april fools
Things are a bit busy at this end of the season. Summer has hung on, and hung on. Ramadan has been and gone; Easter is just around the corner. So too is the first frost. Now's the time for getting in the harvest and putting away the tools.
That rush is why all you'll get on this April Fools Day is a few harmless pranks, and this quick snapshot. These are just some of the tools headed into storage.
On the left is my refractomer. It's calibrated to measure the wt% of dissolved sugar. For me, it's the piece of gear that extends the discussion about apple picking time. For any apple, it's the lift test first: has the abscission zone weakened? Then are the seeds changing from white through shades of brown. I don't use the iodine test; instead, I reach for the refractomer.
Next to it is one of my alcohol hydrometers. I could use it to measure the sugar in apple juice too. But that requires a bigger sample and cloudiness in the juice makes the scale difficult to read. Instead of bending light, it measures the specific gravity of the liquid: apple or grape juice, beer wort, whatever. The dissolved sugar makes the Sp.Gr. higher so when it is fermented out to alcohol the Sp.Gr. is lower. That's when I reach for a hydrometer — to determine the end point of fermentation. There's nothing worse than your cider exploding!
Out of curiosity, I also check the pH of my apple juice. Too low and the cider will be sour — so-called pig whistle cider. There's nothing fancy about my method — universal indicator paper is good enough.
This year's ripening season was weirdly early. It means I lost fruit I hadn't bothered to monitor because, on paper, it was too soon. That, and the hail storms messed up the apple yield. Typically there'd be so many apples and three distinct periods of ripening that I'd rack the two earliest batches to rest, then blend them back later before adding priming sugar and maybe a boosting shot of yeast to get the bottle fermentation I mostly use. Yes, I do some dry still varietal cider, or semi-sweet. But they're a lot of bother with multiple handling steps and for semi-sweet either the notion of chemical stabilisation or pasteurisation to prevent a secondary fermentation. Mostly, I can't be bothered. This year, I don't have to worry. There was so little fruit, high pH and high sugar, all at once, that the blending happened with the scratter and press. So instead of racking, decanting, blending and all the rest, this years cider has gone straight from the fermenter to the bottles with — touch wood — enough live yeast remaining to consume the priming sugar and carbonate the cider.
Righto, now back to work. Jack Frost is on his way!
april fools
Things are a bit busy at this end of the season. Summer has hung on, and hung on. Ramadan has been and gone; Easter is just around the corner. So too is the first frost. Now's the time for getting in the harvest and putting away the tools.
That rush is why all you'll get on this April Fools Day is a few harmless pranks, and this quick snapshot. These are just some of the tools headed into storage.
On the left is my refractomer. It's calibrated to measure the wt% of dissolved sugar. For me, it's the piece of gear that extends the discussion about apple picking time. For any apple, it's the lift test first: has the abscission zone weakened? Then are the seeds changing from white through shades of brown. I don't use the iodine test; instead, I reach for the refractomer.
Next to it is one of my alcohol hydrometers. I could use it to measure the sugar in apple juice too. But that requires a bigger sample and cloudiness in the juice makes the scale difficult to read. Instead of bending light, it measures the specific gravity of the liquid: apple or grape juice, beer wort, whatever. The dissolved sugar makes the Sp.Gr. higher so when it is fermented out to alcohol the Sp.Gr. is lower. That's when I reach for a hydrometer — to determine the end point of fermentation. There's nothing worse than your cider exploding!
Out of curiosity, I also check the pH of my apple juice. Too low and the cider will be sour — so-called pig whistle cider. There's nothing fancy about my method — universal indicator paper is good enough.
This year's ripening season was weirdly early. It means I lost fruit I hadn't bothered to monitor because, on paper, it was too soon. That, and the hail storms messed up the apple yield. Typically there'd be so many apples and three distinct periods of ripening that I'd rack the two earliest batches to rest, then blend them back later before adding priming sugar and maybe a boosting shot of yeast to get the bottle fermentation I mostly use. Yes, I do some dry still varietal cider, or semi-sweet. But they're a lot of bother with multiple handling steps and for semi-sweet either the notion of chemical stabilisation or pasteurisation to prevent a secondary fermentation. Mostly, I can't be bothered. This year, I don't have to worry. There was so little fruit, high pH and high sugar, all at once, that the blending happened with the scratter and press. So instead of racking, decanting, blending and all the rest, this years cider has gone straight from the fermenter to the bottles with — touch wood — enough live yeast remaining to consume the priming sugar and carbonate the cider.
Righto, now back to work. Jack Frost is on his way!