Cider - Trial #1

It was a major goal of ours to use more of our apples this year. Every year it seems we can't keep up and end up piling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow on the compost pile.

I have to admit, we still piled a lot of apples back there - our two trees are very large and produce an insane amount of apples. We just don't have the time to keep up with picking. We may try thinning the trees next year. Apparently that's a thing and may help.

Even so, we were able to pull it together enough to produce 5 gallons of cider. It was a process and I really can't believe I don't have more photos. We set up on the picnic table and cut the apples into manageable chunks and to make sure there were no bad spots. We then ran them through the crusher. We let the crushed apples sit for one day then ran them through the press. We then poured the juice into a glass carboy and let it ferment for several weeks. We re-racked once. The result is a light, dry crisp cider that we are pretty happy with for a first run. Next year we will try to mix our two apples a bit more, as this one was about 95% pink fleshed, sour apple and only about 5% of our sweeter apple.