This is always the busiest time of year for the cider maker – collecting apples, hopefully lots of them.
And perhaps the most exciting as you don’t know how the cider apples will be until you pick them from the orchards for cider making.
The following is an excerpt from Orchard Pig Cider recent harvest report:
“Harvest is upon us sooner than we expected!
We’ve done our final grass topping and got the sheep out of the orchard. The crop is looking pretty good afterthe recent rains, with good sugar in the fruit. We’ve done all our final checks of the equipment sowe’re ready to go!
The Morgan Sweets are dropping already so they are ripe and we have started to harvest them.
Last year the tannins in the cider apples were really high, with relatively low sugar levels. This year we are predicting that sugarlevels will be high and tannin levels will be low. It means we will be paying close attention to the blend so we make an interesting brew.
September is always an exciting month. We’ve been waiting twelve months to see what kind of crop we’re going to get and we just don’t know until we pick the apple, both juice and cider, and taste it for the first time”.
Based on current apple collecting methods – by hand you can collect up to 1/4 tonne of apples per day, and well over 1 tonne by machine. This is confirmed by the recent tweets from our cider producer friends on Twitter:
Tell us how your apple crop is looking this year, share your thoughts about when to pick and if we can ever have the correct combination of sunshine and rain for that reserve cider!
Leave your comments below. We’d love to hear from you.