Making Cider

Shaking

The autumn time is the traditional time to make Cider (or if you are from the US, Hard Cider) and this year Richard Dixon and I didn’t want to be left out.

We had been offered as many apples as we could pick from a friend’s orchard so we set about getting all the equipment together to make some cider: A 56 gallon oak barrel was sourced on ebay, 2 x 48 gallon food grade barrels were located at a local garden centre and a second hand garden shredder was modified to use as a Scratter. Richard has his own metal works so he built a hydraulic ‘rack and cloth‘ press and we were ready to go.

Saturday afternoon saw us visiting the orchard with a boat hook, a trailer and plenty of plastic bags. After a few hours we had filled all our bags and calculated that we had collected about 600 lbs of apples. We both ached that night!

Early on Sunday morning we were ready to press, and soon discovered an issue with our Scratter – if you put whole apples in it worked very well as a peeler but didn’t actually pulp the apples. It turned out that chopping the apples in half made a big difference, so that was my job for the day.

The process is pretty simple and goes as follows:

  1. Ensure that all your equipment is clean (we cleaned everything with a sterilising solution then rinsed with tap water)
  2. Clean apples in water (with a couple of campden tablets added)
  3. Chop apples in half
  4. Pulp apples in Scratter
  5. Place pulp in a cloth on the press and wrap the cloth around the pulp to form a cake
  6. Place a slatted wooden rack on top of the cake
  7. Repeat from 2. until press is full – the series of cakes and racks in the press are called a cheese. Our press took 4 cakes to make a cheese
  8. Place a heavy board onto the cheese
  9. Apply pressure to the press and collect juice. Each pressing collected between 4 and 5 gallons of juice.
  10. Pour juice in to fermenting barrel through some muslin to stop any bits
  11. Dismantle the cheese, discarding the dry apple waste (called pomace) – we fed it to the pigs
  12. Repeat from 2. until you have no apples left
  13. Measure pH of Juice
  14. Measure Specific Gravity of Juice
  15. Calculate any additives required
  16. Add required additives
  17. Seal barrel and leave to ferment

Here is a rough video of the process from start to getting the juice in the fermentation barrel:

From our 600 lbs of fruit we managed to collect approximately 46 gallons of juice which is an extraction rate of better than 75%. The Specific Gravity was measured as 1.050 which we later raised to 1.055 with the addition of some sugar. The pH was slightly lower than we would have liked at 3.1 but it was close enough to the desired range (3.2 – 3.8) to not worry about.

An SG of 1.055 should give us an alcohol content of up to 7.2% in the finished Cider.

We had decided to ‘Sulphite’ the juice with the addition of campden tablets at a rate of 1 per gallon, then introduce some known cider yeast 24 hours later so that we could be sure of getting the correct type of fermentation.

The facts and figures for all those technically minded people:

Apples Pressed: 600 lbs
Juice Volume
: 46 gallons
Pressing date: 3rd October 2010
pH: 3.1
Specific Gravity
: 1.055
Sugar Content: 12.2% (approx.)
Potential Alcohol: 7.2% (approx.)
Campden tablets added: 46
Yeast added: Young’s Cider Yeast, 50 grams.

If you are interested in making your own Cider there are several great resources on the internet, below are two that I have found most useful:

Fallen apples

Fallen apples

Cleaning

Cleaning

Chopped apples

Chopped apples

Scratting

Scratting

Apple Pulp

Apple Pulp

Pressing

Pressing

The last apple!

The last apple!

Apple juice

Apple juice

48 gallon fermenting barrel

48 gallon fermenting barrel