Love this juicer! Advice for a perry recipe

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GeneDaniels1963

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I've been trying to figure out what to do with the bumper crop of pears hanging on my tree. They have really good flavor, but are mealy, so not great for fresh eating. It bears a huge crop every other year, and a small one off years. Two years ago I tried to juice them using the freeze and thaw method. It was way too much work!

But I just found a used, like new, "Jack Lalane power juice Pro" for $35. I snapped it up as fast as I could! Just got it home this evening and did a test run of pears. Man that thing is a beast! I grinds them like they are nothing. I carefully weighed this test, and I am getting about a gal of clear juice from 18-20lb pears. It is 1.057 OG.

I know that would be plenty of gravity for a good perry, but I am concerned that pear juice is so mild that I will not have a lot of flavor. So here is what I am thinking of doing:

hit it with a Campden tablet for 24 hours
use freeze reduction on two 2-litter bottles
That should give me about 1 liter of concentrate.
mix one gallon juice with the concentrate and ferment

Any suggestions?
 
add good apple juice to it. You may also have to add a bit of powdered acid, either malic or citric. Be prepared to back sweeten as well.

I have 5 gallon of perry/cider in carboy now from last fall. It has a subtle flavor so far but will be very refreshing with a touch of sweetness. That was about a 75/25 mix of pear to apple juice.

These were neighborhood pears. Some were Bartlett and some were Asian pears. I would love to ferment perry pears but they're just not available.
 
I have tried straight Perry a couple of times but without much success... hard work to get much juice because they are fairly soft and almost non existent flavour when fermented. But, they were just what I had available from my trees (Williams and Burre Bosc) which are great for eating.

I agree with AzOr. Adding pears to apples gives a bit of sweetness from the sorbitol which in pears is four time as much as in apples. The apple/pear combination was O.K. but not significantly better than apples by themselves if fermentation is stopped around 1.002-1.004.
 
Thanks for the ideas, but I not sure how I will finish this. I have 2 gal in the bucket with Campen tabs, plan to pitch yeast tonight.

While that is going I am freeze reducing juice. It works pretty well. The concentrate is about 1.130-35, so it almost doubled from the raw juice. A for volume reduction, a 2 litter bottle come down to about 12-14oz.

I am thinking I will let the batch go through primary fermentation, then add 24 oz of concentrate, the way you would any other berry adjunct. That might keep more of the pear flavor and aroma.

At 1.130, that is 46oz sugar per gal, that means 12 oz of the concentrate is a little over 4oz sugar addition, per gal. I think I am going to process up another 4-5 gal of the juice and concentrate all of it. Now I just need to figure out how to store it. This year has been a bumper berry season so my freezer is FULL, and that is before raspberries, muscadines and figs. I guess that is a good problem to have :D
 
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