Attempted cider tonight. I went over to
Beer at Home (which it turns
out is only a mile from my house) and rented a cider press. They
had a nice new unit there they rent out for $15/day. Got that
back home in time for jeremy and jeff to show up. Sean and
Evelyn also were passing through and stopped to help out. We
picked tons and tons of apples. Next step was to chop them up
and get them into the cider press, which we managed to do just
fine. Then the press didn’t press. It would get to a point and
then just be too hard to crank. We tried a number of things,
discussed theories, but the best we could come up with is that
the apples were too hard and needed to be mushed before
cidering further. So, we are going to freeze the apples tonight,
thaw them tomorrow and then try pressing them again tomorrow
night. At least we got all the apples picked.