After letting the juice rest for around 20h I added the yeast.
I’ve used this stuff before and it gave good results. It’s a high alcohol tolerance strain, so will tend to ferment to a higher ABV than I want. I’ll check in a few more days and stop the fermentation at 8% ABV or thereabouts.
The day after adding yeast, the fermentation was going well.
I had access to a tree full of pears for a weekend. With the help of Meagen, we picked two large bags of pears of various ripeness – around 25kg I’d later come to know. I don’t actually like pears as a fruit, so I’d already panned to make perry from them. I’ve done this once before with pears from the same tree and the results were rather good.
I didn’t have the ability or time to process the pears immediately after picking, so they took a trip to an industrial freezer to be stored until I could use them. I was down with covid for a week or so after collecting the pears, and it has left me a bit fatigued. Carrying home 25kg of pears wasn’t going to happen. I took a trolley to bring them home and had to conduct a repair with scrap wood to shore up the sides before I could risk the journey home.
The pears were still too frozen to run through the scratter/crusher, so I left them overnight to thaw. Next day they were mostly thawed and ran through the scratter well. Giving a bucket full of green/brown pear pulp. The freezing an thawing had turned many of the pears mushy, which greatly helped the processing. Pears are full of pectin, which make the juice & perry cloudy, had I been reading the directions on the pectic enzyme I’d bought to reduce the pectin, I’d have added it directly to the pulp – I didn’t, so I didn’t.
The pulp went to the fruit press. The first batch squeezed well, but then came to a sudden stop – on checking the pulp it has formed a solid frozen cake. I turned this back into the bucket with the rest of the pulp and put it on the sun to thaw some more.
Pears are ~80% water by mass, so I was expecting about 20L of juice from 25kg of fruit. After pressing all the pulp, I had around 17L of juice. I definitely didn’t get 100% of the possible juice – due to not having the press mounted to a firm surface, I couldn’t get the pressure needed to extract all the juice.
Previously I’ve used an electric juicer to juice pears and apples. It works, but it loud and makes a lot of fine particles in the juice – you get almost a sludge which is had to ferment. The cheaper electric juicers and not really designed to run for several hours to process tens of kilos of fruit.
I added a heaped teaspoon of pectic enzyme to the juice and a few Campden tablets to knock down any wild yeast or bacteria, to give the yeast I want to use a clean slate to start growing.
The total volume of liquid was shy of the 20L I wanted, so I added some pretty bland apple juice to make up the difference. I’m hoping the primary flavour comes from the pears.
I’ll add the yeast tomorrow.
For the last few months, on Sundays when I’m home, I’ve been feeding crows in the park. I’d read that they recognise people who feed them, so I wanted to see if this was true.
There are two distinct populations of crows at the park, though I didn’t know this when I started. There’s a group of ~50 by the lake, and another group of ~30-40 that hang out on the field. There are also a few scattered crows that don’t seem to belong to any larger grouping. Once I’d learned to recognise a few of the crows in each group, I realised I didn’t see them in the other group.
I’m feeding the crows with a mixture of shell-on peanuts and dried mealworms.
The population by the lake took very little encouragement to investigate the peanuts on the first feeding attempt. I threw a few nuts out towards a half-dozen crows on the grass, as soon as they hopped over to look and realised it was food, almost the entire population flew down from the trees and waited at a distance to see what would happen. I threw more nuts, favouring the birds closer to me, or those that had just missed a nut. It didn’t take long before all the nuts were gone and the crows were squabbling over the scraps. Peanut shells biodegrade quickly on damp ground, so there’s no littering issue.
A week after the first feeding test with the lake crows, I visited again, this time with nuts and mealworms. The crows came down from the trees quickly once I threw a few nuts out and really seemed to enjoy hunting for the mealworms in the grass. By the third visit (two weeks after the second), the lake crows flew down before I started throwing the nuts. This is now their behaviour when they see me, but only if I’m carrying the bag with the nuts – if I don’t have the bag, the crows don’t seem to bother with me. I’m now on the 6th feeding visit, and the lake crows seem very trusting, with some individuals coming within arm’s reach to await a nut.
It took me a couple of weeks to realise the crows on the field were a different group to the ones by the lake, the group size is smaller, and the birds are more widely scattered when looking for food or resting.
The first feeding attempt was ignored until I walked away, then a few birds descended to investigate, followed by about twenty more. I’ve only fed these crows three times, the latest being today. They are more wary and wait for a few more inquisitive birds to hunt down the thrown nuts before they all come over. They maintain more distance from me than the lake crows ever did. It will take another few weeks before I’m sure whether they recognise me.
For the cost of a £1 bag of nuts and the occasional £3 bag of mealworms, it has been a fun way to spend half an hour or so on a Sunday, observing how the crows interact with each other, the pigeons and squirrels, that also try to make off with the nuts. A few crows are distinctive enough that I can recognise them on sight – not an outcome I expected.
20 years ago I was turfed off a train at Bow Road due to an electrical issue.
20 years ago I walked the rest of the way to work.
20 years ago I was just trying to read the BBC news website (it was very slowly loading) when I received a panicked phone call from a friend. The bus she had just got off, had exploded as she walked away from it.
20 years.
It’s conference season, lots of meeting up with people from all over the world. Statistically, at least one person will be carrying COVID (case rate is currently 1.7 per 100,000 people, many people attending will have travelled internationally, number of connections exceeds 100,000).
I wasn’t eligible for a free booster this year, so I paid for one – £98 for 300 micro-litres of vaccine – is this more expensive than printer ink?
