Cider making workshop

Went to a great cider-making workshop on Monday night. It was in Hulme, and organised as a joint workshop for Abundance Manchester and the Manchester Permaculture Network. It was a fun night – quartering the apples, shredding them and then crushing to get the juice, with a good break for eating all the delicious food everybody had brought to share. Everybody got some juice to take home too – we haven’t made ours into Cider, we drank it instead and it was delicious!

The workshop gave a good grounding of the basics – I’d need to do a bit more reading before I was confident to turn the juice into our own cider. I’d also learn how to pasteurise the juice so that we could bottle a year’s supply for the kids too.

As soon as our apple crops start to build up we’ll definitely look at making our own juice and cider. After all, cider is a great way to preserve apples for consumption through the year!

Here are some of the pictures from the workshop to give you an idea of the process:

Agnes (who did an excellent job of organising the event) and Matt (who did an excellent job of teaching us about cider making) putting the shredded apple into the press:

The first apple juice starting to flow:

Matt showing us how to measure the sugar level in the juice, and therefore the anticipated alcohol level of your cider (6.5% in this case). You can see the apple shredded in the back of the shot – quite an impressive set of blades in there!

We start to run out of containers (and everyone has already drunk as much as they could!)

The finished product – delicious!

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