Homegrown, homemade apple cider!!
 

Yum, yum, yum! We went to visit family members who have apple trees and a cider press and spent the weekend picking apples, washing them, and making cider! DS had a blast playing in the apple washing water and taking one bite out of random apples. We made like 10 plus gallons of cider so DH and I brought home almost 6 :shifty

And it's all organic as the only thing done to those trees is the occasional pruning.

We haven't pasteurized any of it yet. We have one gallon in a jug with some airline tubing running into water. This lets the gas out but no air in, apparently. We are hoping it will become... interesting.

The rest of it is in a 5-gallon collapsible water container. I think DH wants it all to get... interesting... but maybe I should siphon off a gallon or so to freeze for late fall or winter. Probably should pasteurize it and let it remain boring :O

It doesn't get extremely alcoholic, no more than beer, and if you drink it before it finishes fermenting it's sparkly and all natural!! BUT DH learned the hard way not to drink cider made from ground apples. So we picked them all from the tree this year.

Does anyone else let their cider get a little more exciting the natural way?

Re: Homegrown, homemade apple cider!!
 

Do you press the apples to extract the juice or freeze them? Last year I had a bunch of apples I wanted to juice but I didn't have a press. I looked up instructions online and it was more complicated than I thought. I've made wine with concords before but I don't care for wine much.

Re: Homegrown, homemade apple cider!!
 

There is a thing you put the apples in that turns and grinds them up. It has a hand crank which someone disabled and it is powered by a little motor. The apple mush falls into a bucket type thing with no bottom (we use a bit of cheesecloth but some pieces still come out).

Some cider comes out while the mash is going into the bucket, but most comes when we slide the bucket down and put a piece of wood in the bucket and turn a handle to press the juice out. So it is a plain ol' press with no freezing involved.

I bet you could use a blender or food processer and squeeze the resulting mash with something heavy... just use lots of plastic tarps so the resulting goodness doesn't get soaked into the wood! It would be a lot of work that way, though.