Cider:- would this work?

A guy i work with is an avid wine maker and has invested in an bit of gear that he uses to remove juice from fruit.

Basically it sits on the stove and extracts the juice from cut up fri\uit. I know nothing more than that.

He is willing to de juice some apples from me ( we have access to about 50 kilos of small sour /sweet apples)

He has said that he typically gets more juice out of the fruit if he adds sugar to the boiler, but this then makes a thickish syrup like fluid ( ideal for making wine he says)

I am thinking that i can use the juice in order to make a cider, but wondered if i could use this concentrate with some normal apple juice in order to keep the OG and strength down.

My thought is that if i dilute the concentrate with juice, then add black tea for the tannins that i might end up with a decent turbo cider type brew.

Can anyone tell me if this sounds ok?

Thanks

I would give it a try, you can get a SG reading before hand to see if you need to dilute it with water or if just adding it to juice would work.
I think it would be a great way to up the taste. Please let us know how it comes out.

well i went and picked up a load of apples that were blown down in the last few days.

Around 20 kilos in total. In order to get an idea we took one batch of 1.4 kilos and just de juiced them, got about half a liter.

then we upped the apples to 2.4 and added some sugar and got 1.4 liters juice. means that it will need watering down a little.

I have a wyeast cider yeast in the shed, its getting cold here, only around 10-14 degrees during the day, would this be ok or would i be better served having the fv in the house?

Thanks

A few things to keep in mind here:

1) If your friend's juicer heats the juice, it will set the pectin and it wont clear. If you dont heat it, it will get nice and clear in the secondary. If you dont mind drinking it cloudy then no problem.

2) If you go past 180F, then you are effectively heat pasteurizing the juice, which is probably a good thing since you are picking these off the ground - except that this will also knock out a lot of the taste.

3) you dont want to use apples that have been on the ground for any length of time (more than a few hours). They are much more likely to pick up an infection. If you heat to pasteurization temps, it will kill the cider bugs, but heating adds its own problems. It sounds like you have plenty of apples, in which case a good easy (although somewhat inefficient) harvesting method is to rake all of the previously fallen apples away from the tree first. Then give the tree a good shake and pick up everything that falls. Climb up on some of the low branches if you need to and shake whatever you can reach. Then you can safely pick up everything that falls to the ground, but you should still wash everything.

4) if you add sugar and then water, all you are doing is diluting the apple taste.

5) a clean garbage disposal makes a workable grinder. A couple folks on this board have posted some workable press designs using pump jacks. If you like cider and have a decent number of trees already, its probably worth investing in a small hand grinder/press combo. Its good to have the right tools for the job.