Fall Means Cider and Perry!

It's Fall and that means fruit trees are loaded with apples and pears waiting to be picked. Some will be eaten, but the lucky few will be turned into delicious cider! When I say cider, I mean hard cider. I don't understand why we call juice cider sometimes, but as we do, and as this is a brewing blog, I wanted to be clear. I am lucky enough to have a wife with family in Northeast Georgia that let me come by and pick all the apples and pears I want. So, this year instead of making baby food, I decided to try my hand at some ciders - fermented apple juice and perrys - fermented pear juice.

To start off with, I decided to do some small batch experimentation with different yeasts and sugar additions. As some of you know, my brother and I have made several batches of Apfelwein using store bought apple juice, corn sugar and Montrachet wine yeast. While Apfelwein is good and champagne like, I would like to make something closer to a traditional English cider that is a session drink. To test the effects of yeast, I decided to try three different dry yeast, Montrachet, Champagne and Nottingham Ale. To test the effects of sugars, I used separately honey, dehydrated malt extract, white cane sugar and dark muscavado sugar. All of the sugars are almost 100% fermentable by yeast and the additions were used to boost the apple juice from a specific gravity of around 1.040 to 1.055. I'm not sure how these will vary or turn out, but samples of the ciders taken tonight were still sour as the Malolactic Acid hasn't been converted yet. The smell is delicious and varying between the different batches. The most striking difference is the color ranging from vivid yellow to deep amber.

As it turns out, making juice from apples and pears is very difficult and labor intensive without a cider press. However, with determination, persistence, the help of my wonderful wife and not to mention the heroic job of the good old Cuisinart food processor, I have managed to juice 1.5 gallons of apple juice and over 6 gallons of pear juice. The juice of both tasted great and was surprisingly rich and deep in color compared to store bought. I still have over half of the pears I collected and if I'm feeling ambitious over the next week, maybe I'll manage to juice them too.

If anyone knows of a cider grinder/press I could use, please let me know as there is literally tons of fruit going to waste and rotting on the ground.

-Josh