Short Intro
My garden has three old apple trees. One is huge, it’s the centerpiece of the whole garden. It’s a so called “spider” tree, where the branches were tied down during the early years of the growth to make the branches grow outwards, not up, thus improving fruit growth. The other two trees are not as pretty but higher yielding. We have two types of apples: Gravensteiner and Signe Tillich. Both are old Danish varieties and both are good for making cider. In fact, the Gravesteiner was voted Denmark's national apple variety in 2005. That's good enough for me!
The first summer after we moved into the house I took the apples to a cider mill and got many, many liters of must. It was a good apple year with plenty of apples and I made apple wine, cider and juice for the kids. However, the year after I had started brewing and I never made cider again. Fast-forward 19 years and I want to make cider again. This time for distilling. The plans already started last winter. In preparation, I bought a second-hand apple crusher and a second-hand apple press of 14L, EC-1118 yeast and pectinase.
The plan was to make Cider to make aged Apple Brandy. As a side project I would use the remains of the crushed and pressed apples, i.e. the pomace, to make Apple Pomace Brandy. However, 2025 is not a good apple year in Stockholm and I knew I would not even get close to the harvest of 2006. I could not afford to let any apples go to waste.
Harvesting, crushing, and pressing the apples
I started to pick up undamaged fallen apples already a month before the apples were ripe. Every day I would start day and end the day with a sweep in the garden to pick the fallen heroes. Beginning of September was very windy and so the catch was often good. Come weekend, I would wash the harvested apples, cut off any bad bits, and split the apples into quarters. Then hand crank the apple crusher making pulp before pressing the apple pulp and collect the must. Typically, I would have about 10kg/22lb of apples to work with every weekend. I did this 4 weekends in a row. Only on the last weekend I also picked apples from the trees.
Maybe due to the fact that the apples were not fully ripe, maybe because my crusher and press are poor, or maybe because I am a terrible cider maker, my yield of cider from 10kg apples was only 2L/0.5g. According to all the books I am supposed to get 5L/1.3g from 10kg apples. I realized that no matter how many apples I managed to harvest, crush and press, the volume of fermented cider would likely not even fill my boiler. My best bet was going to be to switch focus to making apple pomace brandy. The cider’s role in this project would only serve to augment the pomace brandy, not to be the base.
Before I continue this description of my project, I have to admit that this is probably the least scientific and prepared approach I have followed to produce alcohol this year. I totally went on gut feel on this one. I didn’t even bother to measure gravity before any of the fermentations I made. All the numbers you will see are reverse calculated after the stripping runs.