June Apple Drop

June Apple Drop: "If you have apple trees, they should have set all their blossom by now and fruit should be forming ready for your cider making. One of the problems with cider making can be, that you are all ready willing and able to make loads of cider come the autumn.

But your apple trees have decided to go into a biennial cycle of fruiting, and although you had a wonderful crop last year, this year you may have a pitiful number that will hardly make you a gallon or two.

This time of year is crucial to upsetting this biennial habit. Many varieties of tree set an excessive number of fruitlets and hand thinning is necessary if the apples are to grow to a worthwhile size."

Go here for an explanation of June drop and learn how to get a better crop of apples for your cider making this autumn. June drop


At www.Make-apple-cider.com

Fire Damage to Cider Farm

It is interesting to see how people pick themselves up after a major disaster and in the end it helps them create something better. Elizabeth Ryan at Breezy Hill Orchard and Cider Mill, has survived her devastating fire three years ago. Read about it here:

Daily Freeman - Pressing ahead: Cider mill rebounds from fire:


"It takes about five bins of apples, each weighing about 900 pounds, to produce 500 gallons of cider, she said.

She is doing really well to produce one gallon of cider from 9 pounds of apples. And I like the idea of fruit ciders from peaches, plums and raspberries.

IN ADDITION to apple cider, Breezy Hill makes peach, plum and raspberry ciders, and bakes cookies, donuts, pies and pastries from scratch.

In fact, Ryan recently bought a 20-inch stone mill so Breezy Hill can grind its own flour. And in the near future, she hopes to resume production of hard ciders, a product not made since the 2003 fire.

Ryan sells her wares at farmers' markets in Rhinebeck, Cold Spring and Millbrook."

Good luck with all your hard work Elizabeth I hope you have a good season.

Cheers Paul

Hard Cider

Can I power my car with cider?

Hey I had never considered running my car on Cider, but if you have way too much cider left over at the end of the year, this could be a way to use it up, convert it to ethanol and do your shopping run powered by cider!

This article examines the idea of making ethanol from apples, and whether this could be practical.

Using the back of an envelope and a calculator if you travel 10,000 miles per year, using ethanol at 50 miles per gallon, ( to make the calculation easy ) You would need
200 gallons of ethanol, for a years worth of fuel.

The amount of cider needed to make that quantity of ethanol would be......
If your cider is 5% alcohol content you would need 200 x 20 = 4000 gallons of cider originally. You probably need about 1.5 acres of apple trees to give you that amount of cider.

So with 2 acres of trees you could be self sufficent in fuel apples and cider.


Ethanol: Not a Kernel of Science in It
From the June 2, 2006 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

This guy looks at using ethanol for fuel, but it probably isn't practical as the inputs are way too high to be useful. An interesting article on fuel conservation and alternative sources of energy.

If you want to make cider learn how at my website,
Make Apple cider

To learn about ethanol as an alternative fuel and its problems go to this site:

by Laurence Hecht

Not a kernal of science

Cheers Paul