apples and juicing - some excellent ideas here!

[hedgerow]

we use a small garden shredder that we have removed the enterence plate so we can feed in whole apples and pears, after that we then put them straight into our home made press.

there is an old family friend that has a masssive orchard at his farm that he has no use for so we come down and strip as many as possible

last year we went down with a trailer on the car and collected 300kg of apples some were cider some were eaters and some were cookers , some were frozen for pie use and food. the mix of apple varities gives us some great tasting apple juice for us to freeze down so the son has fresh apple juice to slurp, we do our apple wines inside three 11 gallon stainless steel tanks

[fatbloke]

we use a small garden shredder that we have removed the enterence plate so we can feed in whole apples and pears, after that we then put them straight into our home made press.

Another excellent bit of adaptation....... Though with a garden type shredder, does it get it nice and fine or is it a little lumpy ???

there is an old family friend that has a masssive orchard at his farm that he has no use for so we come down and strip as many as possible

last year we went down with a trailer on the car and collected 300kg of apples some were cider some were eaters and some were cookers , some were frozen for pie use and food. the mix of apple varities gives us some great tasting apple juice for us to freeze down so the son has fresh apple juice to slurp, we do our apple wines inside three 11 gallon stainless steel tanks

{seethingjealousy}damn I'd have gone and got some of those barrels from the wood yard near Wadhurst, or even got some of the plastic barrels off ebay - they'd both do the job for cider

Hell I might have even gone on the hunt for some form of cheap pasteuriser so I could store the AJ in the plassy barrels.......{/seethingjealousy}

Last year I had to pick up a load of gravy powder from a place in March (Beds), and driving down the road towards March, I was amazed to see both operational and "abandoned" orchards. The abandoned ones could have easily been cleared enough to allow the trees to be usable again...... A crying shame if you ask me........

After all, I understand that the "small cider makers" dispensation is still in place i.e. you can make X amount per year and sell it free of excise duty - it's not enough to make a living from but hell, if it helped towards the beer tokens then brilliant!

regards

jtfb

[danpug]

Get yourself down to the westcountry jtfb, you'll be able to get a van full of cider apples for not too much at all!

[koomber]

Get yourself down to the westcountry jtfb, you'll be able to get a van full of cider apples for not too much at all!

Everytime I read threads like this or see masses of gear for pickup only I ask myself why the heck I decided to work in Aberdeen!

[hedgerow]

the apple chunks are around half inch and less but my home made fruit press has either a 5 or ten ton hydrualic car jack up it so it pushes through every well, i use a thick ply wood block between each cheese as i normaly run four or five thin cheeses at a time,

unless we are wanting a particualr flavour or mix the whole lot, eaters cooker, cider and crab all go through and then we mix it up most of the first half is put into old plastic (cleaned) milk containers to be frozen as fresh apple juice even a three pint can does not last long with my son around,

wine wise we have three 11 gallon barrels we use if we need to

the biggest thing i miss from living at shipston on stour and the wine circle from that area is the people in the club had had a massive list of places they had arranged picking rights, some of these people knew what tree was ready when and the sort of wine it would go to. you could even when it was harvest time ask and have a 100kg bag of barley turn up. the farmer used to say he made a better return some time selling us barley at £2 a kilo than selling it to the brewery, its the contacts i realy miss from the club seen