Couple of apple trees groaning in the garden, I’m thinking cider.
Any experiences, advice, recipes?

No but a willing taster here 😀

Couple of apple trees groaning in the garden

Did I miss spring and summer or are you not in the UK?

Yeah, I guess it’s a southern hemisphere thing… Still plenty of apples, but they aren’t good eaters.

I keep meaning to have a go as well, I think you’ll need some sort of a press, either diy (use a car jack) or buy. Lots of stuf on the web.
Good luck.

Plenty of stuff on t’interweb, car jack press works fine… started testing the first batch last weekend, fell of the bike on the way home from the allotment! 😳

I have tried it in the past, bought a cheapish press from Machine Mart when they had a Vat free day. The Cider was very dry and strong (all the sugar turned to alcohol), I am not a big cider drinker so found it hard to drink.
That reminds me there are still 20 bottles of 2008 Vintage Cider in my garage.

thesurfbus… You have enough left to bottle it? 😯

Couple of apple trees groaning in the garden

can’t you help them out at all, sounds like they’re in pain ?

Kev

Check out the ‘Other Brews’ bit of the forum at Jims Beer Kit or Home Winemaking forum

Should be more advice there. And if you can’t wait to use your own apples, have a look at the turbo cider recipes on those sites – I’ve produced a fab cider from tesco apple juice (4.5l tesco apple juice boiled on the stove for a bit, some demerara sugar, mug of strong tea, teaspoon of jif squeezy lemon and some bog standard white wine yeast).

Tales from a poor cider maker!

I made a cider press out of some 2×4 wood, coach bolts and a scissor car jack, dont have a pick but it looks like this:

Using unwanted apples from my allotment.

1st year chose to use one type of apple, which produced a weak tasting cider, drank loads but it was piss poor!

2nd year, added crab apples and a good mixture, much better taste, far better punch, but still did not have the kick we wanted & lost quite a bit to cider viniger!

3rd year we washed all the apples before crushing them & found a supply of propper cider apples – Brown Snout! That cider did not last long, by far the best we made! 2 pints and silly times were guaranteed

4th year, supply of Brown Snout dissapeared, the owner liked our cider so much he decided to make it for himself – boo, so we upped production, doubled the quantity, the home made press died & we had we suffered from mixing problems again, but still some quality drinkable stuff, not nearly as good as Snout.

5th year, planned a midnight raid on the Brown Snout, only to remember we completly forgot we buggered the press from the year before, so couldent be bothered & bought local Hereford cheap Cider – which tbh, was the best ever!

Last year we made wine!

😉

We made some for the first time last year with great success. We didn’t use a press because we had access to a commercial juicer, but a press would have been better.
Recipe (makes 40 pints):
Two wheelbarrow full of apples including about 10% sharp crab apples
Juice or chop and press
Add to container with 1 packet champagne yeast
wait till fermenting stops
bottle
wait 3 months
drink
get ver’ ver’ drunk

Ps Have also made fantastic ginger beer (about 8%) let me know if you want the recipe.

I need the ginger beer recipe please, my “plant” was about a week old when the MIL came over and threw it away thinking it was rubbish.

+1 for the ginger beer recipe please!

I had a plant when I was a kid – neither me nor my parents realised it was boozy until I got absolutely mullered at age 11. Hic!

Ginger beer recipe here
thermometer and hydrometer not essential

Job done, c.90 litres of juice and pulp, fermenting happily. Hydrometer predicted 10% alcohol at start, now almost ready to bottle. DEFINITLY contains mucho alcohol. I plan to secondary ferment in the bottle for a nice sparkle.

Thanks for the recipe.

One tip, if you’re bottling, rather than add sugar to each bottle which is hassle and may cause the liquid to fizz up when you put it in the bottles, take a pint of the liquid out, add the total amount of suger thats needed into that pint, heat until it disolves, then gently stir that back into the mix.

The hydrometer said go!, so I got my cider trousers on today, squeezed out my pulp in a pillowcase “press” (will build a Ski style one next year!). Strained though muslin, 36l remaining, so I added another 0.5kg of sugar in 1l of water (for some pop), and got bottling.

Pulp in the bin, thats about 80 litres.

Fermenting with a little heat…

Bottled, 25 1.25l.

make sure you have removed the pips apparently they can make you blind! hence the expression blind drunk!

As Nicky B says: apple pips contain cyanide, I was told by a somerset scrumpy maker

Last October’s pressing…

Autumn 2009’s pressing working away in the cellar….

Still haven’t racked last Autumns lot off, but should end up with around 10 gallons of unadultarated Devon Scrumpy for the summer of 2011 🙂

Settle down guys!, all the pips were at the bottom of the bin. No pips in bottles. no mention however of pip toxicity on ANY of the cider guides/recipies?

SW, that is a PRESS.

the blind scrumpy drinkers are in the past, from the days when a somerset farm workers wages were a gallon of scrump a day. (Only a century ago…) It took a whole working lifetime of pip poisoning to do it.

or one teenaged girl binge drinking white lightning!