Summer Cider

Monday evening's haul of crab apples was 110 pounds. These are the pink, oblong crab apples that range in size from large grape to golf ball and taste quite sweet despite their astringency.

So, Tuesday was summer cider day! Actually, it was summer cider afternoon, which of course lengthened into summer cider night. But, we finished pressing and even cleaned up before midnight -- hooray!

Len cleaned and sanitized an area for us in the basement laundry room. The crab apples got a cold water rinse in the washtub -- just a rinse and not a scrub, because they have useful wild yeast on their skins.

Then we shredded the crab apples in batches in our food processor. A real cidery would have an apple grinder or fruit crusher for preparing the fruit for the press, but we just used (abused?) our regular everyday food processor from the kitchen.

This is the pulp of just half the crab apples.

The pulp went into our 1.6-gallon fruit press. 

This is our first time using the press, even though my sister and brother-in-law gave it to us two Christmases ago. Last year's apple harvest was just pitiful. We visited some trees too late, while other trees just didn't have a good year. And then, we got Covid. We decided we were too tired (and too contagious) to try processing and preserving what few apples we had picked. Instead, we made a few apple recipes for ourselves over the next couple of weeks -- pie, cake, the usual apple snacks, salads, and skillets -- and that was it.

In batches, we pressed about 6 gallons of rose-colored cider. 

Some notes on this particular fruit press, a small EJWOX model: First, it works! The post-pressing apple pulp was very compact and quite dry. Second, because the pulp is so compact after pressing, it's a chore to get it out. That chore on its own is no big deal, but all the pushing, pulling, and wiggling to extract the bag of pulp also jiggles the screws in the press's wooden slats. These small screws too easily strip their holes and pop out! We had to sift through our bin of pulp more than once to find a lost screw, and Len had to shim a couple of the screw holes with toothpicks.

For every almost-gallon of cider, we added 1 cup of honey dissolved in one cup of water (heated on the stove to dissolve, then cooled to room temperature).

For those keeping track of the science, here is our hyrdometer math:

Original gravity of the fresh cider = 1.060

Gravity of the fresh cider with honey added = 1.070

Temperature of the cider at the time of the readings was about 74-75 degrees, but the hyrdometer is calibrated for 60 degrees, so we need to make a correction to the gravity. We're adding .0015 based on the hydrometer's instruction page.

Let's call our original gravity 1.072.

Oh, what's a hydrometer, you ask? It's a simple, neat little brewer's tool. It looks like buoyant thermometer, and it floats in the cider, indicating the relative weight of that liquid compared to an equal volume of water. While plain water has a gravity of 1.000, liquids with sugar in them will have a higher gravity.

So what? So... when we measure the gravity of the cider again after a period of fermentation, the gravity will be lower because the yeasts will have eaten some of the sugar and turned it into alcohol. By subtracting the final gravity from the original gravity, thereby measuring how much sugar has been converted, we can calculate the cider's alcohol by volume. Fun, huh?

We'll check the cider's progress in a couple of weeks.

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