First heavy rain of the Autumn after a long, dry Summer, and half of it ends up in the workshop!
Not certain how I’m going stop that happening again for the moment. Ideally I guess I’d need to add a fairly high capacity drain in front of the doors, but that’s not going to happen right now.
This time it was a mill that wouldn’t run despite the rotor spinning freely, which suggested an electrical fault. After testing the obvious stuff such as the fuse and power cable it seemed as though there was no choice but to take it apart.
Once the motor was out of the mill body the problem became obvious. The safety interlock that only allows the motor to run when the chute is in place had broken.
Fortunately, spares are available. They’re supposed to look like the one on the right.
Fortunately replacement is just a question of popping open the switch body and screwing the cable into two terminals, so once the spare had turned up it was a relatively quick fix.
Someone brought in a large-ish batch of apples of mixed varieties to be pressed. By sheer chance, the first batch I did produced juice of an amazing pink colour. It was sheer chance that I noticed — if it hadn’t been the first batch I’d probably never have seen it. So obviously I had to bottle that batch by itself. You’d never want to miss out on this if you had the opportunity, surely? Of course, all the apples had gone by the time I found out how the juice looked so I couldn’t take a photo of them or find out what variety they were.
Oh dear! In my hand here is the top half of the bleed valve from the bladder of the press below. It has snapped off inside the rod that supports the bladder, so the actual air release mechanism is still trapped. Given that the broken edges of the brass have turned quite green, I’m not sure the breakage happened recently. I suspect that it cracked some time ago, allowing apple juice in and damaging the valve further.
Not sure how I’m going to remove the old valve yet. Needs some thought. Possibly I can cut off the release button and then depress it far enough to allow something to be jammed inside the valve body, allowing it to be unscrewed.
This time it was Dabinett apples, but otherwise it went much the same as for the earlier Harry Master’s Jersey. Slightly less than two hundred litres perhaps, but not by much.
This juice also had a high pH of 4.4, but as single-variety Dabinett cider is quite common, I decided to leave it as is and see what happens.
to the inside of the press cloth like apples do 😀
I had another test of the settling “tank” with the pear juice too. This is the sediment from about forty litres of juice…
And the pear juice, with apple (on the right) for comparison.
… if I don’t use these soon. But for what, hmmm?
To reduce the amount of sediment in bottles of apple juice I have been testing an extra step in the process — leaving the juice in a barrel or tank for twenty-four hours prior to syphoning off the juice and bottling/pasteurising.
This is what was left in the bottom of a 45l barrel of Ashmead’s Kernel juice after it had been syphoned off. Doesn’t look like much but it seems to improve the quality of the bottled juice in that there are far fewer “lumpy” bits in the sediment (despite straining the juice through a fine cloth before putting it into the barrel).
And here’s the juice itself
I’ve pressed so many apples this season that I was running out of space to compost the pulp. I estimate that I’ve done seven tonnes of apples and I’m not finished yet, so I just had to start spreading it directly on the vegetable beds. It’s got at least six months before I’ll be wanting to plant anything there. Hopefully that will be sufficient. And it will help to keep down the weeds 😀
I found some left-over bacon in the fridge, so decided to have bacon sandwiches for lunch. Whilst I was frying the bacon in a pan (the grill is too much effort for a few slices of bacon :D), I happened to notice a few pairs that I’d collected the previous day after they’d fallen from the tree.
Well, it can’t do any harm, can it? You have to experiment with these things. So I sliced a couple and added them to the pan with the bacon.
Ladies and gentlemen… The bacon and pear sandwich!
To quote someone I knew many years ago: “It was bloody lovely!”
I shall be making them again.
