G'day Guy's,
Well after reading something like 100 or more of Geoff's and Olivers homebrew recipes I reckon after a 12 year drought on homebrew it is time to start again. Anyway where I work we process apples, pears plums etc and last week I got a 22kg wino pack ( sealed bag) which is good for 12 months before opening. The process this apple went thru was basically primary crusher, coarse finisher, fine finisher the thru a pasteurizer and basically is apple sauce.
First Q would this be suitable for making some cider or should I just feed to to my lowline Angus cow for a treat. As we have close to 100 ton of apple at work if this isn't the easiest way to make cider I could just go grab a few sacks of apples and make my own crusher and juicer. Although I do like cider, beer is my favorite drop but the missus loves cider and by making a few brews should keep her off my beer for good.
A good friend did suggest using champagne yeast so we're on the hunt for that but the Q really is as this stuff so so mushy I'm thinking of just putting the lot into my soon to be cider fermenter, topping it up with hot water so the yeast has some some temp to kick in. As the stuff has been pasteurized I don't need to worry about wild yeast.
As it does get down to below zero here I'm going to convert my old gas fridge into a fermenting fridge. I'll put a heater element out of photocopier which runs on 24 volts DC and run it straight off my shed batterybank. For keeping the temp right I'll program a pic micro controller to switch the heater on at a certain temp and use a bit of fuzzy logic to keep the right temp range.
A bit much on a simple cider topic but eh Guy's reading the website for months I'm finally hooked.
Cheers Bryan