Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Apple crop will soon be over
My Lord Lambourne tree has recovered from the drought and produced a bigger crop than usual. The fruit are not large but are beautifully round and colourful. In the last week they have begun to fall without the assistance of wind, birds or squirrels and yesterday I processed the second batch for juicing. Here is what 35kg of cut up apples look like just before they get grated and pressed. Already 16 litres of juice has accumulated from this batch and there should be at least 5 litres more before they're done. This will end up as two dozen bottles of pasteurised juice.
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Permalink Reply by Dick Harris on
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Well Eugene, this is a question we often ask ourselves, but it is not quite as straightforward as one might think. Before I learned how to pasteurise the juice, all of the stuff was fermented for cider and our experience was somewhat mixed. One year I started four 25 litre batches and only one of them turned out to be palatable. One lot turned to vinegar which I now produce routinely as by-product of failed cider. Then there is the fact that we don’t grow proper cider apples (which are pretty nasty for any other purpose) and there is the fact that we have lots of visiting children who love apple juice but can’t be given cider. Most of our juice is fairly tart and we don’t sweeten it so the little darlings are learning to appreciate the good stuff. After a while, we adopted the habit of pasteurising all the juice we could until all of our glass bottles were filled and only then thinking of cider. As it happened, last year was a good year for apples and we did indeed end the season by making a single batch of cider. I was very careful about it, testing the SG etc, terminating the fermentation and adding a little sugar and also powdered tannin to emulate the bitter taste of cider apples. Trudy reckoned the result was good and, certainly, the 25 litres was all drunk between February and the start of Summer. We didn’t bottle it. The cider remained under slight pressure in a plastic keg. This year won’t be as good in terms of quantity so our juice bottles will not all be filled but maybe Trudy will be on your side in proposing cider. We shall see. There aren’t many apples left to fall.
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