More cider

I thought my cider making was finished for the year but then a friend turns up asking if I want more apples. I don’t really. Although the process of sweetening and pasteurising has improved the cider, it also adds another stage in making something that I only drink with some reluctance, like when there’s no beer and there’s very, very rarely no beer these days. But Mandy drinks it and when I see the pile of apples in the back of Duncan’s car I know that I’m not going to let them get dumped in a skip or a compost heap. There’s almost 90kg of apples.

And they’re big apples – some the size of small turnips – and they’re all windfalls brought down by the recent strong winds so some of them are quite badly damaged so this adds to the time. It’s not so straightforward as quartering them and pushing them through the pulper. They need to be washed and there’s little bits of trimming to take out rotten pieces and even though that’s not done all that carefully, it still takes time. In all, with a newly sharpened knife and three hours work, I chopped and pressed half of them and got just less than 20 litres of juice. The rest will need to wait until next week. There’s beer to bottle.