Backyard Chickens & Bees

So, a few weekends ago I went to my parent’s house and picked apples off a nice Gravenstein tree at their neighbor’s place. The tree is on a rental property, and has not been cared for or used for anything apple-centric in a long while (or so it seems). So we picked apples, and I ended up with about 225 lbs of nice, ripe, tasty Gravensteins. My wife was out of town at the time, but I wanted to get started on pressing and making the apples into a nice sparkling cider, and the biggest hurdle was getting the apples ground into the pomace that could be pressed for juice. I didn’t want to do that by myself with the manual grinder… so I built a new grinder out of an electric garbage disposal. This is that story…

The main reason for building the new grinder was that I was a bit daunted by the prospect of cutting up and feeding 225 lbs of apples through a manual grinder and then pressing. That’s a lot of work for two people, and nearly impossible for one. Well, not impossible, but it would take the better part of a week for me to do that myself. Of course, my neighbor offered his services in exchange for helping him press his haul of apples (he went and picked about 150 lbs from the same tree!). Still, I’d been reading about the use of a kitchen sink disposal for grinding apples and had convinced myself that this was the approach that I wanted to take. In typical form, some of the more salient reasons, features, and thoughts on the grinder are presented as a list here:

Efficiency

The hand-cranked grinder is a lot of work, and results in a fairly coarse grind of the apples. The disposal, on the other hand, results in a bucket of mush. It does require that the apples be quartered, but that’s not too bad (just time consuming).

Easier to press

Last year we found a weakness in the Jaffrey cider press system: the metal cup that keeps the screw centered on the pressing disc is made of cast metal (i.e., cheap), and when I applied a lot of force on it to squeeze out as much of the juice as possible, I broke it. It just shattered. So I had to buy a new one, with the same cheaply made piece. While I got about 20 lbs per gallon last year, this year with the new grinder I applied much less pressure on the disc and got about 17 lbs per gallon. Of course, the juiciness of the apples and variety are all factors in extraction yield, as well, but I was able to get a lot more juice for less effort with the finer pomace. After pressing, the pomace was quite dry.

Disposal

The disposal I bought came from Home Depot, and is the “InSinkErator 3/4 HP Evolution Compact Continuous Feed Disposer”. It costs a bit extra, but has all-stainless-steel parts inside where the apples are ground, which for me makes it a lot easier to clean and maintain. The motor is beefy enough to handle everything we threw into it without stalling, and it can take a lot at once. There’s a non-compact model that can hold more in the basket, but it was $30 more and didn’t seem worth the added expense.

Heavy-duty stand

I had a lot of Unistrut material lying around from my days in graduate school. This used to be for a beer-brewing stand that I took apart several years ago and has been sitting in the basement ever since. There were only a few pieces of hardware that I had to buy (it’s basically the same as the SuperStrut electrical channels you can usually buy at HomeDepot), so it was an easy way to build a heavy-duty stand. Most of the parts had to be cut with a reciprocating saw (I’ve used hacksaws in the past, and do not recommend it), which was relatively easy. Ear plugs are a must here, of course… With the pieces I built a 2′×2′×35″ stand that holds the disposal in place with a 3/4″-thick piece of plywood. Eventually, I’ll probably replace the plywood with a piece of HDPE or Corian that is better suited for wet sticky conditions and easier to clean, possibly even with an integrated bowl to pour the cut apples in.

Cooling/overheating

One of the downsides to the disposal is that it has to be run continually, which leads to overheating and tripping the thermal breaker. In normal usage, the disposal is only run for short times with water flowing through to help cool it down. With the apples, I could process for about a half hour before it would shut off and make me wait for the next round. I helped it a bit by putting a small fan next to the base, and chilling the apples a bit, but this was still insufficient for allowing continual operation. There is one guy who claims to have plans for modifying the disposal to allow continual operation, but I was not willing to pay for the book (yet). (As an aside, he has a pretty nice set-up for building a press, so it might be worth looking into if you don’t already have one). Anyway, I’ll continue to ponder on that problem for a while…

Electrical

Yes, it runs on electricity. No, I don’t care, since most to all of my power comes from wind or hydro. I did, however, wire in a switch that is within easy reach (i.e., right on top of the plywood) when the disposal is running. That just makes it a little bit safer (along with always running it through a GFCI outlet).

So, with the grinder built, I had my family over for a day and we sat out on the back deck cutting apples and grinding. Of course, there was beer and hard cider on tap for everyone, so no complaints were heard… As I mentioned earlier, from the 225 lbs of apples, we ended up with about 13 gallons of fresh sweet cider. This was pasteurized by heating to 145 F for a few minutes and allowing to cool back to room temperature overnight. The next evening, when it was closer to 80 F, I added some pectic enzyme and let that sit for another 12 hours. The yeast was pitched the next morning, and by the time I got home from work (about 10 hours later), it was fermenting away. For the yeast, I used a Safale S-04 English Ale yeast. This is quite difference from the Champagne yeast I used last year (Lalvin EC-1118), so we’ll see how it turns out. Unfortunately, I forgot to get a specific gravity reading prior to fermenting, so I tried the final gravity plus refractometer trick to backtrack and see what %ABV was reached (this was done after transferring to secondaries): refractometer was 5.7 brix, f.g. was 1.005, ABV is 6.0%. So far, that is…

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