Foraging for Alcohol

Or: Mungo and Morgainne make Cider.  This was prompted by one of our earlier posts on having located a wonderful old crab apple tree on the marina property.  So the other day, we sallied forth and collected as many of the little lovelies as we could.

A Crabapple is basically any apple under 3"

Just pull a branch and you get rained on by fruit when they're ripe.

These are really tasty ones.

We collected a full bucket of them, shaking the tree, getting rained on by ripe fruit, eating as many as we collected.  Crab apples are a wonderful, very tart fruit, full of flavor.

We washed the fruit, picking out the bad ones and leaves, then rinsed them in water with a bit of bleach to kill wild yeasts, then rinsed again.

We cleaned the fruit in water with a bit of bleach as we're not relying on wild yeast.

Then we pulped the fruit with a bit of filtered water and a stick blender.  At this point we also threw in a handful of raisins as additional food for the yeast.

Pulping with a stick blender

Lalvin K1-V116 wine yeast, mixed with a bit of room temperature water.

After pulping the fruit with a little water to render it soupy, we added activated wine yeast and pulped the whole mass to aerate and to mix in the yeast thoroughly.

Here's the pulped apples and yeast mixture, ready for the lid.

Sterilized bucket full of the must and yeast, complete with air lock.

Now we ignore it for a week for the first round of fermentation.  Stay tuned.

M