A few months ago I acquired about 8 shopping bags of apples from a Golden Delicious apple tree to make cider from. I have never brewed cider before, but I figured how hard can it be? Once I got them home I faced the daunting task of juicing them all somehow. A bit of google voodoo seemed to turn up a few options of how to do this. The best approach seems to be find someone who has a big apple press. Since I don’t know anyone with a press the options are to use a electric juice extractor or blend it with a food processor and squeeze. I ended up going for a combination of these two. The juice extractor seemed to work quite well but was rather messy. The extracted juice seemed to have three distinct layers, a whitish layer at the bottom, a clear juice layer, and a top layer of foamy gunk. The top layer looked a bit uninviting so this was scooped off as much as possible. The blender option essentially consisted of blending until only small chunks remained, then squeezing. One tip I found on the internet was to freeze the blended pulp to help break up the fibrous structure of the apple. Since my Bock was still in the brewing drum this fitted in nicely, so all the juice and pulp was stacked into the freezer for a few weeks.

A few weeks later and it was time to brew some cider. Defrosting all the bottles of juice and pulp took a long time, I didn’t want to force the issue too much in fear the wild yeast might have gone crazy in the small pockets of warmer fluid that may have appeared. Once all the liquid was hand squeezed from the pulp and the bottles of liquid added the brewing drum had a healthy 12L of fluid. Not too bad considering I didn’t have a press. I suspect with a proper press this total might have been more like 14-15L. A quick gravity measurement shows a starting SG of 1045, so with an expected FG of about 1000 and a bit of priming sugar should give a brew of around 6%.

Once the whole barrel was warmed to about 20deg a packet of cider yeast was added. 24 hours later and the bubbling was in full swing with a bubble every 4-5 seconds. It would seem the bubbling is a little less vigorous than a typical beer brew but this is likely because of the much reduced fluid volume. Lots of people on the internet suggest cider can take 3-4 weeks to brew rather than the typical 2 weeks for beer and that a lower FG of around 1001 can be expected. Time for some waiting.