Toggle sidebar

Life, the universe and everything wine-related

  • PATRONS: Did you know we've a chat function for you now? Look to the bottom of the screen, you can chat, set up rooms, talk to each other individually or in groups! Click 'Chat' at the right side of the chat window to open the chat up.
  • Love Gotmead and want to see it grow? Then consider supporting the site and becoming a Patron! If you're logged in, click on your username to the right of the menu to see how as little as $30/year can get you access to the patron areas and the patron Facebook group and to support Gotmead!
  • We now have a Patron-exclusive Facebook group! Patrons my join at The Gotmead Patron Group. You MUST answer the questions, providing your Patron membership, when you request to join so I can verify your Patron membership. If the questions aren't answered, the request will be turned down.
Barrel Char Wood Products
Chevette Girl

Chevette Girl

All around BAD EXAMPLE
Moderator
Lifetime GotMead Patron
Apr 27, 2010
8,454
65
48
Ottawa, ON
In case anyone's bored, here are some photos I put up on facebook... the broken carboy is kind of interesting, as is the cork that split the bottle neck! and someone once upon a time asked for a photo of my strawberry wine. I'd taken it a while ago but since I don't host photos anywhere else I can't just stuff the image into a thread (it never works no matter how small I make the photo) and I never got around to posting it. There are a few shots of my cider press and my basement setup. Comments welcome (and if you wanna "friend" me on fb, send me a message with your gotmead handle if your fb name isn't obvious :)
 
I love seeing other people's workspace! I love the metal shelves that hold multiple bottles, my workbench is waist height which is nice for racking, but doesn't hold as much so my line of bottles just keeps getting longer!
 
Hey you sass that hoopy, Chevette Girl , there's a frood who really knows where her towel is.

Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters for everyone!

SpamDog



Also, Nice Pics
 
  • Like
Reactions: TheAlchemist
I wondered about the wooden press, but read your comments. A few friends have been discussing building a "club" crusher and press. I wondered if wood would handle the stress. Sorry to hear it didn't.

Cool looking gallon jugs! :-)
 
Actually, once I replaced the top member with a 4x4 and replaced one side piece where the screws tore out of it after I'd drilled a second set of holes two close to the first, it held together fairly well. The next failure mode was the cutting boards I was using to sandwich the bag of pulp (I used the smaller of my brew bags instead of cheesecloth), one cracked right in half (split where it was glued) and the bottom one is starting to crack through the wood but once I sorted out which way to align the grain with respect to the pressure, it hasn't propagated too much farther. I think next year I'd like to replace the bottom piece with a nice stainless steel tray with wooden slats to let the juice out easier, this was just what I came up with mostly from stuff I already had around the house in the time I had before the apples went bad. And I managed to break not one but two food processors while trying to process apples, so if I find the money before next autumn, I may invest in a garbage disposal setup for grinding fruit if I don't get another food processor that's up to the task before then.

Oh, and if it's the chocolate-pear bottles you're talking about, they're 1.5 litre Rossi wine bottles, my mom and stepdad pick the stuff up all the time so I get lots of the bottles without having to suffer through the wine :)
 
I almost burned out my juicer making my cider this year :rolleyes:

I think with a bit more patience and splitting it up over a couple of days I can probably do it again without stressing my poor juicer so bad.

In the end it's still a $20 Goodwill find so I'm not wrecking things too bad if I go to town with abandon

I know I'll be making a press for my cider next year as well though, I wasn't happy with my yield and putting together a nice steel job should be easy with some help from my neighbor's welder
 
Honestly, the best yield I got was hand-squeezing frozen and then thawed fruit in the brew bag. Unfortunately my body couldn't keep up with the demand so I had to devise alternate plans before my physiotherapist wrote me off as impossible :) But I think if I were any stronger I'd have popped all the seams in the brew bag.

My press can't handle raw apple pieces, that's mostly what broke things. Putting apple pieces in the freezer didn't always ensure that each piece would freeze and become soft either, so I found running the apples through the food processor with the grater attachment, lightly pressing it, then freezing and thawing and repressing the pulp was the next best yield, I also release the pressure, roll up the flattened bag of pulp and press it again, I also hand-squeeze the ends of the pulp-log because they don't always end up squashed to the same extent. The initial light pressing compacts it so that I don't need to clear half the contents of my freezer out of the way, and it also seems to freeze more thoroughly.

... but on the other hand, a $20 juicer sounds even easier :)
 
C Girl, nice work space. That is cool. To everyone who played off "The Hitcher's Guie...", cheers. That was awesome.


Stephen Arend
 
Any reason you couldn't run the apples through the sausage grinder attachment to your kitchen-aid and then just toss them in the mead sans pressing?
 
When I do my crabapple mel I just roughly chop the apples and put them in a bag with water and honey and pectinase, two weeks later I remove the bag of moosh, it works out just fine. I think straight crabapple juice would be a little too intense for what I want out of it.

This time I wanted to see what happened when I used straight pressed juice, no water. Plus, not all of it ended up fermented, 4 gallons ended up in the freezer, I took two jugs from city park apples to Thanksgiving at my mom's and two more jugs from Spiritwood Farm are going to the farm's Xmas party in December.

And I don't have a sausage grinder attachment, I wish I did. It would sure make liverwurst a lot easier. The food processor just doesn't quite do it.

I actually rehydrated and sugared some of the pressed pulp with the intention of making vinegar, and it was extremely messy, just fermenting it loose like that isn't something I'm going to repeat if there's any other option, I just didn't want either of my brew bags exposed to anything remotely resembling vinegar.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Barrel Char Wood Products

Viking Brew Vessels - Authentic Drinking Horns

Top Bottom