Apples are in short supply here this year. We had a very warm March and all the fruit trees burst into bloom. Then April turned cold and we had a hard frost and all those blooms froze. The orchard I usually get apples from, Bender’s Orchard, doesn’t have any apples this year. Other orchards around have a few and I’ve heard reports that Michigan growers are expecting about 10% of a normal crop.
What apples you can find then are high-priced. That makes making a cider a very expensive proposition. I did manage to find a couple trees that weren’t tended and didn’t freeze that the owners would let me pick the apples for free. Josh and I picked about a bushel of Golden Delicious last weekend, and I picked another bushel or so of some unknown red variety from a neighbor’s tree last week.
Yesterday we crushed those apples for cider. It was a perfect fall day for making cider. Clear and bright and in the 60’s.
We had that wheelbarrow about level full of apples when we started. They were pretty small and gnarly and didn’t have a lot of juice. The apples get dropped in this hopper.
At the bottom of the hopper are some metal teeth on a rotating drum that chops the apples into bits for pressing. It doesn’t take long to end up with a basket full of chopped apples.
From there we slide the basket under the screw and press the apples to squeeze out all the juice.
The juice runs out through a hole in the tray and I drain it through a sieve to get the big chunks out.
Then we strain it through cheesecloth to take a little more of the apple pulp out.
We ended up with about two and a half gallons. About half the yield per bushel from a normal year. The apples that did survive the frost then suffered from the drought and ended up small and hard.
Ah, but the final result was still splendid.
It tastes like the day it was pressed, bright and sunny and crisp. Old memories and new memories, captured in a gallon jug.
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