Ann Of ALONE And Tom Teach How Apple Cider Is Made

Brock Hopper here and today I'm on the homestead with Ann and Tom and today we're going to press apples into cider. After the apples are picked we put them in the boxes and then they're put in the tub to be washed. All right first thing we do is wash the apples. This is the grinder. We're going to take the apples and we'll dump them in here in this little hopper. It'll go down. There's a grinder that's run by this motor and it spits out ground apples. There are various styles of apple cider presses. Some have a screw jack, a slatted barrel with a cloth inside. The system we use is called a rack and cloth press and you'll be able to see that in a couple minutes. The whole rack and cloth press assembly that I have I had built. A friend of mine had a road cider press that was made by a company out east in the 1970s and I copied that and had a friend of mine weld together the pieces that we'll see on the apple press. On the cider grinder itself I found this stainless cable at a salvage yard and I built the racks that go on top of it and the place where we dump the apples. The motor itself was purchased. We had one that was given to us use that played out after about 10 years but this was the expensive part of the operation. It was bending stainless steel metals and fabricating a drum inside it that hooks to the motor and that cost about $600. The rest of it was basically the price of new steel and handshake with my friend and that sort of thing. Tom's hauling the bucket in now with the ground up apples and the next step is what? We have the apples ground and we're going to bring in a bucket of apples and put it in our arrangement for all with the cloths and the racks. So we have a rack already in here. So we put a and spread our cloth back evenly over that form and it helps to push it down so we have the same pattern as the form there otherwise you get air pockets in there and it doesn't press out as well Set that in there and I put it in kind of hard because when you do the second and third racks and the successive racks it helps start the full cider coming out of you banging it down a little bit. At least I like to think that. Spreading this around it's important to get these these corners filled in I think if you leave them not compressed then it's going to be an airspace where the cider can build up and you might not press out as efficiently. This is one of our smaller cloths so it doesn't cover as well as some of them do. Some people fold them in a triangular fashion. I tend to do it this way so I'm going to grab a rack put a form on top of the rack and center that and press set it down grab another cloth. I always make sure that when I empty the cloths that and I fold them up for the next use that the the side with that where the apples was is up again otherwise you get more sediment in your cider than you want maybe some of it will get through the screen probably. Another bucket rather than pouring this it's best and so you just keep repeating this process just keep repeating this process until we have generally we do eight racks at a time. How much cider does eight racks yield? Usually we get about 13 gallons I think you know it's been more sometimes and it's been less some of the apples are some apples are very dry we used to have quite a few northwest greenings and they would give only about two gallons per bushel of apples. Yeah but they make really good apple butter. Yeah very good apple butter. After the cider has been pressed out it's usually referred to as pumice p-o-m-a-c-e. People often wonder what to do with that. I've sheet spread it on the fields for fertility purposes it rots down and stuff and next year you can see all these little apple seedlings that come up. We've got a different purpose this year which Anne can tell you about. Feeding the pigs? Oh yeah they love it yeah they love this stuff. We'll have to take some of this stuff out and feed the pigs. Yeah yeah. Let's see how much they like it. Yeah for sure. Next step is to put it in the press and I've already loaded the press up here this is called a rack and cloth system. These are the racks okay and you put down a rack to begin with which we've done and you put a little form on there and you put a cloth on that and tuck it inside the rack and dump a bucket in there and then level everything out and pat it down a little bit and put another rack on top and then this on top of this form on top of that rack and another cloth and fill it up until you got a little day wood sandwich thing built up. In our case seven or different racks and cloths and put on this steel top and instead of pressing down this presses up. A long throw hydraulic jack here you can get ones that are electric too and you can hook them up so you don't have to bend over if you don't like bending too much. Quite a few strokes for the full press job. You can see the racks and cloths moving together more and the pressure. Yeah you can see the juice coming out. You might want to slow down Tom. Okay. And it's filling up down in there and then it comes down through the hose and into the vat. All right we screen out the chunks. That slipped by us. You have to be careful when we put the racks in this pan and press to get the cider out. The racks shrink and go down into the pan a little bit because of the you're pressing out the cider so you have to make sure that the racks are properly aligned and not in danger of touching the sides of the pan because you can split your pan by the power of the hydraulic jack forcing the racks to it. So sometimes you touch them a little bit and that you probably heard that noise before that's that's what happened there. Checking it over it seems like it's got fairly good clearance. And is that a stainless steel pan right? Yes. So that'd be a little bit pricey to replace then. Yeah and also it's a very unusual size stainless steel pan. I didn't have it custom built but I found it at a stainless steel salvage yard and it happened to be just the right size so I got that and I had to take it to a welder and have a fitting welded on the bottom here so we could have the hose coming out to go to the reservoir and you know that sort of thing. When I got it actually that had a couple little leaks in it I didn't know what was going to have and my welder friend welded them up. How much is too much pressure on that hydraulic where you could actually start wrecking something? There may be a science to it but I have no calibration for that. I go by how firmly I have to push down on the rod to jack it up and it's pretty pretty hard. Sometimes I go by a little cracking noise like that that I hear. And then I also look at the stream coming out into the cider reservoir when that gets down to a drip drip drip we usually break down and but I'll make sure that there's a good firm press on everything before we get to that point. And this is the finished product right here. Putting this into the buckets right now because we're going to be canning it later. We can it up in jars and have it available for sale and there's food co-ops there's an example kind of yeah. We also store and utilize it fresh in these glass jugs sometimes plastic but we prefer glass and we're trying to do more and more glass. The field crates you saw outside before we ground the apples hold a little bit more than a bushel of apples. So to get the bushel apples pressed you generally end up with a yield of two and a half to three gallons of cider depending on your apples and what time of the year you do it. This is a gallon jug this is a half gallon jug just for reference. We probably get about 13 gallons pressed for each setup of the racks and cloths. So what do you guys do with all this cider? Well we drink a little bit of course yeah and we have family and friends we give a little bit too and sometimes trade and we sell quite a bit of the cider. Throughout most of the areas of the country I think the laws are that you can sell cider at least in Wisconsin you can sell cider that you press off the farm or at a farmer's market but you can't take that pressed cider and sell it to a restaurant or a food co-op or someplace where it's put on a shelf in a store for sale unless you have a real intricate inspection of your facility and your process sometimes including the FDA, the federal administration. So we sell a lot fresh at farmer's market and off here but the concern that the health authorities have is a bacteria called E. coli. Since we have a licensed kitchen for our jams and stuff we're able to sell cider that we can and preserve in canning jars. So we heat it up and put it in sterilized jars and then they seal in quart jars and that's become a very popular product. Okay and you're going to do that tomorrow then some of that? Yeah and it's so it's all you know it's all sterile and it's all canned so when you open it it's still fresh so if it was five years from now it would still be fresh if you haven't opened it it could seal. We found it best to take the cider up to about 180 degrees or a little more and then put it in hot sterile jars that would kill any bacteria that would have to worry about. I think it takes at 161 degrees it takes 14 seconds to kill it is what I read so 180 and that was a protocol that food authority at the state gave me in terms of safe canning the cider. So there all right good to know we've got some fresh pressed cider well cheers cheers let's try this stuff out. Oh yeah that's that's definitely good stuff very tasty sweet nice ah smooth too yeah it's good yeah and if you let this stuff ferment for a while does it turn a little bit alcoholic? Tiny bit I think it has the possibility of going to like two percent or so so it gets a little bubbly it's almost like champagne. It tastes very good when there's just enough alcohol to get grandma a little happy yeah even us cider has been pressed out pretty thoroughly and now we've got to let the jack down oh it's a wobbly sound okay I'm gonna pull our pins out for that whole hell to pop from going up too far yeah gotta bring this off set it upside down there and now we have to start disassembling the racks you can see it's not a hundred percent effective there's a little bit of moisture there on the side but it does a pretty good job I'm gonna grab these just right or else it'll spill on the floor we don't want that and we take it out put it in boxes and I semi fold the cloth up when I drop the cloth down first that goes on top and then it's pulling off the top rack there okay and these racks incidentally are made of hard maple also called sugar maple and tacked together with stainless nails I'd say it's about inch and three quarters by three seven inch thick this used to be the standard of the industry of many industries a lot of butcher blocks are made with hard maple it was considered less likely than other woods to retain bacteria in it though there's nothing toxic about it and the claws we have are made pretty much out of unbleached muslin and sews these up into the proper shape and size when my sewing machine works when our sewing machine works now the industry has gone toward plastic plastic racks plastic claws I'm sure we're ingesting a lot of plastic particles from that if we go that way with plastics we can all have even more nanoparticles in our body there you go oh that sounds delicious yum yum you're heating up the cider because this batch is going to be for sale is that right right yeah so we take the cider up to 180 degrees or jars and then seal them up and get them at the where uh oh at the and also Ashley and here at the farm and sometimes farmers markets after the apples are pressed this is all the pumice that is here and we're going to take this and feed it to the pigs Dan's taking the pumice out to the pigs those pigs are looking excited you looking excited piggies you can get some food yeah sometimes you get itchy yeah they're itching itching for food yeah all right so we're gonna feed these porkers hi guys okay yum yum they're liking that I hope you enjoyed seeing how cider is pressed with Ann and Tom here on the homestead don't forget to give me a like in the video share and subscribe until next time this is rock hopper I'll see ya