How not to make cider - or - my garage reeks of apples

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irvingsprinkle
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How not to make cider - or - my garage reeks of apples

Post by irvingsprinkle »

Howdy all, been a while but quite busy lately and not a lot of time for making things.

I thought I'd bring you up to speed with my first attempt at apple cider. I've got a lot of friends with crab apple trees and who know I'm handy with alcohol. I got 2 large Rubbermaid totes worth of apples dropped off at my place. Since they did the hard work of picking, they (correctly) figured they could get part of the final product.

First thing to do was prep them by coring and quartering them, getting rid of seeds, stems, and leaves.

While I was chopping them up I noticed that some of them had damaged parts or potentially signs of pests eating at them. I got rid of those parts, and decided that it might be best to pasteurize the prepped apples.

I fired up the burner and brought the apples to almost boil for 10 minutes or so, in batches since the pot is a 20L stock pot.

This also had the effect of softening up the apples and giving them a cooked taste. As I'll find out in the next couple steps, that's bad.

It's at this point that I realize my luck is starting to turn and I really don't know what I'm doing when it comes to cider. Firstly I see that the food mill I bought sucks and really doesn't do a good job of mashing the apples, even with them softened up. Since it would take days to mill all the apples with that thing I quickly set it aside and try to come up with plan B.

Being halfway decently clever (it's where smart and lazy meet), I go into my kitchen and get the Kitchen Aid stand mixer with the vegetable chopping attachment. Not quite good enough, so I swap it out with the meat grinder attachment.

Clever, right? WRONG! I've been told by a friend who knows what they're doing that this pulps it, making the juice difficult to extract (as we will find out in a moment), and resulting in something that's more like cooked apple sauce than yummy juice. Also, being occasionally sprayed by boiling hot apple pulp while mushing it through isn't especially fun.

The next lesson learned the hard way, while sanitizing my equipment, I opened the nylon mesh strainer bag and realize I got the small size, not the large on suitable for 5 gallon primaries. This is going to be challenging...

Some of the things I try to compensate for this, including using a linen pillow case, failed miserably, and left me with hands scalded by boiling apple pulp as the bag didn't pass enough juice through due to the high pulp content (see: why not to use a meat grinder). So using a metal strainer and a ladle, I proceed to push liters of apple pulp through one scoop at a time.

*** Hours later ***

After working way too hard to get a respectable amount of still very pulpy juice I use that small, wrong sized mesh bag and my trusty strainer to filter it one more time into the primary.

Each time getting an increasing amount of pulp and a decreasing amount of juice. A frustrating amount of my hard earned juice went into the green bin that day. So much so that I only ended up with about 10L, half of what was expected from that volume of apples. I used some of the apple-tasting liquid from the pasteurization, but that stuff was low sugar content despite the taste.

I also added 4L of store-bought apple juice to round out the flavour of the crab apples, as well as 500mL of honey. This brought the starting gravity up to 1.04, and a final ABV of approximately 5%.

I added two packages of EC-1118 Champagne yeast and some pectic enzyme, stirred it up, and sealed it.

Fast forward a couple weeks and the fermentation has stopped. Wait one more week to be sure there's no more bubbles from the primary and that fermentation is complete. I racked the cider off the sediment, leaving me about 16L of cider. Since I like my cider fizzy, I decided to bottle condition, so I mixed 1 cup of water with a 1/2 cup of white sugar, and brought it to a boil to to invert and dissolve it. Added this to the cider, stirred it up, and immediately bottled my cider into Korken re-sealable bottles from Ikea. Got them on sale, seems like they'd do the job. Stashed all the bottles in a sealed Rubbermaid container (since I'm expecting exploding bottles at the rate I've been going with this project), and wait a month or so.

My goal was to have the cider ready for Canadian Thanksgiving, which just passed. I chilled a couple bottles and popped the top.

The final product has a dry, crisp apple taste, lightly effervescent, and pleasant to drink. My ever-patient wife, who cannot tell a lie when it comes to my alcohol adventures, says its quite nice. After giving away a couple bottles to the contributing neighbours, I still have about a dozen bottles to show for my afternoon of unnecessarily difficult work.

Some improvements for next time:
1. Mechanically break apart the apples without pulping or grinding them. I've been told pea-sized bits is about the right size, and the trick is to do this by a shredding action rather than grinding.
2. I'm going to build a cider press rather than doing things by hand. I'm looking into some basic designs using plastic primary buckets and a bottle jack.
3. Not use the pasteurizing water. While it has a lot of apple flavour, the sugar content is low and does nothing in the end to improve the product.

So that, in a few words, is how not to make cider. I think I'll stick with distilling through the winter while I can figure out how to do this better next time.
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flyweed
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Re: How not to make cider - or - my garage reeks of apples

Post by flyweed »

I built an apple grinder using a 1.5 hp garbage disposal attached to the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket. I don't peel, core, deseed, etc..I drop the apples in, grind them up....put it all in a nylon mesh bag, press it into juice and DONE.....I did 100lbs of apples last weekend from apple to juice in 2 hours.
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irvingsprinkle
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Re: How not to make cider - or - my garage reeks of apples

Post by irvingsprinkle »

I’ve heard of that technique before and I’m curious to find out more. Is there any particular kind of disposal, or materials it should be made of, and how do you clean/sanitize it?
I’m looking at different press designs and I’ll likely build it out of 2x6 lumber and reinforced 5 gallon buckets. Anything to help make the apple prep easier is appreciated. Thanks
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Soft batch
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Re: How not to make cider - or - my garage reeks of apples

Post by Soft batch »

See http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopi ... 83&t=41775 - not my design, but a combination of the "Whizbang cider press" and others variations posted here. I did switch to a bottle jack last year, works much easier.
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Soft batch
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Re: How not to make cider - or - my garage reeks of apples

Post by Soft batch »

Look for a disposal with stainless steel blades/basket - models change. I bought it new for this purpose. There are variations that attach an external motor to the disposal to alleviate overheating, which mine does occasionally but not until after using for an hour or two of periodic use.
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cranky
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Re: How not to make cider - or - my garage reeks of apples

Post by cranky »

Whenever I choose to pasteurize I do it after pressing. If you wait a day or so after pressing it will tend to develop a richer color that will be stopped by the pasteurization but it may have already started to ferment. It only takes 6 seconds at 160f to pasteurize it and at 175f you will set the pectin. Then cool it down as fast as possible afterwards because every second hot is flavor lost. I used to core and process with a food processor and press in a pillow case. Never had any trouble pressing apples no matter how fine the chop but you can't force it by adding more pressure, just press and wait then press some more. If you cook it and set the pectin you will more trouble because it will be thicker. I've read posts about the garbage disposal where people complained they popped the breaker every few minutes and personally I don't like the idea of breaking the seeds. My method has gotten pretty crazy but I can do a lot of apples fairly quickly and don't even consider setting up til I have at least 200 Lbs.
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Re: How not to make cider - or - my garage reeks of apples

Post by wtfdskin »

I will report back on actual time spent making cider this year. I have 27 bushel to grind and press. Not sure the weight but i will weigh one to see. Alot of guys dont like the meat grinder method but it works great for me.
My process....

Collect apples and store in walk in freezer until pressin time. (I know, not everyone has access to one) but its key to the meat grinder part that they be frozen first.

Remove from freezer to thaw the day before pressing. They will get soft and squishy, removing the need to cut to fit in the grinder throat.

One person grinding into a tub, one loading the press and pressing. I do 5 cakes per press of about 3" each, each cake wrapped in a linnen sheet. Cakes will press down to about 1/2" thickness and yields about 2.5 gal per bushel.

The grinder can easily bury the presser, usually he is done a good hour before Im done pressing, or maybe i take more beer breaks than him.

This will be my biggest year for apples so we will see how long it takes. Last year we did 18 bushel in about 4 hours.

Now matter what method, its a damn sticky mess, but sure makes some fine brandy. ;)
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irvingsprinkle
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Re: How not to make cider - or - my garage reeks of apples

Post by irvingsprinkle »

Great idea with the freezer, I can see how that would make prepping easy. The common theme I see from this thread is the need for a press, seems like the common key to success.
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cranky
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Re: How not to make cider - or - my garage reeks of apples

Post by cranky »

I think the biggest thing with apples is thinking in advance. The first time a lot of people do apples they really aren't prepared for how much it takes to get the juice out of them. I spend a lot of time in the winter preparing for the next apple season, working on equipment to make processing faster and easier so I can do more apples or the same amount in less time once apple season arrives. It's amazing just how much free fruit someone can come up with if they try but you have to be prepared in advance or it can all go bad on you.
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Re: How not to make cider - or - my garage reeks of apples

Post by larsend »

When I did my brandy with 200-300 pounds of apples I used a corer/slicer that I bought for $2 at the dollar store and this gave me 8 slices with the core removed. I put the slices in a kitchen pot with some water and used my braun stick blender to chop the slices up. The apple slices float higher in the pot than the bits that seemed to help with the blender and overall it worked ok for having nothing invested in it and it also allowed me to process apples as I got them as I relied on free apples from Kijiji and Craigslist. I know it's a no no but I added a small amount of sugar to compensate for the processing water and let it ferment for a couple months then squeezed the juice out using my corn squeezing bag.
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