Had a friend who offered to let me clean all the pears off a tree in his backyard. Naturally, I accepted. This left the Ragin' Mrs. and I with a conundrum - what do you do with a bushel of pears?
Make pear cider.
So, the Ragin' Mrs. set about finding a cider press. We looked at making our own, but the cost in supplies and time would be more than if we just found a decent press at a local antique shop. We eventually found one, and set about getting ready to press some pear cider. A few repairs to the squeezer board later, we have five gallons of pear cider sitting in a fermentation bucket. Add in one package of Munton's Premium Gold brewing yeast, put the lid on, and now we wait. This should end up at about 5% ABV, so it's not going to be a high-octane brew, just a very, very tasty one. My office has so many different projects brewing that it smells alternately like cherries, pears, or ginger depending on which batch just let loose some CO2.
4 comments:
That type of project is on my high priority list for next year. Got an apple tree across the street that the owners neglect. Why buy beer when you can make a hard cider in volume for essentially the cost of labor?
PS,
if I may ask, would you consider going into some detail about your press, and what you think of its operation? I'm considering getting a vintage iron press; most of them are far older than me, and would still outlast me I'd bet.
It's a standard, old style, hand-cranked cider press. It has a slat-board cylinder, a screw-type press and it had an oak squeezer board. The squeezer board was rather old, which is why it cracked so easily. I ended up cutting an aluminum circle and screwing it on to the two pieces to finish pressing the pears.
We didn't have a chopper, so we ran the pears through our food grinder with it's largest plate. We put a muslin cloth in the cylinder and poured the pears into that, then folded it over and turned the screw. We managed to get quite a bit of juice out; over half the actual volume of the pears turned into cider.
If you can find a vintage iron press in your price range, buy it. If not, you can find plans for a cider press all over the 'net. The only real difference that I can see is hand-powered vs. mechanical.
I've done cider in everything from an industrial set-up to hand-cranked, plus (the way I did it in the dorm @ Mizzou), just buy a few gallons and ferment it right in the jugs, capturing the exhaust in surplus weather balloons hidden under piles of dirty clothing in the closet.
The juice freezes well, so jug some up right off the press and freeze it for later fermentation, then you can have the bubbly nectar all year long.
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