Ideal Storage for Sweating Apples

[Mike Rose]

Hello everyone,

A quick question about storing/sweating apples for 1–2 months.

A few weeks ago I picked about 16 bushels of apples. Each bushel was put into a large onion (netted) sack and then placed into a plywood box I made (drilled with holes for air and drainage). I did not cover the box, and they have been sitting exactly like this appear in this photo ever since.

My question is does it make a difference if they are stored with a cover? If so, would a tarp be different from a roof. I'm assuming the tarp would trap in some gases, compared to them being inside. I left them uncovered thinking that the rain would give them a little rinse while they sweat.

Thinking about it now, I'm assuming they apples would dry up better and condense the sugar more if they weren't getting rained on over and over. Maybe I'm wrong though. 

The weather has be highs of 8c and lows of 0c on average. A little bit of rain here and there.

How does everyone here store/sweat their apples? Maybe I'm putting too much thought into it? They would otherwise still be on the tree getting rained on. 

Thanks!

Mike

[Richard Anderson]

We store our apples in standard bins under a tarp in the orchard for perhaps 20-30 days, then move them into a dry storage area prior to pressing for a week or more. One of the things I notice is that under the tarp there is often condensation and I imagine there is some heat build up on warm days. For the most part loss from rotting fruit is minimal and seems to occur in top layer of the bin where I assume most of the condensation is. My opinion is that ideal storage would be a dry shed which allows for ample ventilation.

[Tom Dunn]

Richard, what effect does your sweating have?

We took a month to press our apples and the pulp was warm by the end of it, as if the fruit was fermenting. The first reading we took at the start of the month was 1.048, by the last batch it was 1.038. A 20L test batch smells very vinegar-y even though everything is sterile, airtight with minimal airspace + sulphited. Is it possible the apples could be turning to vinegar before being pressed?

I know a lot of people choose to sweat so we didn't worry too much, they were in a tarped pen and kept around 6-10 degrees, however the test batch worries me.

[Cider Supply, LLC]

We use smaller screened crates in a very dry shed that has good ambient ventelation. We dont allow for any condensation because the more contact with fresh-dry air further raises the Brix by virtue of water evaporating from the apples. Some cultivars do well (the real cider apples) sweating and others turn to an impossible useless mess, mainly sweet sharps.

Chris

[Thomas Fehige]

We stored our apples for up to two months in a well-ventilated garage, where rodents or birds or our dogs couldn't get at them. We used EUR-pallets with wooden frames as apple boxes (see image, the pallets are 120 by 80 cm, the frames are 25 cm high, there's three of them on top of each other in the picture; the gaps in the pallets are a bit too wide for apples, they need to be filled with 2 by 3 cm slats. A box like the one shown cost me 37 €).

At one farm that I'd bought some apples from they had collected them in the same kind of onion sacks you use and I had simply put them in my pallet boxes in the sacks. These two boxes were the ones where later we found a significant above-average amount of rotten apples: roughly twice as many as in the other ten boxes. There could be other causes for this, but I'll certainly empty the apples into my wooden box next time. The weather was pretty warm for the time of the year, around 15°C.

The OSB boards you use are very air and water tight and will probably collect condensation on the inside, depending on temperature changes. For storing apples in the open I'd guess the wind would be an important factor to (a) dry them out for the sugar concentration and (b) keep them dryer so that rot is slowed down. Coming to think about it, it's perhaps not so much the drying that concentrates the sugar in the juice, but the apple biology that turns starch into sugar during that time. But others know more about that than I do.

Cheers -- Thomas

[Mike Rose]

So the onion sack was the only difference in the rotting apples?

Luckily where I'm storing them it's been very cold and even snowing some days. I don't think they will be too ripe. I'll see this Saturday. :)

Thanks,

Mike

[Thomas Fehige]

Well, as I said, there could be other causes, like that bloke put a lot of rotten apples in in the first place. But I wasn't under that impression when I picked them up. Of course there were also some rotten apples in the other boxes, more as time went by, and also depending on apple varieties. But those two boxes (of very mixed varieties) were the worst, and in them were the biggest nests of rottenness, as if, perhaps, being forced against each other by the tension of the elastic bags had increased contamination from one apple to its neighbours. Pure speculation, of course.

Last weekend we processed a crate of mainly Boskoop that had been stored pretty long, but there was hardly a rotten apple among them, and apparently none of them Boskoop.

So: a lot of variables, but still I'll discard the onion sacks next time. I don't need them for further processing and there's a lot of plastic in the world as it is.

Cheers -- Thomas

[Mike Rose]

So everything went pretty well. The apple were very ripe — we maybe threw about 30-40 apples total out of 17 bushels. They were outside uncovered in the onion bags for just about a month (-1 day). I would not have went any longer on them. Very waxy on the outside, strong smells of apples. I should have washed them first but I didn't. There was quite a few rains and a snow. Weather ran pretty cold, averaged ~45f maybe over the month.

Here are my final values for some wild apples:

http://imgur.com/dUIu2pi

My Brix readings were probably not that accurate the first time around as I was just squeezing juice by hand out of the apple. I was also only using 1–2 apples off the tree which I don't think is a good enough sample size. Next year I will try to grind and press a 1/2 bushel or so of mixed apples from the tree (high and low) to get a more averaged reading. I will so do TA as I'm curious to how sweating affects that as well.

You can see the rest of my Cider 2015 album (always growing) here:

http://imgur.com/a/TJ52H