I did quite a bit of travel this year, going further East than ever before. How did this year fare?
North In Transport: A ferry to the north of Norway – I think I was sleeping at the most northern point of the journey On Foot: Honningsvåg, Norway. 70.981511, 25.974690
South In Transport: Paro, Bhutan On Foot: Paro, Bhutan
East In Transport: Jakar Airport, Bhutan On Foot: Jakar Airport, Bhutan
West In Transport: Heathrow Airport, UK On Foot: Heathrow Airport, UK
Up In Transport: 11.5824 km (Aircraft) On Foot: Paro Taktsang 3,120m ASL. 27°29’30.88″N 89°21’48.56″E
Down In Transport -26m ASL (Waterloo Jubilee line platforms) On Foot -26m ASL (Waterloo Jubilee line platforms)
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.
A knackered old shopping trolley with scrap wood sides
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.
First Juice
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.
