11/01/12: Cider for All Saints

One of the perks of the house is the space in our basement to make hard cider. Cider-making was tricky in the cramped basement storage area of our apartment building. So, this afternoon, on our day off for the feast of All Saints, we picked up about 100 pounds of apples--Empire, McIntosh, and Idared--from an orchard north of Pittsburgh, and then had them pulped and squeezed at Sally's Cider Press in Zelienople, PA, about 45 minutes away:

You load the apples up a conveyor belt, where they're hosed down as they go up the chute:

Inside, they're ground to a pulp, which is flattened between several boards and then mechanically pressed:

There's Sally!

The juice flows down into a tank where it's pasteurized with UV light (just strong enough to kill E. coli but not all the naturally occurring wild yeasts and beneficial bacteria). We then fill some plastic gallon jugs with our cider through a spigot; today we had eight gallons--pretty sizable for 100 pounds of apples. At home, I tested the cider for acidity, soluble sugar, and pH, and then dumped it into jars and added sulfites. Cider and its accoutrements are now quite cozy in their dedicated basement area: