A poor year

Scrumping for apples today. But a poor crop in my own garden. The few on my three-year-old Bramley trees were small, and the wild neglected orchard nearby was just as bad. Half a dozen apples and not a single pear, where normally I’d collect twenty bags. Even my local crab apple tree yielded only a dozen fallers.  Fortunately my friend Kevin had a few Russetts and a reasonable crop on his America Mother tree, which never seems to fail.  But I had to supplement all these with some nasty crab apples collected further afield to get enough juice to fill my 20 litre container. I presume the weather was bad when the blossom was out, and the bees stayed indoors.

I didn’t expect much sugar, but to my surprise the starting SG was 1.050.  Fermented out that would give me over 6% alcohol, which is a bit more than I want, so I diluted it down to 1.045.  I’ll add a little sugar at bottling to make sparkling cider.

I wonder what they’ll make of it at the Lowdham apple day.

Jim Thornton