Intro and Breville Juicer Question

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punkin

Active Member
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Mar 14, 2011
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sydney
An introductory post from me.

I'm a punkinhead from inland NSW Australia. My interests are fishing and fermenting.
I make canned extract brew and ferment a lot of corn and malt, fruit, straight sugar washes, mollasses etc for process's that i assume are not spoken of here.

I've fermented a few apple batches in the past for Calvados and a Cider rum, but haven't done more than 50 or 60 kgs at a time until i found some roadside trees recently.

I got 75kg of free apples the other day and started processing them through my cheapie no name bargain juicer.
I guess i pushed the little beast to hard as i burnt the motor out after about 15 kg of quartered apples had gone through.

So off to the electrical store and got a heavy duty model...

http://www.breville.com.au/products_detail.asp?prod=454

This thing does whole apples and does em with ease:)
It also has a 5 year warranty on the motor.


I processed the 75odd kilos in a couple of hours and ended up with 37 litres of juice, so an efficiency of 50%.
It's amazing how fast it goes when you don't have to cut up the apples.

I have been intending to build a shredder and press once my trees here at home have started bearing properly, but the efficiency question is what led me here via google.

Looks like i can get 70% or so with a commercial press, but while a press is an easy and cheap build, a scratter is a step backwards from the speed of the juicer (assuming i don't core the apples) and a more difficult/expensive build.

So i guess my question is two fold.

1) Is it really a problem with the juicer smashing the seeds and the possibilty of a little more methanol/hangover produced during fermentation?
Should i be coring the apples if i intend to drink the ferment rather than further process it (and remove the bulk of the methanol)?

2)Is it worth the effort of building a press to attempt gain the extra 20% from the pomace the juicer is not getting, especially while reading here after searching that a homemade press can often only obtain 50% efficiency anyway?




Any and all advice is appreciatted.

I was unprepared for this little 'windfall' and it was on a sunday i did the apples with the local HBS closed i added only what i had on hand, which was Danstil C distillers dry yeast. No sulfite or pectic enzyme. Should i still add the enzyme today (three days later)?
 
Welcome, finally someone else from Sydney that I can trade with!

My advice is to core and peel the apples before you put them into the processor otherwise you may develop some off-tastes (kinda like chewing on the core/seeds). I can't say anything about a press, sorry!

I personally wouldn't use pectic enzyme, it increases the methanol concentration and it seems like you may have a bit of pulp? It'll clear on it's own!
 
Welcome, finally someone else from Sydney that I can trade with!

My advice is to core and peel the apples before you put them into the processor otherwise you may develop some off-tastes (kinda like chewing on the core/seeds). I can't say anything about a press, sorry!

I personally wouldn't use pectic enzyme, it increases the methanol concentration and it seems like you may have a bit of pulp? It'll clear on it's own!

Thanks for the advice. I'm not actually in Sydney, just included that in the registration. I'm northern inland NSW up in the plains country.

Can still trade.:mug:
 
punkin is what, verb? noun? non-canonical adverb?? the connundrum as i see it: cheap juicers can't handle the seeds, mine spits them out the back pretty much whole, but then cheap juicers wear out. that said my cheapo has churned through way north (is that south for you lot) of 200 kg and it is still chugging, but with something like 10L from 25 kg depending on the variety; poor efficiency. if i run the waste through again i extract a bit more juice but then i start to process the seeds and can smell them straight away. is yours the kind that presses fruit onto a spinning grater (like mine), or the kind that mashes everything up and squeezes the dickens out of it?
 
Punkin is descriptive of my head.

The juicer spins like mad and has a small titanium blade at the botom the pupls everything and the it's centrifical force to seperate the juice from the pulp until the pulp is exited out the back.

It's certainly not a 'cheap' one at nearly two hundred bucks (the one that died was $25), but not industrial either.
 
Thanks for the advice. I'm not actually in Sydney, just included that in the registration. I'm northern inland NSW up in the plains country.

Can still trade.:mug:

Still, I read about all the amazing ciders/wines/meads that everyone makes here, but no one is willing to trade a bottle or two because of the cost to ship from America. Very exciting! If you want to trade, send me a PM and we can work something out :)
 
I don't have any ciders/wines/meads, but happy to trade for something with a little more abv.

Send me a pm.
 
Punkin is descriptive of my head.

The juicer spins like mad and has a small titanium blade at the botom the pupls everything and the it's centrifical force to seperate the juice from the pulp until the pulp is exited out the back.

It's certainly not a 'cheap' one at nearly two hundred bucks (the one that died was $25), but not industrial either.

same as mine i guess, aside from mine lacks titanium and the disc is covered with little teeth rather than blades, so i'm surprised yours juices the seeds. on mine i think they get hooked by the teeth on the spinning plate and flung out rather than pulped. this is all a moot point i guess, since we already established that yours juices the seeds.
.......
my head looks kind of like a grey jug, with some patchy hair on the sides and a beer port at the front, which also comes with a cider adapter. aesthetically not great but effective
 

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