In other news…

Six carboys of cider racked to secondary this weekend.  Winter hit New England hard, like it means business, and it put me in a cooking mood.   Four loaves of Sherwood Inn dark bread baked.  Several butternut squash that were starting to get soft roasted, pureed, and frozen.  About a gallon of low-grease, low-sugar granola baked.  25 black bean burgers cooked and frozen.  Big tray of mixed root veggies from the garden roasted with herbs and olive oil.

Posts I could write

Six carboys are ticking away happily in my office closet, and today I took apart the pedal grinder and scraped the apple sludge out of the crevices – hopefully by next year we’ll have a more streamlined, easily cleaned assembly based on this year’s successful architecture. A lot has been going on, and I haven’t had the chance to do much of it justice in this blog. As a placeholder, here’s a list of posts I’ve thought to write recently:

• I picked out five new apple trees from Fedco to plant in the empty spots in the orchard next spring.
• The garden is pretty much cleared out; I harvested about a bushel of root veggies (potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips) from an area smaller than our small kitchen. This makes me unreasonably happy. Root vegetables seem to have a dietary and spiritual substance that other garden vegetables lack.
• Alexis is half way through her last year of med school, studying for the national exam. Soon she will be interviewing with residency programs around the New England area.
• I’ve been playing a lot of music recently, and today I bought a decent quality fiddle and bow to replace my rock-bottom beginner hardware. Probably one of the bigger discretionary purchases I’ve made.
• At Kauf’s suggestion I recently read Deep Economy by Bill McKibben. I’m generally sympathetic to McKibben; long ago I was influenced by his End of Nature. But I can’t decide whether the book is potentially prescient, or merely hopeful.
• Meanwhile, the actual economy continues to falter. Venerable financial institutions have stumbled; a fifth of mortgage holders owe more than their property is worth, and folks are too scared to shop – it seemed the day would never come.
• On the work front, Holly and I have made what may turn out to be a modest advance in an aspect of solar cell processing technology.
• The financial crisis has dramatically changed the landscape facing renewable energy companies. The birth rate of cleantech startups may be slowing, and existing companies are being advised to cut costs and prepare for a rough time.
• The US just picked a smart, progressive black guy to be the next president – how cool is that? Unfortunately, he’s taking office just as a once-in-a-century multifaceted shitstorm blows in. On the bummer side, California wrote marriage discrimination into their state constitution.

There’s probably more, but I’m grasping for some sense of how it all fits together, what the scene taken as a whole portends. So much is up in the air. On the one hand, the headwind that cleantech faces as a result of the financial crisis confirms a suspicion I’ve long felt. I worried that the general public’s appetite for clean energy was merely a pocketbook issue (in the case of fuel prices) and a good-times magnanimity (in the case of climate change), and that interest would evaporate at the first sign of adversity. And, at least anecdotally, that indeed seems to be the mood at least among venture capital types. On the other hand, there seems to be a reasonable chance that Obama could make renewable energy a major focus of a massive Keynesian intervention to prop up the economy, which would obviously provide a major boost to our efforts.

It’s not at all clear just how deep the economic problems will go, or how fundamental the causes are. A glance at the Case-Schiller index indicates that the inflated housing situation was pretty much doomed to come to a sticky end given the huge leverage involved, but it’s debatable the extent to which food and energy scarcity and global warming are feeding the flames.  As oil crept up on $150/bbl the historical comparisons were mainly to the 1970s; now with housing and energy deflation folks are talking more about the 1930s.  For several years now Holly, Keith, Brandon, and I have kept up a running semi-joke about “The Hard Times”; a sort of worst-case scenario in which energy and climate factors cause an economic collapse that throws much of modernity for a loop and leaves small communities to fend for themselves with improvised technology.  For the most part the HT (or, for Brandon, HTv2.0 – postulating Hobbes’ State of Nature as the original release) are good for a reliable laugh, and provide a satisfying narrative tying together many things that I like to do anyway – e.g. pedal-power contraptions, growing fruit and vegetables, playing home-made music, developing small-scale renewable energy, brewing, etc. (I was pleased to find that barrels of homemade hard cider were the primary item of regional trade in Jim Kunstler’s recent fictional account of tHT.)  But it is a bit disconcerting that a tale we were kicking around in pre-Katrina, pre-oil shock, pre-cleantech bubble era seems to get more and more plausible by the month.

Fourth annual cider weekend – fantastic!

Cider year four: we went to Five Islands this weekend with trailer in tow, carrying the pedal grinder, screw press, and several hundred pounds of cider apples from Poverty Lane.  Around 15 friends joined us to help pedal, press, eat, and drink cider, and it was definitely the best cidering we’ve had so far.

(more pics to come – grabbed the wrong CD from my mom)

We arrived mid-afternoon on Friday; Joshua and Kelsey had arrived a day or two before.  Other folks turned up over the course of the evening, and we caught up around the fire at the old homestead, played some old-time tunes, and of course drank cider.  Saturday morning dawned mostly clear and pretty warm; there was some thought of getting an early start, but we had been up pretty late the night before, and it was nearly ten by the time we got going.  Folks set to work washing apples in the great flexible multicolored tubs that my mom got me for Christmas, then feeding them into the pedal mill. We started off with a couple hundred pounds of fruit from the two trees in our NH yard, to make sweet cider.   Alea’s friend Amit turned out to be a champion pedaler, but most folks got a chance to pedal and force the apples into the grinder’s maw.  The modified press with serrated cutters and polyethylene post-crushers performed as before, producing a fine pulp with almost no crunchy bits.  Soon we switched over to the (hard) cider fruit, and were perhaps half way through the apples by lunch, which featured a very fine vegetable soup prepared by Sharon and Brandon, sandwiches, and of course cider.  Grinding and pressing resumed, and it soon became clear that we would finish comfortably on Saturday afternoon.  Kelsey, Joshua, and Andy did yeoman service on the pressing side, and Shefali was mix mistress, distributing each type of cider among nine carboys.   Ultraviolet toddled around and played with the dogs, while Jeff and Ellen (very old family friends) dropped by to check out the scene, and Jason and Nancy stopped by with their new baby.

We finished sometime after four, having produced about 87.5 gallons of cider.  A rough calculation of yield put the numbers in the low 60s, a bit of a disappointment after the 70+ performance at Pete’s a few weeks back, but we were working faster and the fruit was not so ripe.  There’s definitely more work to be done in the pressing department though – I’m still interested in the continuous press concept, but I’m beginning to think that maybe the key is just overwhelming pressure – and that a pedal-powered hydraulic press might be in order.

After cleaning up the press and loading it back on the trailer, we retired to my folks’ house for dinner (fajitas and cider), merriment, and more old-time music.  Saturday night featured a wild wind and rain storm which cleared my mid-morning, by which point we had eaten our fill of blueberry pancakes.  Finding ourselves with no more apples to press, we took a leisurely walk around the North End, and returned for a nice lunch provided by Team Elgart, whereupon the majority of the revelers dispersed.  Alea and Amit stayed to enjoy what turned out to be a glorious warm, sunny afternoon, then they too departed.

Regarding cider equipment performance, things went so well on the grinding side, so much so that it’s not obvious that much needs changing.  A couple of minor failure modes were observed.  The set screws holding the drive sprocket on the primary post-crusher drum loosened up a couple times, causing them to stop spinning.  A key or more robust set screw arrangement is in order for next year.  Second, with some types of apples (primarily Baldwin, which were the hardest and least ripe), the pulp seemed hesitant to feed through the post crushers, and it pooled somewhat in the grinder portion.  The Baldwins could be fed through in combination with other apples, and it wasn’t too big a deal, but worth tinkering with to get better performance.  I have a suspicion that if the crushers were positioned to receive the material that’s flung off of the cutters directly in the nip (rather than at a ~45 degree angle as at present, for convenience given the pre-existing hardware), it would feed much better.  For an experiment, we removed one of the post crusher drums at the end, which resulted in a much freer feed of Baldwin pulp, and a somewhat coarser pulp, as would be expected, though fine enough to be respectable.  The added sprockets and additional timing chain added significantly to the noise, and it seems reasonable to propose that the primary drive chain (the one that transmits power from the jackshaft to the cutter drum and the primary post-crusher drum) be replaced by a stout timing belt.  The design may be sufficiently refined at this point to warrant rebuilding for next year in plastic and corrosion-resistant metals, with a construction that’s better suited to washdown and provides a stiffer interface to the bicycle.

On the pressing side, the rate was much improved by the dual-stack design, as evidenced by the fact that we produced as much cider this year in one day than we made last year in two, but the yield was still not up where we’d like it to be.  As mentioned above, a hydraulic solution may be called for, but this will have to be the subject of another post.

Many thanks to all who pitched in – cider should be ready in time for Christmas!

71.6+%!!

Cidering at the Colliers’ was a great success.  We took the rig over there on the flat-bed trailer at about noon, after spending nearly an hour in Jo-Ann fabrics trying to buy five yards of cotton drill to cut more pieces of press cloth out of.  Fall weather must trigger something in the septuagenarian brain; the little old ladies were out in droves buying cozy fleece and flannel.  Anyway, we set up the pedal grinder on their back deck and got to work.  The new blades and post-crusher worked just as well as last night’s quick experiment indicated they would, and the bed extension and new set of press grates made the pressing operation run much smoother.  In a bit over four hours we processed 352 pounds of apples and produced 252 pounds of juice, for a remarkable 71.6% yield, not counting the stuff that we drank while we were pressing.  We have thus met our goal of matching the performance of the garbage disposal grinder with pedal-powered equipment.

All in all the whole operation ran very smoothly; we produced around 31 gallons in less than four hours, and surely could have made more if we had paid more attention to efficient choreography.  The fruit was a combination of MacIntosh, Summer Treat, and Empire I think, and it pressed out to a powerful 1.056 specific gravity.  The taste was sweet, rich, and full; it would almost have to be cut with water to be truly refreshing.  Emily Blood joined us from the start, and Rob and Janet came by later on, followed by Elfie and Ruth at the end.  After we cleaned up we had a nice dinner with salad, bread, and a curry soup that Emily made, followed by a formidable chocolate peanut butter pie that Ben (Pete’s wife) made.  We then retired to the living room and played tunes; Ruth brought her cello, which added substantially to our usual ensemble.

With the recent upgrades to press and pedal grinder, the equipment has in my mind attained a level of performance that is fully satisfactory for our present needs.  Further improvements (such as the belt press) can proceed at a relaxed pace.  Also of note, I made and tested a mockup to determine whether the interleaved disk concept would work with the press cloth that we use.  I used a jigsaw to cut about 35 arc-shaped chunks, with a 6″ diameter and maybe 2″ tall, out of scrap pine and plywood.  I attached these to a piece of plywood using hot glue in a pattern corresponding to the intended layout of the interleaved discs, and used the resulting assembly as the top plate of the screw press.  The result was that the cloth didn’t pouch down into the gaps between the rollers much at all, and the top layer seemed to press out fine.  Based on that, I think the interleaved-disk continuous press is a viable concept, though I think it may be difficult to truly finish the job with the interleaved disk press, since we won’t be able to leave the pomace in there long enough for the last few percent of the cider to come out.

Not half the calories, but half the dollars

Not long ago I suggested that while it was unrealistic to suggest that most people produce the majority of their food calories (short of a massive uprooting of the sort the Cambodians were once famous for), a more modest cultural shift could result in people producing enough to offset the majority of their own food dollars. This time of year that almost seems possible.

Overall I’d rate the performance of our garden this summer as marginal. We were out of state for most of May, June, and July, with only brief visits home in which I did my best to get things in the ground. As a result we missed the peas and the first beans, a lot of lettuce went by, things got really weedy, and my tomato starts got sunburned. Still, we have come to the point in August where it produces more fresh organic produce than we can eat on a continuing basis. Last night we had a meal that was easily over 50% home-produced, at least on a dollar-based accounting.

Final kegs bottled

Well, on the first day of March I finally bottled the last of the 07 batches – a keg of strong single-variety Roxbury Russet cider (9%) which I put up still in Bordeaux bottles, and one of the curiously sweet stuff from blended juice I bought from Poverty Lane.  The later I carbonated to about 25 psi (at garage temperature) and put in cap-able champagne bottles.  Two kegs, 8 carboys, and a couple buckets full of random cider equipment are corralled in the corner of my office, ready for next fall – cider season begins again in about 7 months.  Of course, by that time we will have built a gate, fenced the new orchard, and planted or transplanted about 27 trees, so I’m sure the time will go quickly.

Running the counter-pressure bottle filler is starting to get tiresome, and while filling bottles I’ve been tinkering in my mind with a design for a two-position semiautomatic counter-pressure rig.  The basic idea is to have one bottle filling while capping and replacing a second.  A further refinement involves a valve and a sensor on each one (either weight-based or capacitive) such that the flow of cider is cut off automatically at the right point and the bottle begins to decompress while you’re doing something else.  I’ll see if I can pull it off before next December.

Bottling Blueberry Apple Cider

This evening I bottled about 4 gallons of blueberry apple cider that I kegged last week.  I didn’t carbonate it, so I put it in wine bottles with synthetic corks (like most of my supplies, my bottles come from the Modern Brewer in Cambridge).  This was a highly experimental brew produced by adding a gallon of Trader Joe’s 100% blueberry juice to about 3.5 gallons of a late cider apple blend produced by Steve Wood and company at Poverty Lane/Farnum Hill up the road, fermented as usual with Red Star Pasteur champagne yeast.  Steve won’t hear of blending other fruit into cider “There’s not room in your liver for that stuff!” but I think it came out pretty well, pleasantly tart with a nice sprightly blueberry zing. and the deep red color of beet juice.  I’ve also got a keg full of straight cider from the same batch, and a funny thing happened – while the blueberry stuff came out quite dry, the straight cider that was pitched from the same starter and fermented side-by-side with the blueberry stuff finished out noticeably sweet, with a few points of sugar left in it – it’s the first time I’ve had a batch that stopped short of complete dryness.  Three years in to our cidering project I’ve developed a taste for the dry cider that’s our customary product, but it’s nice to have some sweet stuff for a change and I suspect it will prove popular among the less dedicated cider enthusiasts in our crowd.  Since the same cider with blueberry in it went much drier, I can only guess that the cider was short of some nutrient vital to the fermentation process.  Anyway, an interesting comparison.  My mom knows people who operate blueberry barrens Down East, so next year I might try pressing wild blueberries for more intense blueberry flavor.

As it happened I also baked a batch of multigrain bread while bottling, and I can report that little could be more satisfying on a snowy evening than sitting in a rocking chair by the wood stove with warm fresh-baked bread, Vermont butter,  a glass of homemade cider, and a laptop, blogging the evening away…

Here’s the bread and cider:

And here’s to give an idea of the color of the cider – the camera hasn’t got it quite right – it looks a bit more purple than this- but this is close:

Snow and Cider

The snow keeps falling, never more than 6 or 8 inches at a time, but it has piled up to the point where it came most of the way to my knees as I carried the compost out to the pile.  After so many years of lame winters, it’s exciting to have one that’s living up to the New England reputation.  Like most contractors in the northern latitudes, my dad plows driveways in the winter, and he’s already plowed more times this year than he did all last season.

I’ve been busy traveling and doing engineering stuff (I’ve decided on a new job, working on high efficiency solar cells), but the last two carboys have been ticking along in the closet, and the two kegs of 07 cider are chilling in a drift outside the door, to be bottled this afternoon.  The blueberry cider is producing noticeably more gas than the straight apple cider despite less volume and receiving somewhat less than half of the starter; there must be something in the blueberry juice that the critters (Red Star Champagne yeast) find nutritious.  I’ve already cleaned out the airlock once, and it’s already getting some more gunk in it; maybe I should start using a blowoff tube.

07 Cider Roundup

The few wizened apples left on the trees in the yard are frozen solid, and Poverty Lane is about done pressing for the season, so as of mid December I’m finally cut off from sources of quality cider, so it’s time to take stock of year 3.

We made a total of 13 carboys of hard cider:

• 2 jugs that Brock and I  made from early-season Poverty Lane apples, by the garbage disposal method
• 8 jugs of mixed mid-season cider that we pressed at the shindig in Maine, using pedal power
• 1 jug of single-variety Roxbury that we pressed at the same time
• 1 jug of late season juice, purchased from Poverty Lane
• 1 jug of blueberry-apple, Pov + Trader Joe’s

Adding to that around 30-35 gallons of fresh cider, and the year’s production is on the order of 100 gallons, corresponding to perhaps 1200 lbs of apples.   The internet says apple productivity ranges from 8000 to 15000 lbs per acre, so once our initial 1/3 acre orchard in Maine comes into bearing we are going to have significantly more fruit to deal with, and there are further varieties that I’m itching to plant as well.  Time to start thinking about that upgraded press concept!

Cider Factory

With the temperature in the garage finally edging below freezing in a mid-December cold snap, it was time to do something with the four carboys that were settling quietly on top of the table saw. So yesterday we went into production, and bottled two batches of cider – about 10 gallons or 48 750 ml champagne bottles. When these hobby craft projects take on lives of their own and try to eat a whole weekend, Becky sighs and calls this strange compulsion toward anachronistic productivity “The Factory”.  This time it was the cider bottling factory.

I started by sanitizing two Cornelius kegs, reassembling the fittings, and siphoning the cider from two 5-gallon carboys into the kegs.  By tilting the carboy and arranging the keg and carboy at suitable heights, it is possible to siphon cleanly down to the last pint or so of sludge in the bottom.  The next step is carbonation, from a 5 pound CO2 cylinder with a cheap single-stage regulator from the homebrew store.  I rearranged the tubing to flow CO2 into the outlet of the keg, such that it was forced down the dip tube to bubble up through the cider.  To carbonate quickly, I set the regulator to 35 psi and agitated the carboys for a few minutes, which forms fine bubbles inside the keg to speed diffusion of the gas into the liquid.  The solubility is significantly higher at cold temperatures, so it helps that the cider is still ~32F.  We set the quantity of CO2 by taste, but it seems to amount to around 20-25 psi when the cider is cold.

Then, we set up the bottling line on the kitchen counter and go to work.  It looks something like this:

Alexis washes the bottles using a pressure-actuated valve that screws onto the faucet of the kitchen sink,  then sanitizes them with a pump-action fountain sanitizer and inverts them in a pot to drain.  I operate the bottling system, which I borrowed from Holly; one of these days I’m going to make one for myself.  A counterpressure bottling rig is basically a two-way valve that serves to pre-pressurize the bottle with CO2 before introducing the cider, and to control the flowrate of cider into the bottle by regulating the flow of gas out of a fitting at the top.  Holly made his from parts ordered from McMaster-Carr, but lots of designs are available for sale on the internet.    To operate it, you introduce the flow tube on the bottom of the valve assembly into the bottle and seat the rubber stopper in the mouth of the bottle so it seals, then move the valve to the gas inlet side briefly to pressurize the bottle with CO2 from the regulator.  You then quickly move the valve to the cider inlet side, and cider begins flowing into the bottle, driven by the pressure in the keg, which is also hooked up to the regulator.  The flowrate of cider is controlled by manipulating a threaded fitting at the base of the valve; the gas escapes from the top of the bottle via a concentric tube that surrounds the flow tube.  When the cider reaches the desired level, you move the valve to the center (off) position, and the remaining pressure bleeds off through the fitting.  The net result is that the bottle is filled without triggering the CO2 to come out of solution.  Alexis then caps the bottles with a lever-action capping apparatus, and places the bottles back in the case.

The temperature continued below freezing, and I worried about the two glass carboys in the garage, so as soon as the kegs were empty I cleaned them and siphoned the cider from the next two batches.  I then brought the kegs inside, and carbonated the cider while it was still cold.  I think I’ll need more bottles to finish off those batches though.  We also have one six-gallon carboy on secondary with the single-variety Roxbury Russet cider in it; it’s taken forever to settle but is finally starting to clear so I may rack it again, or just let it sit until I have a keg available for it.

I also started one last batch of cider, with juice I bought from Steve Wood and company at Poverty Lane.  I got 9.5 gallons, and started a 6 gallon batch, plus an experimental batch with a gallon of Trader Joe’s pure blueberry juice mixed in.  Steve is a purist in matters of cider, and would rather drink clorox than cider adulterated with other fruit, but in the interest of science I feel compelled to try experiment beyond the bounds of tradition, and make my own mistakes.  In my defense I’ll note that that West County Cider down in MA also makes a blueberry-apple cider, though I’ve never tried it.  It was kind of cool – the Poverty Lane cider was almost 8% potential alcohol while the blueberry was just over 5% – significantly less dense, and the blue juice mixed with the cider but stayed mostly on top, so the contents of the carboy segregated by color.  Here’s the cider, including the one with funny purple juice – don’t tell Steve.