Backyard Chickens & Bees

The carboy that I set aside for a wild fermentation has finally started, after sitting for about a month (almost to the day!). I’ll probably rack it over quickly, as there was a bit of mold forming. The alcohol should kill that off, but I figure it’s better to be prudent and not get too many spores mixed in…

Ten chickens enjoying a hot meal on a cold day, eating up the mashed grains I used to make a rye bock lager. Ah, the best way to transform the spent grain onto compost!

Disgorging is messy business!

In 2010, I made a batch of cider using the “juice apples” available at Kiyokawa Orchard in Parkdale. It was good cider, although a bit bland due to the dryness, mild acidity, and lack of tannins. So I thought I’d make it a bit better with some bottle conditioning to produce a true “sparkling” cider in the méthode traditionalle (i.e., the way that Champagnes and sparkling wines are properly made). This process basically involves a secondary fermentation that results in a very high CO₂ concentration (and bottle pressure, which is in excess of 6 bars, or about 90 psi), and aging on the secondary lees for 12-24 months to develop the flavor. As a result, this requires heavier sparkling wine bottles that can take the pressure (and cost a significant amount more than your standard 22 oz bottle). Anyway, despite that, I put up four cases of the cider from that batch (roughly 10 gallons), and tried my best to forget about it over the year, even though all the kegged cider was gone and I was having to actually drink boughten cider! Thanksgiving was approaching (at the time) and we were expecting a large crowd, so I thought it’d be fun to take some out of the aging process to make it ready for the Thanksgiving day table…

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Data for the three cider batches made in 2011.

 Nat brought over some very nice apples today that I added to the 98 lbs of crab apples, and I spent about 4.5 hours grinding and pressing them all out for cider. Well, 604 lbs of them were pressed. There were some Newtown Pippens left over, but I just couldn’t squeeze them into the press. The efficiency of the press and grinder are about the same as with the disposal, but the time savings is more that enough to justify the cost! Anyway, the juice is now sulfited and waiting for yeast to be pitched tomorrow. The juice is distributed in a 30 gallon barrel and two 6 gallon carboys (the barrel has 32.5 gallons in it, and the carboys have 5 each!). One of the carboys will be allowed to undergo a wild fermentation. Always a crap shoot, but the resulting cider could be amazing (e.g., the perry from last year)!

Total cider made so far this season: 114.5 gallons. Good thing there’s two adults in the house…

Crab apples that I found along my bike commute. In a public space, no less!

This coming weekend will be cider-making, round 3. I lent Nat West of Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider my grinder so that he could breeze through several tons of apples for a commercial venture, and in exchange he’s providing me with some apples for another batch of cider. This one will be a blend of 25% English cider apple mix, 25% Newtown Pippens, 25% Esopus Spitzenburgs, and 25% Winesap. Oh yeah!

Of course, me being me, I had to go out and pick some crab apples with my co-worker to add to the mix! We got about 98 lbs of them, and “them” is—to the best of my knowledge—a bunch of Hewes’/Virginia crab apples. Well, I’m not certain of that, but they’re very tasty and juicy! In fact, I’d say they’re probably something else altogether. Also a bit scabby, but that matters not for cider. Especially since they’re not wormy at all! I guess this’ll make it about a 20-20-20-20-20% blend with the new ones.

The previous batch has been fermenting along well at around 14-15 °C (56-60 °F) for the past couple of weeks. It’s just about fermented out fully, so I’ll be racking it along to the secondary soon enough. Of course, the final gravity for the last two ciders was 1.002 and 1.001, respectively, which leads to to believe that the hydrometer I am using is a bit off (the final gravity for a cider should be around 0.998). I guess some calibration is in order soon! Good thing I chaptalized the last one to a safe level. I guess the alternative to calibration is to just always chaptalize to a high, safe level of sugar, like around 1.100.

Data, for show:

Fermentation progress for cider #2. Two weeks is a nice amount of time for full fermentation.

Fresh, sweet cider coming out of the press.

Round two of cider-making took place this past weekend. I learned a lot about buying apples in bulk and what NOT to do! Also, I made use of my new apple grinder from OESCO to replace the garbage disposal one that I had built last year. That was easily one of the best investments I have ever made! Wow. To really make the point, I’ll just start by estimating the person-hours used in batch one and two: for batch one, there were around 6 people working for about 9 hours for roughly 54 person-hours; for batch two, I did just about everything (others were present, but I was able to easily work both grinder and press alone) in 1.5 hours. So that’s a 36:1 advantage with the new grinder! As I anticipated in the previous post for 2011 ciders, the speed of the new grinder means that the pressing is now limited by the press itself, and not the amount of time it takes to cut and mill the apples. Anyway…

Buying apples for this batch was a pain in the ass. I was hoping to get a full bin of mixed McIntosh, Liberty, and crab apples from the orchard I normally source from, but that was not meant to be! I had previously e-mailed the owner, who gave me a generic price for a bin at their fruit stand. Well, I found out that it’s not as easy as just showing up and grabbing a bin at the fruit stand! I should have expected as much, but didn’t really take the time to call and talk with the people who actually work the stand to get all the details before heading out. Anyway, turns out they want one week notification for a mixed bin of fruit, which, of course, makes perfect sense, as they have to prepare the bin and fill it, etc! As such—and since we (my wife and I) were on a tight schedule that morning—we ended up just buying by the box. A bit pricier than I would’ve liked, but the fruit is great and we got what we needed.

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This is part two of the first chapter in the 2011 cider-making escapades! The last section was more about the new press, the grinder woes, and the HDPE fermenting barrels that I’m using for the larger batches this year. This part will address more of the apples that were used, the yeast strain I pitched on the sweet cider and other fermentation-related stuffs, and what’s coming next for rounds two and three!
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The new hydropress, pressing out sweet apple cider!

Two Sundays ago (or so, it was on 9/11) was the first day of pressing apples for this year. Of course, it was also about the second hottest day we’ve had in Portland so far (93 °F, or 34 °C if you prefer)! But that didn’t stop us from running 503 lbs of Gravenstein and Dolgo crab apples through the grinder and into my new hydro press! From that we got right around 35.5 gallons of sweet cider with a nice acidity and decent SG (1.052). So many things to talk about, where to begin?

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Pardon this test post. I’m trying out the Android WP program.

Anyways, apple season is coming up, and I have scored my first harvest of crab apples from three of the trees in the parking lot at work! I ended up with about 40 lbs of Dolgo crabs, which are nice and sharp.  These will be blended with some other early season apples, such as Gravensteins or the like. Yum! I’m definitely looking forward to pressing them with my new hydro-press, and using some recently acquired 30 gallon barrels for the fermentation.  With luck, I’ll be able to produce 120 gallons of cider this year…

One of the Hamburgs in the makeshift chicken sauna.

One of the Hamburgs has been very lethargic recently, and we are beginning to suspect that she might be eggbound. She has been quite solitary and showing little signs of energy, although her eyes are bright and she talks a bit now and then. Veronica checked in her cloaca, but felt no eggs; I felt her crop, and while it felt a bit empty, it certainly wasn’t blocked. So, today we have her in a makeshift sauna to see if that will help. One thing I’ve read in several places is to either have her sit over a steam bath or in a tub of warm water to help her relax enough to pass the bound egg through. So, if that is in fact what’s wrong with her, we’re hoping that this will be a means to help her out of it. Also, having her isolated from the other girls will let us see whether she’s eating and pooping.

For what it’s worth, none of the other hens are showing signs of illness, so we’re not suspecting that it’s an infection or virus. Well, not yet anyways.

The sauna itself is just the normal broody-bird box (a stand that with wire mesh walls on all sides, top, and bottom), covered with a tarp, and standing over a bucket that I filled with hot water for steam. She’s got a bowl with some clean water and another with oyster shells and food. I guess I’ll find out the results when I get home from work tonight…

Update 1: Still no change 12 hours later, if not worse. Hopefully she’ll make it through the night. We’re now thinking it might be coccidiosis, so I might have to stop by the Urban Farm Store to get some antibiotics. Regardless, I’ll stop by and have a chat to see what they think it could be…

Update 2: 36 hours later, she passed away. I went to the store at lunch and picked up some antibiotics, mixed up a bowl for her, and tried to get her to take some, but to no avail. Veronica did an autopsy to see what the final cause was, but nothing conclusive was determined. We still think it was coccidiosis, since there was no sign of her being eggbound. But, since there was no blood in her poop, we can’t say for certain. It’s a sad day at the house… she was a cute little girl, and I’m sorry to see her gone.