My Nottcider is now bottled up (3 quarts which had got down to about 1.004 at 15°C) and I have also moved my next brew from juice extraction to fermentation. This one is made from the bumper crop from our Malus trilobata supplemented with a couple of oranges which we had previously used for peel. Malus trilobata is an ornamental crab apple with gorgeous leaves but relatively small, hard, green fruit. They don’t look very promising but cook into a delicious crab apple jelly and I might have done that if we didn’t still have some of last year’s batch left, hence the experimentation with brewing.

I think I will christen this one Malus Orange and it went into the fermenter, a 5l water bottle, with a gravity of 1.034 at 22°C. The water-extracted juice was supplemented by some brewing sugar and 3g of Nottingham yeast which seems to have done the trick on the previous batch.

I will be swimming in cider next year. After the evening service I checked the crate of apples left over from harvest decorations at the church and, since several of them were starting to turn, decided to take the rest which have all been washed, chopped and left in a vat of water for a few days. That will probably be the last batch of the year though and I’ll see if I can squeeze another round of beer in too (not least to use up most of the supplies I have had sitting round for a while so I can start with some fresh stuff next year).