Hello, Hive gardeners! 😎 📷 🍎
I usually post updates from the field, but this post is about apples. Our orchard consists mostly of apple trees—some are very old (a couple are over 100 years old)—and every few years they bear a bountiful harvest, followed by a few years with a smaller crop. This year, there was quite a bit. My son and I have been working on this intensively for the past two weeks.
Our apples don’t look quite as nice as the ones sold in stores. This is a very old winter apple variety; we call them “briner.” We don’t spray them with anything, so they look pretty ugly on the outside, but once you peel them, they taste much better than apples from commercial orchards. We mostly use them for homemade apple juice, and later, when the juice ferments, it turns into apple cider vinegar over a couple of years.
🍏 📷 😎 📷 🍎
I’ve described our traditional process here; I’ve written about it in previous years: 8 years ago, 6 years ago, last year. The photos are always new, and the text is different :)
We have twelve apple trees in our orchard, and most of them were full of apples. My son and I spent a week picking them.
We stored them in the woodshed, in crates and sacks. A whopping 900 kilos, maybe even more.
What to do with all these apples now? As usual, when there’s a good harvest, we grind them up and press them into juice. But this takes some prep and equipment: space, a fruit grinder, and a press. Everything needs to be washed beforehand, because in a home setting, everything tends to get pretty dirty.
First, grinding the apples. Last year we bought a new fruit grinder—it’s very fast—but it produces pulp too fine for our press, so we add a mesh screen. As you can see, the ground apples oxidize very quickly, and the pulp turns brown after a few minutes.
Then we fill the press. Ours is very old—it dates back to 1975 :) The press is manual; it’s not really suited to a grinder like the one we have now, but new automatic presses cost over €1,000—I can’t spend that much on a tool I use once a year (or maybe not even that often)...
We press by hand as long as we can until the juice flows out. It’s usually very sweet—too sweet for me, actually, like syrup...
When I can’t squeeze any more, I take the press apart, and the leftovers go to the compost. In the past, people let it ferment and distill brandy from it, but… I just don’t have the energy for that... and the brandy isn’t the best anyway...
🍏 📷 😎 📷 🍎
There are too many of these apples—we’ve been squeezing this juice for two days now… 😵💫
While my son and I squeezed, my wife pasteurized the fresh juice in another room; she heated it to 80 °C, then poured it into bags while it was still warm. Now we have 50 liters of juice that will keep for at least half a year. We were still drinking last year’s batch as recently as this past July. I hope we’ll still be drinking this one next year, too :)
We pressed about 200 liters of juice in total, then poured the rest into a green plastic barrel, where it will ferment for a couple of days, turn into cider, and then continue fermenting into apple cider vinegar. We age our apple cider vinegar for at least two years before we start using it.
Once we’re done (yesterday), everything needs to be washed again with water.
It took quite a bit of effort, but now we have juice, and we’ll have new vinegar :)
🍏 📷 😎 📷 🍎
To wrap things up, here’s a short video!
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