Wednesday 30 November 2011

I know, I know...not

When on my own I tend to live off rubbish stuff out of the freezer. It was to be fish fingers and chips (oven variety...) as there's some peas as well... but then I spotted half-a-bottle of wine from Sunday... which ranks higher, right? And would be wasted with fish fingers. Yesterday 'was use up those well out of date grill steaks from the freezer' with some Smash and beans (hey, I enjoyed 'em!)...
so, spotting the wine set a new course - rummage rummage, finds a container of what appears to be Spaghetti Bolognese frozen left overs, but on defrosting is strangely missing any meaty bits - more like some sort of home-made pizza topping then...
Okay, it's defrosted now so best course is to cook a few sausages, slice 'em up and add to the whatever sauce it is - onions and stuff, marvelous...
You may well ask what this has to do with cider? Well while it's all coming together a good time to try a bottle. Up from the 'cider cellar' a bottle of 6P... Now the P stands for pasteurised - 'Hey Louis' - and batch 6 all got pasteurised... which is a shame really 'cos it certainly did change the flavour profile in a rather unfavourable way... now it just happens that I've already tried some form of adjustment in the way of sucralose based sweetener, which certainly makes for a more palatable drink... so all is not lost with no.6...






Monday 7 November 2011

Dolly Mixtures..?

A cider weekend sees the addition of batches 8 and 9 - 1.054 and 1.060 respectively. Using up the last of some very sweet red-skinned windfalls from a local churchyard most likely accounts for the higher gravity of no.9.
With the scratter video on YouTube receiving so many hits, I thought I'd mention two simple modifications for this season.
1st the feed plates have been further shortened and a plastic skirt added. This is just a stretched out (at one end) strong plastic bag. Just held in place trapped between the body and plywood base plate - a simple but big improvement and the scratter hasn't clogged up like it used to.


Also a piece of plastic bag just held with a couple of drawing pins over the feeder chute prevents bits flying back out - again simple but effective.




Using softer apples and with the drill set to a slower speed it took 20 minutes to scrat over 40kg of apples. Although on a slower speed the scrats tend to come out a little bigger.


and those Dolly Mixtures..?


With other jobs needing doing, especially with the fine spell of weather through October, progress has been slow on the steel press, but the wooden press held yet again...