Winter is coming! I always seem to start making alcoholic beverages at this time of year*, as you saw the other day I have some beer brewing in my kitchen, now let me tell you of how I ended up helping bring into existence hopefully 40 pints of Perry!
After the Huddersfield food and drink festival (a truly amazing annual event and not just because it is usually the weekend nearest to my birthday!), my family and Kim’s went for a crafty beer at the Sportsman pub**. The outcome of which was that my Dad, Graham (Kim‘s Dad) and myself decided to split the cost of this cider press!
Well one of the pear trees in Graham’s garden was groaning under the strain of its fruit recently which meant it was time to press! And that is exactly what we did!
First we chopped the pears the tried to press them… bad idea this was waaaaay to tough! So Kim got her Mum’s blender out and we quickly blitzed the pears and put them back in the press. Juice in abundance!
A rough estimate of the ingredients:
- 25lb of pears (pressed to about 1 gallon of juice).
- 2kg of sugar
- 4 gallons more water
- 14g yeast
This is a bit experimental and of course I’ll let you know how it turns out. But I will say this, Cider presses are FUN! The working title for the collaboration of we three cider press owners is ‘RAG cider & perry’ (Richard, Adam, Graham) so should we succeed and the Dads decide to come out of/never go into retirement and go professional watch out for this name… hum… maybe…
* I’ll be starting some meads shortly.
** This has got me thinking I should write a pub guide to Huddersfield!
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