85 lbs of backyard apples + 19th century cast iron grinder and cider press + an afternoon of elbow grease (x2) + yeast + a few months = single-varietal Adina hard cider:
The raw juice had a pH of 3.3 (a reasonable level for hard cider) and a specific gravity of 1.050 (expected, should result in a 6.5% ABV cider after fermentation all the way to dry).
Fermenting with the special White Labs WLP775 cider yeast (rather than the dry champagne yeast and ale yeasts I’d used back in the previous kitchen-scale hard cidering with store-bought cider) in a glass carboy and then resting to condition/clarify/settle:
And, about a month later, we racked it into bottles with a little sugar to carbonate it. As usual for a cider, it had fermented all the sugars (down to a specific gravity of 0.996, below even water). In a few months (just in time for Thanksgiving?) we’ll see how it is… but even the first taste of the unaged still cider was interesting– tart in a very crabapple way, but not at all harsh.
Update: Later– bottled and labeled:
