This year yet again we pressed some asian pear and mixed apple juice to make hard cider. I used a press that a friend of mine has access to via membership through a local tool library in Seattle, but I recon you can also buy one if you will press enough apples or use it frequently to justify its expense.
Here we were pressing some juice from mixed asian pears from a single nice mixed grafted tree, it produces one 5 gallon bucket of pears which give us about 2 gallons of juice:
you notice the light colour from the pear juice compares to a different colour from the apples:
To Make either apple or pear hard cider is easy…. you can use any fermentation container really, even growlers and if you don’t have an air lock, simply put some aluminum foil over it, the gas will escape and prevent anything going inside, the positive pressure should prevent anything going inside as well.
Crush and put some campden tablets into your fermentation container and let its do its thing for 24 hours, and allows gas exchange so that sulfur dioxide can escape. This process will kill any bad things from the collecting process of the pears/apples, bacteria and wild yeasts.
you can use many different yeasts, including wine yeasts.. some people naturally ferment it with natural yeast, but this is more risky and you never know how it will turn out, as each time the yeast and results could be and will be different…
After 24 hours, add your yeast of choice and let it ferment. To clear later you can cold crash it in the fridge for the cider to clear up, and there are many different natural agents you can add to clear up the cider as well, such as bentonite clay.
You can even transfer to another container and leave any sediment behind to further finish the fermentation and help to clear up the cider, which is recommended. Once all done, you can naturally carbonate with priming sugars or force carbonate with co2 gas if you already have this equipment.
Cheers!
