We are heading down to Kent shortly to do our first apple picking adventure. Our friend Laura is coming with us to help with the picking. We have twenty 25kg designated apple picking bags to fill today. With three of us working the orchard together, I don’t imagine it will take us too long to fill up the bags. The hardest bit will be wheelbarrowing them to our estate car that we’ve rented.
On Monday our equipment arrived on two pallets to our South London flat. I think it was all a bit more than we anticipated.
Did I mention we live in a flat in South London? Yeah, space is fairly limited. But once the equipment was out of the boxes it wasn’t so bad. We’ve go a 90l Speidel hydropress and a Speidel Electric 2.2kW Apple Mill. We bought bigger capacity equipment from the get go so we could scale up easily in the coming years and not have to worry. All we will need to do is buy more fermenting tanks.
We have the fermentation tanks on the side of our garden at the moment. We have used the pallets which the equipment came on from vigo presses. James will work to build a structure to cover the fermentation tanks once we are back from our honeymoon, so the cider has a bit more protection from the elements. The hydropress will live in the shed and so will the mill (once we unpack it from the box and move it out of our hallway). We were able to fit a few smaller tanks in our shed (amongst the bicycle parts), bringing our capacity up to 360 litres in total.
We are shoving off down to Kent momentarily, so I must go. Our car is a bit smaller than we anticipated, so it’s good one of our friends has ducked out of joining us for apple picking. Not sure we will squeeze all 500 kg of apples in it, but we will see. We also have next weekend available to get more apples. It may be advantageous to have two different goes at picking apples and see if there is any difference in taste. Until next time. – Colleen
