Apple Day!

Yesterday I went picking apples in the community orchard, the plan being to make a quickie wine from the pressed juice that was my portion. Aha, I need to give you some background don't I ....

About this time last year I pledged to investigate if there was a Transition Initiative in my Town. I found that there had been an attempt to start the initiative, but that was about as far as it had got, it kind of stalled. I met with the people who initiated that attempt, and that led to me being giving a vote of confidence to take it on. So for the last year I've been co-ordinating our Transition Town. At our regular committee meetings I turn up with a bottle of wine. But yesterday, for the first time, a few members of the initiative joined in with the start of the brewing process - rather than simply the end. Onwards then ...

 

5 of us turned up. Many more and it could have been chaos (only because there was plenty to learn), any less and it would have been much less fun.

---

 

 We picked two wheel Barrow loads in a couple of hours, then we had to go our separate ways. Only 2 of us wanted to do something with the apples so we split the load. I got 2 gallons of juice from mine. With mine i'll be making 5 gallons of quickie wine (crisp, light, clean, blush table wine. Ready in 8-10 weeks) and 1 gallon of pure apple wine ready in no less than 6 months, but probably a year. The recipes and methods are coming right up in the next post, in this post all kinds of fun stuff about everything in the process up to and including the pressing of the juice. I believe the other happy apple recipient is making cider.

The juice tasted delicious by the way, full of body and as sweet as any apple juice i've ever tasted. OG was 1050, which would have surprised me had i not tasted it.

More piccies and more detail

 

We arrived around 10.00 am, tho a couple were a little early and got stuck in to picking delicious blackberries straight away. One soon had a cult following of a couple of boys and they joined in the blackberry picking. When they left they gave him the berries, which gave him a very pleasant surprise.

---

Then we got stuck into apples. One of our number was from the parks department in the Borough Council, she brought a wheel barrow, tarpaulin , bags, a scythe (how i wish i had a picture of me holding that ... but there's a long story behind that which involves an undead warlock in a place called Quel 'thalas, Azeroth) and also a ladder, all of which was a great help. She couldn't wait to climb trees and was soon shaking handfuls of apples down while we scurried about collecting them, or went looking for low hanging fruit on other trees. Being hit by an apple is hardly life threatening, but being hit by a rotten one is somewhat horrible. Some of the fruit was hanging so low that you had to bend down to pick it! One of our number had a short roll about in the nettles and brambles after he and the ladder had a disagreement and a parting of ways (from an altitude of about 15 cms). And my inner child also came out and i was soon climbing trees to shake off fruit too.

---

 

The Orchard is a beautiful spot, and being school hols it was great to see the whole park being well used. The resulting haul of fruit meant that there was no time to loose with processing the apples.

---

So straight home i went to get set up in the garden. One of the troop came too to help me get started (i've never pressed apples but she had). It was great to have the benefit of her experience and a delight to troubleshoot problems so easily with her.

  

So first of all there was washing, just a simple rinse really to get rid of loose surface dirt, identify the rotten ones etc.

---

Then chopping, to make the whole juice extraction easier. And also removing bruises, insect holes, stems etc. We didn't bother with coring because its very time consuming and besides even split pips won't taint the wine. However if you're using a juicer - rather than a press - then removing the cores will be essential because the seeds will be pulverised and will almost certainly not do the wine any favours.

---

Then came pulping, because pressing chunks of apples ain't easy. I used a T-handled phillips head screwdriver. The sort of thing you get in a flatpack furniture tool kit. I attached it to an electric drill with the "T" protruding acting as the pulping blades. Set the drill to "hammer action" and got stuck in. Worked a treat, tho I only this after i broke my de-gassing whizz stick which was clearly not up to pulping, mind you i don't like using it for degassing either and reverted to a wholly manual method shortly after buying it. Anyway, back to what did work, the shaft of the "blade" wasn't very long so I had to pulp the top few inches of the bucket, then mix the apples up by hand and repeat. This was about a 6 cycle iteration for each press load.

---

Next up came pounding/mashing. Pulping alone wasn't going far enough to make the pressing easy. So i pounded the pulp with a rolling pin for about a minute. Well until the juice started splashing me anyway. Wasps love apples and i hate wasps, so i really didn't want to be covered in apple pulp AND juice.

---

Then came the pressing, so the bucket of chopped, pulped and pounded apples was tipped into the press. This belongs to my fellow transitioner and friend, and is a very traditional design. It's about the smallest version you can get but there's nothing wrong with that, it does the job fine and a bigger press would be a waste of money for something that gets little use. As you can imagine a wheel-barrow load filled the press a few times!

Just got to sneak a close up of the press in, cos i do like it. This one taken when the apples had been pressed, and the press was partly dismantled for emptying. So you can see the blocks used as spacers to allow clearance between the lever on the spindle and the "barrel" as the pressing progresses.

At first we had no lubricant on the spindle of the press, neither did we pulp the apples well enough, so it made for hard work. But we learned fast, applied some vaseline to the spindle, and by the time the 3rd load went in the pressing was a breeze and each load delivered almost 3 litres of juice. This passed through a few layers of muslin and 2 layers of tightly woven nylon. The result was a delicious, sweet, full bodied, pure pressed juice with no lumps of apple or pips. Some hours later and there's no scum floating on it either. All of which is very promising for wine making, but deprived me of trying a process new to me called "Keeving"*. I then added 2 campden tablets to the 2 gallons of juice. This will stun/inhibit any wild yeasts, deal with any bacteria and bugs and the like. It'll also add a very important something to the juice that will help to make its home very homely. After 24 hours i started it fermenting with all the other ingredients!

Next post will be the recipe and method, but first of all ....

*Keeving: This is a cider making process. If you ever see a cider described as keeved then give it a try. Very briefly ... normally cider is make by pressing/pulping apples and fermenting. It's quite agricultural in that the brew contains the pulp until some way down the fermenting process. However when a cider is keeved it means the pressed apple juice + pulp are left for 24-48 hours (with a yeast inhibitor like campden or potassium metabisulphite). During that time the solids either sink or rise - depending on their density - leaving the clearish juice in the middle. This is racked off, and then the ferment is started. I was going to do this with my juice but the filtering through muslin etc was so effective that i had no lumps in the juice. And after 24 hours there was no scum on the surface. So no keeving was required.