Building Unity Farm - The Cider House Tools

The orchard at Unity Farm has 36 trees, of which 24 are heritage apple varieties.   Since each tree will produce 5 bushels (a bushel is 42 pounds), we'll have 120 bushels (over 5000 pounds of apples per year) when the trees reach maturity.    Of course we'll eat, sauce, jelly and produce various apple products from them, but my favorite way to enjoy fresh apples in the Fall is to make cider.One bushel yields about 3 gallons of cider, so we could make up to 360 gallons.Cider can be frozen and kept for a year but even with pasteurization (which changes the flavor), unfrozen cider will not keep more than a few weeks. The easy answer to preserving cider is to make traditional fermented hard cider.Here's how we'll do it.In the orchard, we have a cider house, pictured above.  All our orchard harvesting and honey processing tools are kept clean and dry in that building.  We have a 36 liter cider press and grinder which can produce about 9 gallons of juice per pressing, pictured belowWe'll test our apples for flavor, acidity, tannin content, sweetness, and bitterness then choose a combination of apples that will make a balanced cider.  Our hand cranked fruit grinder sites on top of the press and we'll fill the pressing basket with approximately 2 bushels of ground apples.    We'll apply pressure via the hand cranked ratcheting screen and gather the juice a gallon at a time.  I prefer a two stage fermentation with racking of juice from...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - Category: Technology Consultants Source Type: blogs