This is my kind of homesteading.
As I've written previously, I am not a big fan of hoppy beers. Over the past few years I have focused more on drinking hard ciders. This year, I decided to try and make a batch.
When we first moved into our city house, we had a crabapple tree on the back side of the house. It was a very messy tree, dropping masses of petals in the spring and buckets of small apple 'berries' in the fall. We removed the tree, which created an open space we did not care for. We decided to plant another tree, but instead of learning a lesson from the last homeowner, we repeated it by planting a pear tree! At least the pears are easier to pick up.
During the past two seasons, the tree has gotten big enough to bear fruit. Unfortunately, the pears are very hard, and stay firm even with cooking or poaching. As a result, we have not done much with the pears. This season, I thought I would try to make hard pear cider, or perry.
I have made beer and wine off and on for over 30 years, although my bottlings during the past decade have been limited to making root bear and cream soda with my son. As a result, I already had most of the equipment. I even have a small fruit press, which I got for free. I was dropping off branches at our local waste collection center, and sitting alongside the metal recycling dumpster was the press shown in the photo. I found it probably 10 years ago and put it in the garage, until this week.
I found an initial recipe at https://diyhardcider.com › how-to-make-pear-cider
The recipe called for 100 pounds of pears to make 5 gallons of perry. While we may have 100 pounds of pears on the tree, I decided to start small with a 1-gallon batch, or 20 pounds of pears. Maggie and I picked the pears. I let the pears sit for a week as suggested. All that seemed to do was attract a lot of fruit flies. The recipe also included an option of freezing the pears. I thought this would make more juice - freezing would rupture the cell walls. I sliced out the cores, put the segments into four 1-gallon bags, and put them in the freezer for a week.
Today I moved to the juicing. I took the pears out of the freezer the night before and put them in the refrigerator. I then moved the bags to the counter in the morning before leaving for work. After dinner, I got my equipment, washed everything down, sterilized my fermentor, and got to work.
I used our food processor to grind the thawed pears to a pulp, and scooped the pulp into the press. The 20 pounds of pears yielded just under 1 gallon, as predicted by the recipe! I went back to the tree and got about 2 to 3 additional pounds of pears to top off my fermentor. I cut the cores out, ground the segments in the food processor, and pressed out the juice. I feel that I got about the same amount of liquid out as from the frozen pears, so that seems like a step to skip. I crushed one campden tablet and added it to the must to sterilize. Two days from now, I will be ready to pitch some yeast!
댓글