It’s a pretty bad apple year and it’s likely we won’t be making cider. However it is a mast year for acorns, filling up a bag is as easy a taking a walk in the woods. In the spirit of going along with what nature decides, we’re trying acorn flour this year.
In the newly reinstalled greenhouse
Acorns are drying
We have no idea what to expect from this.
Our 2nd year making hard cider, we skipped one last year when the apple trees didn’t produce anything. Such are the whims of mother nature.
We did this one a little more “right” by transferring to a 2nd fermenter after a couple of months and by letting it age for 5 months total. It definitely helped refine the flavor and remove some of the less desirable tones.
As before we used our maple syrup to fuel the fermentation. It’s kind of a shame because the taste of maple syrup is completely lost in the process, I would love to have something mapley left. At the same time, it’s completely awesome that we are able to make hard cider with 100% local ingredients. And by local I mean right from our backyard. It may seem completely absurd to use maple syrup like this, we could sell it and buy many times its weight in refined cane sugar with the money. This isn’t what we’re after though, closing cycles as locally as possible is the end game, not making money. And so using maple syrup is the most sensical and harmonious thing we can do.
I commissioned labels from Robin, I would like to build up a portfolio of labels made from people I love to satisfy any future circumstances. This year we had deer go through apple trees during a ghost moon, and we had a press day heavy on yellow jackets.
Overall it’s really super nice that all these projects are well established these days. We are so much more relaxed going through the motions with experience under our belt. It’s still a lot of work, but at least we’re no longer worried we’re going to majorly fuck something up and ruin everything.
We’ll be sugaring soon, and we’ll have cider to drink while we boil the maple syrup we’ll use the make the cider. It’s the circle of life or something.
Rebel without a cause, but with a bin full of apples
Hisse et oh
Using refined cane sugar is not an option
And now we wait
All unmanaged trees in the region look something like this:
Apparently a very tough Winter and wet early Summer are to blame and a lot of trees could die if we get another round.
No cider for us this year :(.
We are at 10 gallons for the season. I wish I could say they suffice to our yearly consumption.
Hard time taking pictures of the process, we’re at 15 gallons of cider, 5 of which are now laced with the inebriating nectar of the gods :). We followed an extremely simple farm recipe, the cider is good but not great. The 2 gallons with honey tasted best, maple syrup left no particular taste but did make the cider a little stronger. Good stuff!
Every batch labeled with a picture for the story of the tree it came from.
“Old man’s arch”, “Maple ghost moon”, Honey third from the left” are all there.
Every day we pick up droppings from a tree that is a bit early. We make just enough applesauce for a day, just enough for the house to smell incredible.
the nice ones are saved as they keep really well
the ugly ones are cooked immediately
We thought we were going to have to wait 10 years before we could produce apples but it turns out that our land came with quite a few apple trees. We took a good hike and sampled every tree we found. A good few were tart, some just not usable and a couple yielded good surprises. It also seems to be an excellent year for apples and so we find ourselves with more apple than we’ll know what to do with before we even planted a tree. They need a few more weeks to yield their exact flavor but it was a nice appetizer 🙂 It’s cool that these trees make apples that are unique to the place. We will graft the couple of good surprises in due time.
Some of them will definitely need more breathing room
Branches falling down under the weight of yumminess
