced apple but don't really know how much he likes the sweet stuff. My boss told me the other day it was incredible. I give away wine and cider every year at Christmas and contributors and bosses get extra :ebiggrin: My bosses let me get away with a lot of crap including building goofy things in the shop so in a way they are contributors :ewink: I would like to get some kegging equipment to carbonate my cider so I didn't have to bottle condition.
Jimbo wrote:
cranky wrote:I'd like to do a blueberry brandy
I made a blueberry wine once. Then like most wines Ive made, I never drank it. So I dumped the 2 finely aged dust laden cases or so of bottles in the still and made an eau de vie. Its pretty nice, actually. But cant say I drink much of that either. Its funny some things, just cause you 'can' do em, doesn't always mean you should. I no longer make wine.

My cherry tree is about ready to explode, maybe tomorrow. Its a beautiful sight.
I like to sit and drink wine with my wife on weekends by the fire pit on the deck and since we now have a whole lot more yard it will be even more enjoyable. My wife has started favoring the wine over the hard stuff because what she likes to drink is whats called a toasted almond, which is Kahlua, amaretto, and milk but as I get older she seems to have become a bit lactose intolerant which is weird since she is only 28. Of course she's been 28 as long as I can remember :lol: but we have always had a thing for dessert wine, especially icewine. When we got married someone gave us a bottle of German icewine, this was back before the Canadians made the stuff, and back when we didn't have much money it was often our big indulgence to sit on the porch in the summer with a bottle of icewine so there is some nostalgia there. It's actually kind of funny that now that we are fairly well off financially the price of icewine is too high for me to justify spending the money on it which of course is why I started making my own in the first place. Plus wine making still serves as my cover story to keep people bringing me free fruit and not paying too much attention to the fact that I made 70 gallons of cider and have enough plums to do 18 gallons of plum wine. I might even have enough plums still in the freezer to do another 5 or 10 gallons but I'm thinking I may just look into doing a clean out the freezer brandy :D

I took some pictures of my mini orchard yesterday :D
This first one is most of the trees
FRUIT TREES 15 APR 17 #1 - C.jpg
and this one kind of shows one of the cherries
FRUIT TREES 15 APR 17 #2 - C.jpg
The plums are done blooming and the cherries are just getting going I drove by the big cherry by the July apples and it isn't even starting to bloom :( I have no idea how late cherry season will be but it is going to be quite late this year.
raketemensch wrote:I've been in England for the last 10 days, and have developed a real appreciation for cider. I think I've maybe had 2 beers since I got here, and have had probably 4 or 5 ciders a day. SO much tastier, I wish they were more readily available in the states.

This country truly understands fruity goodness. Also, pretty much everything is dog-friendly.
I'd like to go to England and try some of their ciders I have 4 cases of cider put back from all that apple juice I pressed and I think they are pretty good.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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I know there isn't much going on in the world of fruity goodness lately but the apples are finally beginning to bloom. My apple grafts are looking pretty good at the moment so I am hopeful there ant I got this for my birthday yesterday :ebiggrin:
PICKER 22 APR 17 #4 - C.JPG
A brand new store bought apple picking basket with a 13ft extension pole.
I like my home made one but wanted to try a fancy store bought one and am thinking about adding a tube to the home made one and seeing if on the easy trees I can just run the tube to a bucket so as I pick the apples go straight into the bucket. Maybe I can even talk the wife into helping me pick apples this year :angel:
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by Bushman »

I have several of those pickers, work great!
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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This morning I was outside doing something on my deck when I noticed these little guys
PORCH APPLE #1 - C.JPG
Last year my wife tested out the apple chopper by chopping the apples on the deck while I pressed them on a platform beside the deck. Of course there was a bit of pulp that didn't make it into the bucket and found it's way into the gaps between the deck boards. Since the chopper doesn't break the seeds they are able to sprout and now I have baby apple trees sprouting up :roll:
I know I need to clean that stuff out of the gaps but I'm always reluctant to just waste any fruit tree. I actually have little apple trees pop up all over the place in the spring because there is so much apple pomace getting composted.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by cranky »

It's been a hell of a night here. A thunderstorm came through late in the day yesterday, then they continued coming through all night long. The PNW doesn't get many thunderstorms and when we do they are pretty mild. These were more like Oklahoma thunderstorms. My big fluffy cat was terrified all night and I slept like crap but the big problem is the apple trees are just flowering and these storms may have just put a big hurt on my apple season :(
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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I got back from fishing just before the storm. Really a weird day as most of it was calm and beautiful out and then it just turned within a few hours. I agree with you that it was unusual, for me at night I take my hearing aids out and have no trouble sleeping.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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Bushman wrote:for me at night I take my hearing aids out and have no trouble sleeping.
I had a 20 pound cat being a huge baby determined to wake me up. When I wouldn't pet him he would flop down on me over and over until I payed him attention :roll:

I'm very concerned about the apple trees now. The trees I drove by on my way home looked pretty beat up with few blossoms visible :( I might have to find a different fruit this year. The pears were finished flowering and I have a line on a couple more pear trees this year so maybe this is the year for pears and berries.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by cranky »

I'm pretty happy right now :D I went out yesterday and checked on my apple grafts and it seems that at least half of them are actually taking :ebiggrin: So I had to take pictures and couldn't wait to tell you guys
So here are the pictures.
GRAFTS 21 MAY 17 #1 - C.jpg
GRAFTS 21 MAY 17 #2 - C.jpg
GRAFTS 21 MAY 17 #4 - C.jpg
They are a little blurry because my camera didn't want to focus on it but you can clearly see the leaves. Even one of the Apple to pear grafts is taking
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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While sitting at the dock at Roche Harbor I walked up to the distillery for a tasting. They make cider along with different alcohol. Since they are a 10 minute run from the cabin I asked if they wanted to buy any of the apples. With 2 orchards we have way more than we can process so it ends up feeding the sheep. They said they would by the cider we make at $3.00 a gallon. With our small set up and having to deliver it is not worth it unless my friend that owns the property would get more of a write off.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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Bushman wrote:While sitting at the dock at Roche Harbor I walked up to the distillery for a tasting. They make cider along with different alcohol. Since they are a 10 minute run from the cabin I asked if they wanted to buy any of the apples. With 2 orchards we have way more than we can process so it ends up feeding the sheep. They said they would by the cider we make at $3.00 a gallon. With our small set up and having to deliver it is not worth it unless my friend that owns the property would get more of a write off.
I've been running that through my head since I read it this morning and think an enterprising person might be able make that work. If you average more than 5 gallons per hour you can beat minimum wage :D I was trying to figure how fast I can pick apples and think on good open trees it takes me about an hour to pick 250 pounds, but I'm really not sure how long it takes. With the new chopper I hope to reach 1,000 pounds per hour processing speed. The bottle neck in my process is now the press itself but if that were upgraded to keep up with the chopper, that would be 4 Hr to pick and 2 Hr to chop and press, so 6 Hr for 1,000# which would produce roughly 62 gallons of juice. At $3 a gallon that comes to $187 for a pretty hard days work...well maybe not that hard. That could come to $31 an hour or more for a motivated person, which isn't really too shabby. I'm not sure how fast you can process so it might require an upgrade in equipment and motivation :problem: Personally my motivation is a bit lacking lately :roll: One thought is get local kids to do the work and take a cut but in this day and age if one of them gets hurt they sue you so maybe that isn't such a good idea. :(
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by Pikey »

Good morning all - I have a bit of confusion. Over here (UK) Cider is an alcoholic drink - an alternative to beer, made out of fermented apple juice. The impression I get from various threads, is that in the US / Canada, Cider can be either an alcoholic drink as above, or it can just refer to fresh apple juice - is that correct please ?
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by DSM Loki »

Yeah pikey, here a lot of people refer to unfiltered apple juice as cider.
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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DSM Loki wrote:Yeah pikey, here a lot of people refer to unfiltered apple juice as cider.
You don't make life easy for us foreigners do ya ? :lol: :lol:
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

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Pikey wrote:Good morning all - I have a bit of confusion. Over here (UK) Cider is an alcoholic drink - an alternative to beer, made out of fermented apple juice. The impression I get from various threads, is that in the US / Canada, Cider can be either an alcoholic drink as above, or it can just refer to fresh apple juice - is that correct please ?
The clarification on that actually dates back a couple hundred years. Over here there are actually 2 things called apple cider. Unfiltered apple juice which used to be referred to as "Sweet Cider" and fermented cider which is called "Hard Cider". I know from research these terms were used as far back as 200 years ago. Over time as filtered apple juice became the norm they started referring to filtered apple juice as "Apple Juice" to distinguish it from sweet cider. Then Prohibition came along and all alcohol got banned so there was officially no need to distinguish between sweet and hard cider so for marketing purposes the "Sweet Cider" was shortened to just "Cider". Then Prohibition ended :clap: and suddenly there was once again the need to distinguish between the two but "Cider" had already become the norm for referring to fresh unfiltered apple juice so they kept that in use and returned to using the "Hard" to distinguish between fermented and fermented cider.

Because this is an international forum and I try to consider that there are differences throughout the world and there is actually historical references to Americans using the terms "Sweet" and "Hard" cider I try to include those terms when referring to things. Sometimes I fail :( But for the sake of clarity in The USA

"Apple Juice" = Filtered clarified apple juice
"Apple Cider"= Unfiltered, unfermented apple juice.
"Hard Cider"= Fermented apple juice/cider
and when I say "Sweet Cider"= Unfiltered, unfermented apple juice
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Re: Lets get carried away with fruity goodness

Post by Shine0n »

Well howdy doo Cranky, juse wondering how the fruit season on the west coast is coming along?

Over across the country in Va. the apples are looking very promising this year! I will be prepared this year for them too!!!

my youngest wanted to go and pick a few this am so I decided to grab 2 from each tree (total of 6) and check the brix, I chopped them up and squeezed out enough juice to get a reading, all 3 trees read 11 on the brix. that's really good for early july :thumbup:
1.0442 which means 5.8% as of now and I can assume it will go higher by months end.

is not been a rainy spring like usual so they are pretty small but not super small either at least not all of them. The ones twards the tops of the trees are decent sized.

If I recall you saying you wait to see a brix of 12???
Now usually the apples start falling around Sept and Oct but they seem already high in sugars, do you suppose they will get better twards that time or should I be ready at the time the brix gets 12 or a bit higher? I don't want to miss out on them this year like last year so I'm preparing now for the onslaught of apples.

I'm picking up a 8ton press from harbor freight, I already have the 2 mixers for the chopper blades, I'll use my big ole pot strainer basket (20 gal) with Geo fab filtering for lining the basket.

As of now I have 4 good trees with a very good possibility of 2 more BIG trees, the man said well maybe and the little old lady said to get every one. So it's in limbo but looks promising.
after picking how long can an apple sit without going bad? I wont be able to pick them all in a day or two so I'll have to let them sit foe a spell.
My plan is to fill a 55 gal drum with apples, once full put them all on the loading table to start chopping. Load the basket and press into 5 gal buckets and cover them tightly with lids and keep in a cool room until I have enough to fill the 55 gal drum with around 45 gallons.

That should give me enough to do a full boiler and thumper charge 1 time and a boiler full and low wines in the thumper for a final spirit run.

Hope things are well in the pnw and hope to see you about the forum soon talking about apples and apples and more apples. lol
Also, what is your take on fermenting on the pulp or fermenting just the pulp after pressing? I know it's alot of space taking stuff but will it be worth the effort? More flavor? Or a big pita.

Shine0n
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