Ok, here goes...I am extremely selfish. I have two boys and a wonderful husband but I don't cook or bake for them unless I am hungry, you know what I mean?
I am also rather obsessive and tend to take things too seriously. I rarely do anything half-heartedly. I am also fairly arrogant and when I do something I usually think it's the best that there ever was. At least, it's the best in my situation. If you had the same circumstances as me you couldn't do it better.
I am also full of hypocrisies and juxtapositions. Like this:
Sometimes I'm the little girl making the perfect castle and sometimes I'm the obnoxious, sand kicker. I've also noticed I tend to live one way inside my head and often my reality doesn't match up. Sometimes I see clearly my shortfalls and sometimes I am embarrassingly delusional.
Ok, now that that's out of the way (for now). I want to state my intentions. I intend to be honest and not give in to the bragging I want to do. If something goes wrong, I will tell you. I read a really good book recently by Kurt Timmermeister and what I loved about the author most was his honesty. He told it all; even the stuff that did not make him look good. I want to be like that.
Now, ON TO THE CIDER ADVENTURE! (yes, I am shouting) I am WAY too excited about this. (This is normal for me. I go from one obsession to the next.)
I live in apple country. We actually claim to be the Apple Capital of the world. I don't know how true that is with how many apples China produces but, whatever. We grow a lot of apples here. I was up at my local orchard a couple weeks ago and I picked up about a hundred pounds of Golden Delicious apples. They were mostly seconds and I got them basically for free. (I paid $5 for the good ones and they gave me three 5 gallon pails of the seconds.) I made some apple pie filling, I made some apple sauce. Then I decided to juice them. When I was researching how to make a cider press I found how to make hard cider. I read a lense on squidoo by JellyGirl1. It sounded too easy not to try.
It took me a couple days to press a gallon of cider (I was in the middle of researching and making my press, too). I finished on Nov. 10, 2012.
I've decided to post separately about pressing the apples.
I went to my local homebrew store which is an awesome store called Stan's Merry Mart and purchased all the supplies I thought I'd need for $24.21.
The first recipe and method I am trying is:
1 gallon of cider;
1 campden tablet; and a
1/2 a packet of Red Star® Pasteur Champagne yeast (I accidentally added a little more than half).
Here is my hard cider journey:
DAY 1
On Nov. 12 I pitched (it means added) the yeast. This was after waiting for 48 hours after adding the campden tablet which kills all the wild yeast, etc. I sanitized the airlock and stopper in vinegar for a few minutes and rinsed it with clean water. I don't even know if the vinegar does a good enough job of sanitizing but that's what I did.
On the back of the yeast packet it said to add the yeast to warm water but I didn't want to dilute the cider so I poured out some of the cider and warmed it.
Then I inserted the stopper and filled the airlock with water (some use vodka but I didn't have any) to the fill line an put that in the stopper.
Here's Day 1's official photo:
DAY 2
In the morning I noticed bubbles coming out of the airlock. I was so excited. They weren't very frequent but it meant that the yeast was alive and kicking! I climbed up on a stool to see little bubbles coming up through the cider.
Later on on Day 2 I started wondering if I should store the cider somewhere dark so now it lives in my son's closet. Just in case it explodes it will go all over his stuff and not mine. :) he he
So, now I will go and check on the experiment and take Day 3's photo.
We are so RELATED!!! I laughed out loud reading this~
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading :)
ReplyDeleteSo, do tell which parts you identified with. I'd hate to guess!