General Discussion Thread

[Iceea]

Wyrm, soundtrack indeed

One of the small towns near our property in Vermont has an apple fair every fall. Parades, old time band music, library book sale, etc. Also all kinds of local vendors and craft people selling their wares most of which are apple related. But the big draw a cider press, a huge one. It is the only place I know where you can get unpasteurized cider these days. The difference in the taste is just amazing. Apple cider everywhere else these days has to be pasteurized, health reasons. The reason for the pasteurization is some cider places were getting apples from anywhere they could. Not caring about the quality or if they were already half rotten from the ground, or if cows had been grazing and some of the grounders had some cow dung on them. "T'is a sad state of affairs lads"
I'll try to find a picture of the press it is impressive.

[Róisín]

I'd love to see that!

[thorny]

[ It is the only place I know where you can get unpasteurized cider these days. The difference in the taste is just amazing.

Indeed. Pasteurized cider isn't cider, it's apple juice. I don't much like apple juice.

Luckily, I have friends who have a small orchard; and most years they invite me to a cider pressing party. Help chop lots and lots of apples, crank the press, haul remains to the compost, clean up afterwards . . . and take home jugs and jugs of excellent cider for the freezer. I don't ferment it generally, I drink it as sweet cider. Absolutely lovely on a hot summer day, and doesn't knock me out so I can't go back out in the field. -- though the alcoholic version is great too, just not when I'm trying to get any work done!

[wavewright62]

Apple cider as I know it from my youth in New Jersey, such as thorny & Iceea describe it, does not exist here in New Zealand, and I sorely miss it. Frankly I don't know why that should be, with our robust apple export sector.  I *once* encountered a pair of blokes selling this at an A&P show (and never again). 
OTOH, the entire sector of juice for the table is apple juice, flavoured with whatever juice it claims to be on the label - we don't have the tubes of frozen concentrate as is common in the US.  Mango & passionfruit juice is apple juice, orange juice is apple juice, strawberry & guava juice is apple juice, V brand energy drink is carbonated apple juice with caffeine added.
I suppose I've just answered my own question.
Anyway, my husband decided not to devise a press using his truck jack as he originally planned, he *ahem* sat on the pressings.  (I can hear Iceea howling from here, tone it down woman!  Still better than cow dung.  Somewhat.)  He also didn't wait for me to get home, he finished setting up the fermenter using advice from the local homebrew shop, so we'll see how we go in a few weeks' time.

[Iceea]

The Cider Press. These are dated from Oct 2010.

The press from the business end. The whole rig is on a large flatbed truck. You can see the apples in plastic crates stacked next to the truck.


They have a mechanical crusher to do that job, it's attached to the press.


Toss them apples in, stems and all.


They have a frame as a form with the cloth laid in it, here's the mash/wort coming out of the crusher into the frame/form.


Here he's packing the mash/wort into the frame/form.


Folding the cloth.


Out of the frame, adjusting the fold on the stack.


Another view of the stack and packing a frame. Another view of the crusher. Check out the heavy weight flywheel on the other end of the power shaft!


Fit that last stack in there, If you count there are 7 layers, remember that number.


The big squeeze. Count the number of layers now, there are 8


Squeeze them apples, look at the flow.


All most all squeezed out.


How much pressure does it take? Let's read the dial


Wow, that's quite a lot!


How did the stack go from 7 layers to 8? After they put the 7th one in they squeezed gently to make room for an 8th layer. And they may have pressed lightly on the stack several times to get all the layers in.

The New and the Old. Prius - Packard
As part of the festivities there were a number of vintage cars present. I think this one's a Packard, but I'm not really up on my vintage automobiles

[Róisín]

Really neat press! Bigger and shinier than mine, which is manually operated. Looks good!

[Purple Wyrm]

My local council actually doing something sensible for once...

Perth council cuts red tape to allow residents to plant fruit and veg in public parks

[Róisín]

Wyrm, that's excellent! We do that here, and it's fine. In some of the older suburbs of Melbourne and Adelaide the early settlers planted fruit trees as street trees, and the Adelaide Parklands have always had small plantations of edible trees. People still harvest from the olives and pine nut pines there. St. Peters and parts of Payneham and Norwood have walnuts and plum trees. Every so often councils try to replace productive trees with useless ornamentals and get howled down by the locals.

Our Community Garden here is open to anyone to wander in and just pick food. We've had a few trees stolen, but overall people are good. We are busily planting up other spaces around the town with food plants.

[refract3d]

Indeed. Pasteurized cider isn't cider, it's apple juice.

I agree. My family always tries to get a few gallons of unpasteurized cider from a local farm and it is so, so good. Storebought pasteurized cider is just bottled disappointment. I don't mind apple juice (mostly ambivalent towards it), but it's not even close to the same.

My local council actually doing something sensible for once...

Perth council cuts red tape to allow residents to plant fruit and veg in public parks

Nice! It's good to see places allowing public food gardens. I've actually been planning to see if I can get involved with something related to that again.

[Purple Wyrm]

Today I managed to shoot myself in the foot in quite an impressive way

For years I've had a memory that when I was a kid back in the 80s there was a big news story about the recently deceased body of some kind of extinct creature (I'm pretty sure a trilobite) being found in my city's storm drains. A few days later the whole thing was revealed as a hoax with the item in question having been carved from an old car tyre.

No one I have ever asked has any recollection of this happening at all. So when I stumbled over a mention of it this afternoon on the website of respected cryptozoologist Dr Karl Shuker I was over the moon! Finally evidence that it wasn't all some kind of dream or hallucination!

It was shortly afterwards that I came crashing down to earth when I realised that Dr Shuker's source for the story was a post I myself made on Reddit a few years back asking if anyone else had any memory of the event

Round and round and round we go! :'D

[urbicande]

Today I managed to shoot myself in the foot in quite an impressive way

For years I've had a memory that when I was a kid back in the 80s there was a big news story about the recently deceased body of some kind of extinct creature (I'm pretty sure a trilobite) being found in my city's storm drains. A few days later the whole thing was revealed as a hoax with the item in question having been carved from an old car tyre.

No one I have ever asked has any recollection of this happening at all. So when I stumbled over a mention of it this afternoon on the website of respected cryptozoologist Dr Karl Shuker I was over the moon! Finally evidence that it wasn't all some kind of dream or hallucination!

It was shortly afterwards that I came crashing down to earth when I realised that Dr Shuker's source for the story was a post I myself made on Reddit a few years back asking if anyone else had any memory of the event

Round and round and round we go! :'D

Heh, that's kind of funny!

[wavewright62]

Today I managed to shoot myself in the foot in quite an impressive way

For years I've had a memory that when I was a kid back in the 80s there was a big news story about the recently deceased body of some kind of extinct creature (I'm pretty sure a trilobite) being found in my city's storm drains. A few days later the whole thing was revealed as a hoax with the item in question having been carved from an old car tyre.

No one I have ever asked has any recollection of this happening at all. So when I stumbled over a mention of it this afternoon on the website of respected cryptozoologist Dr Karl Shuker I was over the moon! Finally evidence that it wasn't all some kind of dream or hallucination!

It was shortly afterwards that I came crashing down to earth when I realised that Dr Shuker's source for the story was a post I myself made on Reddit a few years back asking if anyone else had any memory of the event

Round and round and round we go! :'D

This is hysterical!
 
Sadly and more seriously, this is often a deliberate tactic by fake news and fake medicine purveyors, citing references they themselves put up in their private newsletters or websites, citing research or polls from their own 'institute.'

[Iceea]

wavewright, may I ask where-a-bouts in New Jersey you lived as a youth??

[wavewright62]

wavewright, may I ask where-a-bouts in New Jersey you lived as a youth??

Warren County, what they're now calling Skylands.

[That Bunny]

Hello people! Since there isn't a thread about interesting websites (or at least I didn't find one ) I may post it here: http://www.visitfinland.com/campaigns/finngenerator/public/en/
This is a website which generates a finnish name for you! My name would be "Aurora Kari" (like: Aurora Borealis, Rocky islet) I think it's pretty fun to play around with this name generator! And sorry for interrupting your conversations!