Another batch of cider

[misanthropic_curmudgeon]

Somewhere in between work, Spawn, hunting, and mowing the lawns, I
managed to put down another batch of cider last week.

As I’ve mentioned, all my trees have been quite lean on their fruit
outputs this year, so I opted for a grand-coalition-of-the-unknown. I
scored some feijoas from some roadside trees I know of before I went
hunting, and on my return augmented my fruit supply it with the apples
from the tree at my old (now rented) house as well as the neighbours,
and more feijoas from my own trees. From the old house apple tree I
got a whole litre of juice, a marked contrast to the twenty-something
litres I recall from it last year, and from the neighbours apples
trees I got about eighteen litres as opposed to the fifty-odd from
last year.

Once again The Spawn helped me, and the theme of augmenting was
continued with another of The Spawn being one year older and willing
to wield a knife while the eldest drove the juicer. So there we were,
gathered around the kitchen bench with knives, chopping boards, fruit,
a noisy old juicer and earmuffs. They key difference was that we got
it all done in one day this time, and not several as before.

After the meagre apples yielded what they could, we started on the
feijoas. Having read about feijoa wine, I have an utterly unfounded
suspicion that feijoa wine – based solely on the recipe of not many
feijoas and a whole lot of sugar and water – is really just feijoa-
flavoured fermented sugar , I was and continue to be quite
apprehensive about adding the feijoas, but what the heck.

Accordingly I started juicing the feijoas by halving them and
‘shelling’ them with a teaspoon, and this coincided with bedtime for
The Spawn as it was probably getting a bit fiddly for little hands and
big knives. What surprised me was the consistency of ‘juiced’ feijoa
flesh: a sickly-sweet-smelling-syrupy-slop.

After getting about one and a half litres of that slop, I called it
quits, dumped it in the fermenter, and added the yeast and the ‘dry’
enzyme that according the geezer in the shop would convert more of the
natural sugars to alcohol making it a dryer drop and increasing the
alcohol content, which is just fine my me on both counts: my last
batch I nick-named “The Anaesthetic”. Once again I forgot to use the
thingy that measures the thingy that give an idea of the potency of
the brew, but what the hell: let’s get surprised.

I was seriously tempted to literally water down the syrupy slop, but
decided against for no real reason: I suppose I could water it down at
a later date and its hard to ‘unwaterdown’, so what the heck.

This bastardised concoction of three apples varieties and feijoas
looked much darker than my previous brews probably due to the feijoa
slop, and was soon bubbling away happily at 22degrees Celcius, which
it seems to hold itself to quite happily, perched on an old tower PC
chassis in my workshop under the house.

Over the last few days I’ve slowly seen the brew lighten and a
significant sediment of an inch or so build up on the bottom, which I
am assuming is the feijoa flesh that made it through the juicer
separating out, but just in case there is some weird density thing
going on with the liquids I popped it open for a big stir up this
morning.

I’ve decided that I might try my first racking-off with this brew:
decant off the good stuff and discard the sediment part way through
fermentation. Just for the sake of curiosity. And what I am unsure
about is the effect of that feijoa slop on the apple cider, whether I
should have stirred it up, and if fermentation will continue after my
neophyte attempts at racking in a weeks time.

Let’s just see.