The autumn has come to a close and the glut of apples lies o the ground. In which case it’s time to make apple cider.
The glory of apple trees
So EmmCee and I are lucky enough to have a large garden which includes five apple trees thee dessert apple varieties and two cooking varieties. Normally we pick picking the best of the dessert apples to eat.
But this year we have been a little more pro-active than normal and collected the windfalls for cider. Now I wouldn’t eat a lot of the apples I made into cider but after cleaning up cutting away the worst bits and pressing they’re often fine.
Indulging my need for tools
Last year I built myself an apple scratter, a device for shredding apples to make pressing easier and more efficient. It’s a basic box made of plywood it has a hopper shape on the inside.
I threaded a rolling pin through some holes and screwed in some threaded plated screws. When rotated using a battery drill these act like little teeth and rip apart the apple chunks.
EmmCee, “the Monsters” and spent some time collecting the windfall apples, mostly cooking but some desserts. We washed them all off discarded those the worst. Then trimmed any of the rest. EmmCee and I chopped them into chunks and loaded them into the hopper. The scratter is cunningly designed to attach to a battery drill in my case a DeWalt Combi Drill that I bought as a kit from a local retailer. Obviously there is a risk from spinning parts so keep you’re digits out and keep your Monsters away too. The other risk is the torque on the motor when scratting can be unpredictable and jolt. So brace your drill against your body or risk wrist injuries.
Scratting the apples
After loading the scratter I attached the drill and scratted away. This is a messy process at times but does fill the house with a pleasant apple juice aroma. Fill the hopper before starting as towards the end the scratter gets messy. So a few big runs are better than many small ones.
After only a few seconds they’re all shredded.
And will look something like this.
EmmCee and I found that one pass through the scratter wasn’t enough the shredded pieces were still too big and this made pressing slow and inefficient. The large pieces don’t squash together well. There are too many voids and you’re not getting all the juice you should. So I scratted them a second time before loading up the press.
It take quite a bit of force to squeeze the apples and I lived in dread of the press exploding but it seems pretty robust and well made.
I’ll post something on the recipe followed and brewing process when it’s all done as a Part 2.
I’ll be sticking other links to similar posts here.