Backyard Chickens & Bees

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?

Part 1: New press and shortcomings of the current grinder.

I guess the first thing to present is my new hydro press. I ordered a Lancman water press, bladder press, whatever you want to call it as a replacement for the Jaffrey basket press we’d used for the past two years. The basket press is still in use by the neighbors and all, and has plenty of life left, but it wasn’t really up to the specifications that I was wanting to push the amount of cider I can make at home. So I ordered the new one, which holds 80 L of apple mash at a time, and provides about 11-12 gallons of cider in one pressing. The press is the Lancman VSPI-X80, and is a big mass of stainless steel and tubing! Ah, such a nice fun toy… Anyway, we used this for the first time for the cider, and quickly found on the first run that there are a few things to really watch for, as evidenced by the silliness in the videos. The second and third pressings went much smoother, and the press is surprisingly easy and relaxing to operate once you have all the details worked out.

Apples used for the first 2011 cider: Gravensteins and Dolgos.

The garbage disposal grinder made it’s second season appearance, and seems to match well to the press, in terms of providing a fine enough mash that the press can efficiently squeeze the juice from. It did overheat a couple of times, which was OK since we were waiting on the press to complete it’s round, but otherwise held up to the amount of apples being fed through it. However, the opening to the grinder is fairly small compared to most of the apples we were throwing it’s way, so most of our time was spent cutting them into quarters so that they could fit in! I would say that the cutting was by far the most labor intensive part, and with a larger opening we could have easily shaved several hours off our day. Or we could have processed even more apples and filled a second (third?) barrel. For example.

All in all, I am very happy with the new press, but I think that the grinder component needs to be reconsidered. If I wasn’t interested in going pro one day, I would just suck it up and have apple-cutting parties. However, there is talk of doing something fun like a commercial cidery down the line, and a more robust grinder would certainly be another step in that direction. Now I just have to find one that suits my needs and won’t break the bank! (Update: I did find one! I now have one on order from OESCO!)

Part 2. Barrels and configuration for fermentation (CO2 inputs, pumps, etc).

30 gallon barrel for fermenting and storage, modified with an airlock and a ball-lock CO2 input.

Of course, pressing 35 gallons of sweet cider leads to the obvious question of where to store it. Carboys would be OK if it was only 35 gallons, but I intend to do at least two more rounds, and having 21 carboys filling up the basement would just be a disaster waiting to happen! (By disaster, I mean my wife would probably kill me for cluttering the basement up with so many carboys!) So I looked into various tank and barrel options, and settled on four 30-gallon HDPE shipping barrels. I ordered four new barrels, rather than getting used ones, as I had heard several horror stories about “flavor scalping”. (Flavor scalping is where the residual oils, especially from orange juice or lemon juice, permeates the HDPE pores and leaches out into the cider.) Also, by buying new, I was able to pick up some natural, as opposed to blue, barrels that allow me to see where the liquid level is on the inside. I ordered four of these from Basco USA (http://www.bascousa.com), part number THO30N.

So the next problem to overcome (and one that still hasn’t been fully resolved) is how to attach an airlock to the barrel, and how to purge out oxygen when the cider is fermented (e.g., during racking). The CO2 part was easy, at least! The barrels come with two plugs: one is a 2-inch NPS threaded plug, and the other is a 2-inch buttress plug. The buttress plug has a 3/4″ threaded knockout in the center, that I was able to build up a ball-lock fitting onto (this was made with a 3/4″ NPT to 1/4″ NPT stainless bushing to connect a 1/4″ NPT to cornelius keg post adapter from http://chicompany.net/). This makes it incredibly easy to attach a CO2 tank and purge out the air inside the barrel, since I already have lots of ball-lock cornelius kegs and all the accompanying fittings and such.

Ball-lock CO2 input for purging the barrel during racking, etc.

For the airlock, I first tried drilling out one of the NPS plugs so that I could fit a #6.5 rubber stopper and bubbler, but the 1 1/8″ hole I drilled was not perfect and this proved to be a bit leaky. Pushing the rubber stopper in further helped, but when the fermentation really got going, it overwhelmed the airlock and I had to remove it, clean up the mess, and attach a larger blow-off tube! This also fit through the drilled hole well, but was still a touch leaky (I could see the chapeau blanc bubbling through the insertion point). After the foaming subsided, I then tried using a #12 rubber stopper with a bubbler inserted right into the 2″ NPS threads on the barrel. This worked pretty well, so long as I put a bit of water on top to help form a tight seal (the seam on the barrel provides a gas leak path, so the water helps seal it without dripping into the cider). I’m still not satisfied with the set-up, so more trial and error will have to go on with the next batch. (As a side note: I bought some additional 2″ NPS plugs from McMaster so that I could try different configurations with the holes and stoppers, but they were slightly wider than the PlastiPlug ones that came with the barrel, and would not fit easily. Actually, they were so far off that I thought they’d cross-thread the barrels, and so I scrapped them! I have other ones on order from US Plastics for replacements.)

Anyway, after fermentation, I racked the cider over to the secondary barrel for maturation, making use of the CO2 input to purge before and during racking, and then I sealed the barrel up with an unadulterated NPS plug. For now, it seems to be holding pressure (only about 5 psi to maintain saturation in the liquid and exclude any oxygen incorporation), but I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

There’s lots more, particularly about the fermentation and apples and what I intend to do with all this cider, so I’ll write it up next/soon…

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