we are here today to make some apple cider my name is Jamie cotton and I'm here with Matt
Bollinger he is our director of IT and digital marketing and we've been at Stark brothers just
overloaded with apples we've got a ton of them in our orchard and wanted to do something with
them and that you've been making some apple cider at home yes so we've got three or four
apple trees in our house and every year we get a ton apples and we like to eat them fresh and we
like to make baked with them but at the end we still end up with a ton and we can press
them into apple cider so we thought we'd do that with some of our surplus here at Stark Brothers
this fall yes I stole them out from behind the computers to show us the way so one thing that
we did find you actually experimented with a couple different varieties a few weeks back we
did one with all Granny Smith and Golden Delicious strain and today we found some golden sheen apples
and another strain of the Red Delicious and then also a high green apple which is a Jonathan and
reign of Jonathan yeah yeah so we've got double movement kind and you can play around with them
we're actually gonna link in the video a list of a lot of apples that are great for cider and
then also we have a collection of cider apples here at star brothers so you'll be able to see
what different ones you can use but the most important thing to know is that you want to
balance part and sweets and you want to different flavor profiles going into your cider to make it
delicious oh yeah well not why don't you want a little bit [ __ ] quid sure yeah so we have this
is a tabletop Pressman for just somebody with a small orchard in their backyard it this isn't
going to be producing a ton of cider but um so the tabletop press you can get this online maybe
around $100 or so it's some of the different retailers so this will press the cider and the
apples and then before that though you need to chop the apples up and you'll grind them they
call it a pumice but it's basically just mashed apples and so if you click here on this thing
there's some teeth on it and you will throw them into the hopper will grind them up they will put
that mashed into the press and smush them down and then that's federal sector flow so to go
through the Apple crusher it's actually best to quarter your apples and you've actually already
cleans these we wash them and they're ready to go but as with all homegrown apples you know
they come with their spots and they're their little imperfections and if you have anything
that's like but is you know rotten or starting to rot you want to take that out of your out of
your cider mix you kind of want to treat it like anything that you wouldn't eat you shouldn't put
in your cider so that's kind of the attitude and then you just take your apples and you quarter
that removing any bad spot and then take the press they go move the press out of the way and you're
set up generally water shoot this writer is not like an industrial one it's also table top one and
some apples a little softer and you can throw a lot in there a little bit more dense these
ones here you know maybe one Apple at times it's pretty easy and you're just a couple apples worth
so we are about probably halfway through with this batch we want to just kind of take a peek
up and see how things are going it's got a nice fine mash okay Jamie it looks like
we're just about full here on this bucket so I'm going to go ahead and pull the grinder off
and we'll dump the comments into the press and see how full that makes the press decide if we
need to grind up any more from there so let's this out of the way we've got the press here
so a couple things - we have a nylon mesh bag in here and this will keep all of the seeds and
the skin and everything from being pressed down and running into the cider this came
this bag came with the press here other people use all different materials some people don't
use any but we found this works pretty well so there's a hole in the bottom you slide it over
it won't stay but it'll help us centered
and then we want to bring the mesh up over the top and then the press
has some additional pieces here this is the wooden section that will actually
be pressing the handles down and then we'll use a couple blocks and we'll start out with
just a few blocks and we'll just keep adding blocks as the press goes down
all right and then we have a crank arm and we will start cranking this down so it's just a
big long giant threaded screw is basically one of the things I learned from John Logan
who's one of the descendants of James stark our company founder he has a side business
business where he makes hard cider and he makes you know traditional cider as well
but I was making sided with him this summer at one of the conference's we were at and he
was explaining how you don't want to crank down too fast and just keep it going you when they
put some pressure on it let it run and let it do this thing and then come back every couple
minutes and crank down some more and that way you'll get more cider if it has more time to
just release its juices versus just smashing the heck out of it so that's what we'll do so
this could take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes to get down this this size probably closer to 15
minutes 10 or 15 minutes really go and forget it his advice to kind of let it do its thing
all right so we've reached the end of the height of our blocks here and our
lever here is not gonna be able to go much further so what we basically want to do
now Jamie is back the pressure off I'm gonna make sure we don't spill the juice and we're
gonna add some more blocks okay so let's get it spinning freely lever off and then we can just
miss my cider Ginga yes I do jingle oh sure okay so I'm gonna put two and then it came with your
Apple breath the box yeah the blocks typically come with the bricks a couple of these I made of
us and then scrap 2x4 Zoho just to make sure we had plenty of the blocks okay so now we're back
to the top you put the pressure back down and the idea is you just kind of keep going in so
you're not getting juice anymore right or until you get to the bottom of all your blocks and here
it's flowing again so we finished our apple cider and we just took it from our bowl that
we were collecting the juice from and poured it into our pitcher didn't have to do anything else
it's ready to go so I'm just gonna go ahead and pour us some it can be enjoyed like this it can
also be warmed up you can add cinnamon sticks and clothes and it tastes really good warmed up
but we're gonna buy fresh I think it Wow so this was golden sheen which were these yellow type of
apples yeah golden sheen and then we had a it was mostly the hybrid that one I think is one of the
best relaxed person type of Red Delicious and then the hybrid is this little Jonathan strengthen hop
Johnson so these are the varieties we used in our cider and we'd love to hear from you if you
make apple cider what varieties do you love to use and if you've never made it before we love
to hear how it goes if you try it and if you use a different kind of what type of setup do
you use do you use a small bench top tabletop press like this and an expensive grinder you
have an heirloom that maybe your grandpa you know or something completely different yeah
so let us know what you're using and we'll look forward to chatting with you soon and thank them