Perry! Hmmmmmmm!
Shandygaff anyone?
- Thread starter nikkuchan
- Start date
Rough Perry - goes through you like a dose of salts...
I would still go for it! When I was a kid my parents would get this non-alcoholic apple cider from roadside stands that was all thick and dark, clearly unpasterized and unfiltered. Before the days of e coli, I suppose--you know that the deadly form of e coli actually did not exist if yu go back 20 years or so.
Anyway, after a time, my Dad, who had grown up in the 1920s in reall Virginia apple orchard country and had worked for virtually nothing in the orchards in his teens to contribute to his family's income when they were virtually starving in the Depression, I guess thought about it and decided that he had seen such cider made too often at the commercial orchards and stopped buying it. He said anything could end up in it. Stuff would just get shoveled into the cider press--so you had rotten apples, and leaves and things, but also manure (way back in his day they used mules for power!), dead mice, anything that might end up on a barn floor, would just get shoveled in! I am sure that the fact that it is hard cider/hard perry (to use the Yank phrase) probably help.
I have a friend who bought a house with an orchard and a small cider mill several years ago. Every autumn I help him make the cider and perry, and also another drink called Plum Jerkum which is similar to the ciders but make with plums.
The stuff we make is the traditional cider made without adding yeast. The natural yeasts on the fruit do the work. We Crush the fruit in a mill driven by and old dumper truck engine and then lay it up in layers wrapped in hessian on the big press. The juice is squeezed out and put into 40 gallon (Imperial) drums and a bit of cloth tied over the bung hole to allow it to vent.
Lovely stuff but can strip the enamel from your teeth!
When I said rough Perry can go straight through you I meant it. There are various chemical in pears that aren't in apples and if you drink the perry too young it has a dire effect that means you won't stray far from the toilet for a day or two!
A couple of years ago, he had a break in at the mill and someone stole a barrel of the perry that had only been fermenting for a week or two. We never did find who'd taken it but we did hope they started drinking it soon! Poetic justice. I expect they would have been at the hospital with massive dehydration and gut ache!
Gareth
The stuff we make is the traditional cider made without adding yeast. The natural yeasts on the fruit do the work. We Crush the fruit in a mill driven by and old dumper truck engine and then lay it up in layers wrapped in hessian on the big press. The juice is squeezed out and put into 40 gallon (Imperial) drums and a bit of cloth tied over the bung hole to allow it to vent.
Lovely stuff but can strip the enamel from your teeth!
When I said rough Perry can go straight through you I meant it. There are various chemical in pears that aren't in apples and if you drink the perry too young it has a dire effect that means you won't stray far from the toilet for a day or two!
A couple of years ago, he had a break in at the mill and someone stole a barrel of the perry that had only been fermenting for a week or two. We never did find who'd taken it but we did hope they started drinking it soon! Poetic justice. I expect they would have been at the hospital with massive dehydration and gut ache!
Gareth
Great post! Yeah the apple cider we would buy at the roadside stands would start to ferment on its own even in the fridge. When I was a teenager we went through a little phase of trying to drink it as homemade hard cider, but never really could do it.
What is "hessian"? How many pounds, bushels or whatever do you think you needed to press to get a gallon?
What is "hessian"? How many pounds, bushels or whatever do you think you needed to press to get a gallon?
Similar threads
