Cider 12 - Winter wheat from the orchard and a bicycle powered apple washer

Another great year of cidering at Five Islands, Maine with a good group of people, excellent weather, and delicious food.

A complementary writeup and different set of photos can be found at Ben's blog.



We arranged for our usual two bins of mixed seconds from Autumn Hills in Groton. Ben and I spent a couple pleasant hours a week and a half before cider at the AH orchard transferring apples from their bins to ours and chatting with Ann and Scott. Many local orchards had little fruit this year due to a late freeze. Autumn Hills escaped the worst of it though and had plenty of apples. I've noticed a lot of smaller apples this year too – possibly a result of drought?

I also picked up an extra two bushels of seconds for my friend from work, Jim. Here he is strapping a bushel box to his bike, with some sweet potato greens on top which we had just picked in the garden.

Ben got a bin of mixed Yarlington and Dabinett from Poverty Lane in NH, and yet another bin from Brackett's in Maine. So we had a nice amount of feedstock. Last year we had a ton of extra apples picked from wild trees by Ben's parents and brought in by cider participants. The abundance was awesome, but strained our capabilities and meant that Saturday was not done until very late and there was more to wrap up on Sunday. Four bins makes plenty of cider but is a better match to the throughput of the equipment and the hands to run it.

I meant to pick one of my five Goldrush apples still hanging on my little tree in my backyard in Somerville to bring as a symbolic contribution, but I forgot.

I took friday off work and spent a few hours fitting up our new huge cartop carrier and packing a large amount of stuff into a small space. Luckily Ned volunteered to transport four corny kegs in his spacious Prius trunk.

We arrived in Five Islands at the end of the day and enjoyed a beautiful sunset over the cove from the lower cabin. 

Soon we were eating burritos with some early arrivals, and Ben led a memorable viking fire barge effort.

Next morning saw the final fitting out of the first attempt at a bike powered apple washer. 

Washing has been our bottleneck step for these last few years, and consumes a lot of labor. It is not especially fun either, since your hands get cold and your clothes wet, so it has been at the top of the list to do something about for a while. The Mainers had knocked together an inclined piece of plastic culvert pipe running on rollerblade wheels with a belt drive from a bike. 

Saturday saw the pipe lined with astroturf and some stationary wooden features arranged to direct the apples while traveling through the apparatus. A hose was rigged to lightly spray water into the upper end. 

A few adjustments were made throughout the day and while I wasn't involved much it seemed like this new addition made a significant impact toward reducing drudgery and increasing throughput. Here is a little video. 

Ben had grown some Warthog winter wheat in between rows in the orchard, and it actually made an impressive amount of grain. Emily, Ben, Beth and some helpers figured out how to thresh it with a weedwhacker in a plastic barrel and winnow with window fans. 

The effective and well-built Country Living grain mill first used last year made another appearance, but built into a cute little pedal stand by Kelsey and her father in law. 

The new stand surely stores better and is easier to transport than the huge bike power stand it was on last year. But it was not as ergonomic to use. We put the flywheel back on and adjusted the gearing a bit, which got us to an ok place for the day's grinding needs. I think perhaps with a bigger flywheel and the right seat, probably anchored to the grinding stand, it could be quite good. Normally you probably don't need to grind as much grain at a time as we wanted to on Saturday, so a drop in efficiency and ease of use in exchange for compact storage size could be a good tradeoff. 

A rotation of pedalers ground up enough wheat to make Ned's apple fritters, cornbread (1/3 wheat) and 6 trays of apple crisp for dinner, plus pancakes for sunday morning. We switched to the corn screw feeder on the mill and ground up 1800g of corn, about half of which was dried down sweet corn from the Stroudwater garden. The cornbread was very tasty this year (recipe listed in last year's writeup, but sugar reduced to 200g), so I think using dried sweet corn is a fine thing to do for cornmeal. It was much lower density than the boughten dent corn I brought for grinding, so I'm not sure how it would turn out if used exclusively. I'm sure the fresh ground and ultra-local wheat added to the flavor.

Becky made a huge pot of veg chili, some leftovers of which we had to push off on the locals on Sunday to reduce the chance of chili spill accident while driving the pot back to Somerville.

We made up 6 trays of apple crisp using a mix of Calville Blanc d'Hiver from Poverty Lane and some apples from my coworker's tree she donated to the cause, which I suspect to be Newtown Pippin. The Calvilles this year were truly fine in flavor, and it is such a pretty looking apple with it's pronounced and distinctive ribbing. Those ridges do make it more troublesome to peel however!

Emily and Child 3 helped prep the apples, as shown at the top of the post. About a 20L pail full.

Here is the stack of butter Becky and I used to cook dinner, warming up on some boards. Healthy country living, eh?! Well, truthfully we don't confine the consumption of outlandish amounts of butter to our trip to Maine…

Our kids had lots of fun running around left up to their own devices. They have hung out with the other kids at this cider event enough times that they get over the awkwardness faster than they used to and get on to having a good time more easily. Some of the activities I saw the pack of younguns engaged in:

- sledding on cardboard and rolling down a big dirt mound
- putting random foods into the hot oil from the apple fritters, including watermelon, cookies, etc.
- making voodoo dolls from sticks and apples and throwing them in the fire
- stick fights
- wheelbarrow rides
- helping run cider, grain production, and dinner

Only minor injuries too, so let's count that as a success.

Duane from Japanese Pattern Challenge dropped by for a little bit. He lives in the neighborhood and I thought it would be fun to meet so I invited him to come over on Saturday. It was cool to meet this talented hobbyist garment maker and craftsman; I can only aspire to get as good as he is at making clothing for oneself. We also chatted briefly about his ongoing project to make a wooden sailboat, which looks amazing so far. Duane brought a box of apples and left with a little cider.

Cidering itself went smoothly; very few equipment issues, and enough people have been to the event enough times that there are many folks around who generally know what should happen and can shepherd things along and keep the process running. We are developing competence as a group!

We got new shirts this year, courtesy once again of the generous Jones family, this time in chocolate brown with white ink. We re-used the chainring/apple drawing from cider 10 because no one felt they had it in them to beat it. New text and layout was done, with the title of this year's event settled as “dry spell”, both for the historic drought in New England and for the residual sugar content of the hard cider we ferment from the year's efforts. We added a tribute to Ben's grandfather, who passed away this year, and without whom our cider event would certainly never have developed in the wonderful way it has.

Some shirts were ordered undyed with black printing, and were layered inside press cloths during loading of pomace. These took a good amount of color, but after a rinse off on Sunday we decided they should go for another year of treatment to gain a darker ciderish hue.

I heard reports that some of the lighter press cloths in the rotation had blown out. I didn't see them myself but there was at least one cloth made of 10oz canvas in there. Looks like 12oz at least is recommended for single layer use. I'll have to make up a few more for next year.

There was enough time on Saturday late afternoon after all the apples were run to start cleaning up and putting things away.

A big bonfire was lit in half of an old oiltank, and a hollow pine log was modified by chainsaw to be an impressive flaming torch.

We brought home plenty of cider for drinking fresh and fermenting.

I'd like to make some more boiled cider syrup, and possibly get around to doing apple cider vinegar this year.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

A Quick and Basic Frame Saw

I bought some rough cut green oak from a local supplier early this spring, for making into some plant trellises and a little perch on a maple tree for the kids. Feeling that this by itself was not enough of a challenge apparently, I decided to try to do a bit of carving on the tops of the posts to make these installations more interesting.

Rather like when I tried to carve the transition pieces for the handrail on my back stairs, I quickly realized I am a terrible wood carver. When I'm trying to remove material, I'm constantly feeling like it is going poorly. I feel as clumsy as if I were trying to stack up marbles with chopsticks while wearing wool mittens. One thought that is difficult to banish is "If only I had a different tool this would be going better...".

With the handrail I ended up using a carving wheel on an angle grinder, but I wanted to try to stick with hand tools on this project. One issue was that the green oak in thick sections will quickly load up even a coarse coping saw blade. My carpentry sized ryoba does pretty well, but the blade is wide so it can't turn in a cut very much. A pruning saw does ok, but mine is not as sharp as it could be and the blade is still pretty wide.

I had the idea of using a bow saw type blade with gnarly teeth to do some of the rough material removal. Bahco/Sandvik makes some nice ones in 530mm length, available from Amazon. I bought one for green wood, one for dry wood.

Now we just needed something to hold the blade and tension it. I sketched up a frame for the blade in Inkscape, printed the parts on large paper and cut them out with scissors to make templates. You can download the SVG file here.

Some well seasoned beech wood was pulled from my stash and chopped to length.

Marked around the template pieces.

Roughed the parts out with the bandsaw.

Sanded the cut edges, eased the corners with the router, then sanded the faces

I made some through mortises using forstner bits on the drill press

followed by some chisel work.

The matching tenons were done with a dozuki saw

and a chisel to finish things up and tune the fit.

The fit and quality of the mortises and tenons leaves something to be desired, and I had cut the center brace piece too short to be able to make the tenons come all the way out the far side of the end pieces.

I made the best of it and figured it would be ok. I beveled the inside edges of the exterior side of the mortises to come down to the meet the end of the tenons, which makes it almost look like I intended them to be short.

For the top tensioner, I used some stainless 8mm OD tubing I had sitting around, which took a nice internal thread for an M6 flat head stainless screw.

The blade is retained with some stainless dowel pins, which fit snugly in cross drilled holes in the wood.

After some test fitting, I finished the three wood pieces with three coats of Waterlox.

The blade actually stretches more than I had anticipated and I had to cut the tension tube at the top a little shorter. Still could use more trimming in fact to get more tension, but the shorter it gets the more poorly the tenoned center brace fits the side pieces.

How is the performance? Well, I quickly determined having this saw is not making me better at carving. Ugh! But on the plus side I have a handsome homemade saw hung up in the shop, and Child 3 had fun doing the project with me.

Tapping the Urban Maple, and Boiled Cider

Last year, I read about tapping trees that are NOT sugar maple at the blog of Anna Hess, and I resolved to tap the handful of trees on our small city lot. We have two Sycamore Maples and two Norway Maples. I had no idea what to expect, but I thought it would be fun to try. The easiest way I could come up with to test the waters was a piece of metal tube stuck in a hole, with a length of tubing run down to a container sitting on the ground.



I bought a length of 3/8" stainless tube from McMaster, and bent and cut some sections using tools at work.

McMaster also supplied some 3/8" ID tygon tubing. Probably cheaper to buy at the homebrew store, but I'm pretty lazy.

 and for collection containers I used the rectangular plastic carboys I normally use but once a year to transport cider from Maine to Somerville.

In mid-February, daytime temps were (weirdly) already frequently above freezing, so I figured we better get on with the tapping even though it was much earlier than typical dates cited for the area online.

We drilled a hole maybe 60mm deep in the south face of each tree

Stuffed in the metal tubes,

dropped the carboy on the ground, and stuck the end of the tube into it.

Of course the next day there was high wind and it blew the empty carboys all over the yard!

I meant to tie them to the trees, but never got around to it. Once they get some sap in them they don't blow down as much.

We left the taps in for four or five weeks, during which time the sap never really ran all that heavy. We only got a significant quantity from our biggest sycamore maple, and a little from the smaller sycamore maple. The Norways put out close to zero. We sampled cold maple sap straight from the tree, which apparently is getting trendy as a health drink, in the same vein as coconut water. It tasted just like water.

Each saturday, we went outside and dumped the carboys into a big pot and slowly boiled down in the kitchen. It wasn't all that much sap (about 10L at most), so I didn't worry too much about putting the water into the air in the house or the gas I burned evaporating the water. Just cooked it on medium heat with the exhaust fan on low all day.

When it got down to a liter or so of liquid, I strained it through a fine stainless sieve into a small pot.

This was boiled down further until it looked thick enough, then I strained it through the seive lined with a piece of muslin.

The first week's sap cooked down into a whitish, light colored syrup which had a strange flavor.

The following weeks' sap cooked down to dark brown syrup with a closer to usual taste, but still quite different from regular maple syrup. I stupidly forgot about the last week's syrup while it was in final cookdown and I burned the crap out of it. Took forever to clean that pot. Oopsie.

If I hadn't burned the last week's charge, I think total volume of syrup would have been about 500ml, though I cooked it down a little too much so it is pretty thick. Still tastes weird. More just sugary, without that maple-ey flavor you expect in maple syrup. But with a little bit of a strange flavor that is hard to place.

We've eaten some, but no one particularly likes it. I've been using it to sweeten other things (e.g. whipped cream).

One minor issue in collection was that when the sap was running, a significant quantity would spill out from around the tubing. So maybe a tapered tap or tapered drill bit would help with sealing the tap better at the bark interface. We also got a lot of drowned ants in the carboys and tubes toward the end of our experiment. These come out easily if you pour through the fine seive going from carboy to pot.

So while yield was ok, the product itself wasn't worth the trouble. I think the sap to syrup ratio was about the 40:1 that is often quoted for maple. I doubt we will tap these trees again next year. They do an urban tapping and boil down at the nearby Growing Center in Somerville, but I haven't tasted the output from it and I don't know what kind of trees they tap down there. My friend Ben's parents collect and process quite a bit of maple from trees around where they live in Five Islands, ME, and it turns out great.


Apple Syrup
For some years I've been meaning to try cooking down some of the sweet cider we make every year in Maine with a group of friends and acquaintances. I've bought plenty of Boiled Cider from Wood's Cider Mill in VT. They make a fantastic product, and I prefer it to maple on pancakes and waffles. It really boosts apple pie if you put some in the filling in place of sugar. Once I asked them by email what apples go into the product, and this is what they had to say:

Holly- We usually use a large percentage of Macintosh. At least 2/3rds. Also might have some empire, golden delicious. macoun, possibly northern spy, pound sweet, a very few red delicious, and some wild apples. But mainly Macs for consistent flavor. What kinds do you grow? Graft on some Ashmeads Kernel if you like tart apples. Willis

The other week I fetched a few bottles of cider from the deep freeze for Child 3's birthday party, and brought up an extra 4L of cider to try boiling down. One of the great things about apple syrup is that you only need to reduce it 7:1 rather than 40:1 like maple. I bet you could can the syrup too, and thus keep it preserved in concentrated form on the shelf rather than taking up a bunch of freezer space.

With this first cider cookdown, I boiled it for some hours one afternoon until it looked thick enough. It was actually still pretty liquid, but you have to anticipate how much it will thicken on cooling. Well, it turns out I cooked it too far and it turned to a consistency thicker than honey in the fridge. But it is easy to spread with a knife on pancakes and tastes wonderful. From 4L of cider I filled up a half liter jar with syrup, with about a 1/5L extra which I traded for some homemade fermented kraut with my neighbor.

Compared to the maple, the apple syrup was much easier to make (once you have cider of course, as we nearly always do), and tasted great. We'll surely make more of this. Might be a good way to use up extra cider at our cider get-together if in future we have another huge fruit harvest year like last year. We could cook down 20L at a time over a turkey fryer outside.

Ah, apples give so much. Pretty flowers, fresh eating, sauce, pies, sweet cider, hard cider, aftershave, and now syrup. I'd like to try vinegar too, but have not got around to it. If you have made cider vinegar yourself, any useful tips? I could start with either sweet or hard cider.

Violet's Tiny Embroidered Buckwheat Hull Pillow

She has had this project going for a couple years now, but recently wrapped it up.



First she embroidered the muslin with a design to please her american girl doll Ruthie, which she received from grandma Mary some time ago. She is almost done with a dress she designed and made for Ruthie, but perhaps more on that later.

After the embroidery was done, she sewed it up with the Singer 99, leaving an opening to put in filling.

While we were in Maine last fall for cider 11, we milled some buckwheat Ben had grown on his small orchard up there using a bike powered Country Living grain mill. The first step was to run the grain through at a wide burr spacing to crack off the hulls.

I think I had told Child 1 that I had once spent a very pleasant night in a ryokan in Kyoto sleeping on a pillow stuffed with buckwheat hulls. So she asked if we could save some hulls to use in a pillow, and Dave obligingly swept up a shopping sack full for us to take home.

The bag of hulls sat on the shelf in the basement for a few months. We pulled it out and devised a scheme for cutting down on the extraneous material in the hull filling. First we riddled the hulls through a coarse mesh to take out leaves, sticks, and straw. For this step the hulls pass through the mesh, but bigger stuff stays behind.

Next we tossed in a sieve for a few minutes, the idea being that the hulls would stay above the seive, but smaller bits and dirt would fall through. Lastly we hand picked out a few remaining bits of debris.

We filled the pillow using the cleaned up hulls through a funnel.

Child 1 hand stitched the opening up.

Nice doll pillow!

I wonder if we should take enough hulls next year to make a person sized pillow? Not sure if Ben is growing buckwheat this year again or not.