DIY cider in dustbins?

[george [dicegeorge]]

I've got hundreds of apples, Are there easy and quick ways to make cider etcetera, perhaps with a power drill with a plaster mixer bit and brewing it in a plastic dustbin?

[g]

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well if you don't much care about the quality simply mash the apples and strain them and leave the result a week or two.

The natural yeasts will cause all sorts of amusing reactions.

If you care about not being too poisoned, boil the resultant slurry, and add proper brewers yeast.

Decant into bottles when the resultant mess has achieved your taste in poisons.

[geoff]

In message , "george [dicegeorge]" writes

Do not ferment in a coloured bin, it can produce dangerous toxins

[Spamlet]

Getting just the juice out is very difficult, so for cider proper, it is best to take your apples to be properly pressed. You might be lucky with one of the top end juicing machines, but if I were you I'd stick to making it in the manner of home brew wines, for which you normally need (gradually)

2-3 pounds of sugar to 3-4 pounds of chopped fruit per gallon of wine. Start it off in 5 gallon clear plastic drums, leaving enough room for when it froths up.

Apples are so hard and full of insoluables, that it is best to chop them fine and stew them to soften first. Then add pectinase enzyme to help break down the 'roughage'. However, I have found that even after fermenting and filtering through the usual muslin bag, one can still get a demijohn that is half full of sediment. Don't let me put you off though, some of my best home brews have been from apples, and on the rare occasion when they 'go off', the apple vinegar is marvellous stuff.

S

[Tim W]

Getting the juice out is the problem if you don't have any equipment. They need to be mashed up a bit, then the pulp wrapped in a cloth and squeezed hard. A neighbour of mine did it by pulping with a petrol strimmer and pressing under an acro prop beneath a beam. I didn't see it done. He said it worked but was quite laborious.

A good kitchen juicer would give you a few pints for fun, but you need serious equipment to press enough to brew five gallon batches.

Tim w

[Peter Taylor]

I just had about 60lbs of my own apples pressed at this place, if you're anywhere near:

press is quite impressive, it's a stainless steel drum with a rubber cylinder in the centre. When the pieces of apple are packed in, the cylinder is expanded by water pressure and the juice is filtered as it drains out. If it's just for juice it is pasteurised as it's being bottled, and this kills the yeast and prevents fermentation, but it can be left unpasteurised if you want to make cider.

[John Whitworth]

I once made an absolute beauty of a wine from Gala apples and blackberries. I picked all the blackberries from the fields behind us, though I must confess I bought the apples.

Completely agree with your suggestion of chopping and stewing etc - and definitely using pectinase/pectolase.

I only made cider once - and that was using clear cartoned apple juice. It was OK. But to get regular apples into clear juice is not easy.

[John Whitworth]

buy clear apple juice from the supermarket. :(

[george [dicegeorge]]

thanks for the tip!

[Spamlet]

And cider smells like sick while it is brewing too!

A word of caution to those wanting to take the easy route of using cartoned juices. These are very handy and can work well, but steer well clear of anything labelled 'juice drink', (ie it ain't juice), and anything with sulphites in: it won't ferment - at least not into anything safe to drink. I had some big cartons of so called fruit juice - you know the ones I mean, with Polish writing on - from one of the cheapy shops. Even after diluting it some 5 to one with extra water, it was completely impervious to yeast fermentation, but eventually got some foul smelling pink spots on the surface! One of a very few brewing attempts I've ever had to throw away.

Bumper year for apples, and the squirrels even seem to have left us some pears this year too.

Cheers,

S

[John Whitworth]

Is that always true? I bought some frozen apples and blackberries, which I then discovered contained metabisulphate as a preservative. The advice from a winemaking group was to leave them for 24 hours after defrosting, as the preservative would dissipate/break down. It did, and I managed to make a decent wine from it - though not as decent as the fresh fruit one, obviously.

When I used apple juice, it was a Tesco UHT clear apple juice carton. 3x 1.5 litres I think. Worked really well - but yes, smelt rancid whilst brewing. And was really vigorous. I think I just used 3 litres in a 4.5 litre demijohn to start with, until it settled a little - that said, I was using an airlock.

JW

JW

[Steve Firth]

Better way of doing it. It's easy and cheap to get hold of bottle jacks in the 2 - 6 tonne range. The weight on any one wheel of a motorcar is not going to get close to that.

[Peter Taylor]

Of course - I can buy runner beans or eggs in Tescos cheaper than it costs to produce my own too. But that's beside the point - both the OP amd I have our own apples we don't want to go to waste.

Besides, the juice from my apples is about 3-4x more potent than bought juice and I need to dilute it. I'm not counting the cost to be honest, but that brings it down to about 60p a bottle.

[R]

If you are anywhere near Lewes in Sussex take them to Rod at Middle Farm who will (for a small sum) press them for you...

Google Middle Farm near Lewes

[Spamlet]

No. it won't always be true: when all they have to do is put 'contains sulphites' on the container one can never be sure how much - and there may be other preservatives as well. I think there should be few problems sticking with regular brands of real juice. The Polish stuff was the only 'juice' I've tried which would not ferment at all. It might have been good for cleaning the bog though!

On the other hand, the recent TV series on additives was a bit of an eye opener. There we were treated to a 'demonstration' that convinced the presenter that without a teaspoonful of metabisulphite, grape juice tasted 'off'. To that, all I can say is that 'we' have all got used to the taste of metabisulphite!

I only use sulphite to keep bottles sterile between uses. I use screw top, high pressure bottles over and over, and, each time I wash them, I just put a pinch of sulphite into the damp bottle and put the lid on. Rinse it out again before putting in the new wine.

I've never put sulphite in the wine or fruit itself and have almost never had any go off (Actually had great difficulty making wine go off when I wanted vinegar!). Nor have I quite understood why anyone would want to make a nice red wine and then put a bleaching agent in it.

Don't know quite why, but frozen fruits usually taste different to fresh ones. I used to get loads of Tayberries, and freeze one lot while I was fermenting the rest. Wine from the frozen always had a sort of 'boiled sweets' taste. Not unpleasant - and preferred by many - but definitely different from made from fresh.

Some fruit does taste 'fresher' with sulphites though. We used to deliver organic veg and often included some dried fruit too. I think the orange, 'supermarket' dried apricots, do taste better than the brown and rather cloying organic ones. But I expect there are a lot of other differences than just the sulphites, so this may not be a fair comparison.

Anyway, good to hear from another enthusiast, so good luck with the latest efforts - and I guess it is about time I had another look in the back of the airing cupboard to see what DJ's I've forgotten about.

Cheers, S

[Nick]

In message , "george [dicegeorge]" writes

We used plastic dustbins for the first time this year. 140 kilos of merlot grapes into two of them (with lids on as the only protection against vinegar flies) -worked very well.

[Weatherlawyer]

Getting apple juice without a press requires a freezer. The crystals need to be small ones IIRC so cool them down in a fridge first. Boiling them will cause a cloud that takes months to clear.

Making no-grape wine used to require that different fruits and veg were mixed in order to get the mineral balance for the yeast. These days a drop of dishwasher salt is all that you need.

But a cider should brew to something drinkable in a few weeks as getting rip snorting drunk was never the purpose with it. It was just a cheap drink for country people that would ensure there was no colera or dysentry at harvest time.

Haven't things changed for the better over the last few decades. I don't think.

[Weatherlawyer]

Apple butter is a highly concentrated form of apple sauce, produced by long, slow cooking of apples with cider or water to a point where the sugar in the apples caramelizes, turning the apple butter a deep brown.

The concentration of sugar gives apple butter a much longer shelf life as a preserve than apple sauce. There is no dairy butter involved in the product; the term butter refers only to the thick, soft consistency and apple butter's use as a spread for breads. Typically seasoned with cinnamon, cloves and other spices....

If and when you do some, I'll get my address to you.