It's 2022 cider making time! Apples from the garden and a few "special" ones scrumped from Watnall Woods. This article shows the steps I used to brew my "Watnall Wildwood" cider...
1 - Regular garden shredder used to roughly pulp the apples so juice extraction is easier. At this time of year the apples have maximum juice and sweetness. They don't need to be perfect so I collect the leftover/windfall apples until there's about 2 boxes worth, wash in a bucket of water, cut in half, chuck away any bad bits and pulp the rest into a big, well-washed out, garden/builder's trug...
2 - Best apple varieties for juice are the sweet-tasting dessert types like these Cox's Orange Pippin. My trees came from Lidl a few years ago. Cookers like Bramleys are not so good. For cider, adding a few bitter varieties like crab apples to the mix supposedly helps. There are surprisingly quite a few apple trees in the nearby woods. Old boys from the locality have tipped me off over the years about the locations. Some trees were apparently planted specifically for their cider making properties so perhaps I'm keeping an old tradition going. I ended up with 2 plastic boxes full..
3 - Apple pulp ready to press. There's already loads of juice and the raw juice is delicious. No need to make cider really! I save big plastic milk containers and bottle the raw juice in those for immediate drinking/freezing/fermentation.
4 - Previous year's brews...
5 - 12 litre fruit press from eBay. Cost £54. Best fill it half way then pressing is easier. Took 3 presses to get 13 litres of apple juice.
6 - From those 2 plastic boxes of apples, I got 13 litres of apple juice which can be frozen, made into cider or drunk from the fridge within a couple of weeks (otherwise it starts fermenting). This year I experimented with pasteurising the apple juice and it definitely keeps longer for drinking in the fridge without starting to ferment. If you want to use the juice for cider making this is not necessary as the fermentation process is the key to making the cider. Pulping took about an hour as did the pressing...
7 - Cider making essentials. Cider guru Andrew Lea's book and website are invaluable. Full of tips and techniques... http://www.cider.org.uk/content2.htm
8 - The pic below shows 9 litres brewing away in 1 gallon demi johns from Wilkos. You just leave it in a corner to do its fermentation thing. Cider can be ready for Christmas or you can leave it longer for a fuller, more mature taste. When it's ready I siphon it off into airtight bottles from Wilkos (shown on their side in pic below). If you like slightly fizzier or "sparkling" cider, add c.7g of brewing sugar to each 75cl bottle at bottling time and leave for a few weeks. The sugar uses residual yeast and ferments a little more in the bottle to produce the fizz. Don't add too much sugar or the bottle may blow its top! You can also reuse old bought cider bottles by recapping them with new caps and a "crown capping" tool...
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9 - Drinking it... So there you are, making your own cider is not so difficult given the right gear. It doesn't take long to do either. Half a day's pulping and pressing is what it takes me. The fermentation of natural sugars and natural yeasts in the apple juice pretty much takes care of itself too. You can kill off the natural yeasts in the apple juice with Camden Tablets and replace with a shop-bought cider or wine yeast for a more sure-fire fermentation. Some natural yeasts may impart a not so nice taste but I found it was ok. Update 2023 - bottling time... I tried some at Christmas 2022 and it was ok but not quite ready so come April-ish 2023 I had a bottling session ready for drinking in the summer.
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| Happy Daze - a good name for next year's cider?? |
Apple Varieties - There are hundreds of old cider apple varieties but I just used the Lidl Cox's Orange Pippin and the wild apples whatever they were. Possibly some kind of crab apples, Sheep's Nose and some unknown ones. I didn't use any other of these old traditional British varieties...
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