 It's time to make Apple Cider. So I am running apples through my grinder, which is a oak drum with little teeth on it that run apples through a smaller and smaller gap. And I have to push them through because this isn't perfectly designed. This is something I'm gonna be rebuilding next year, but for this year, it's functioning, so I'm not gonna stop it. This is run, it could be run by bicycle, but it's actually being run by electric motor right now just for easy quickness of getting it done. And so I'm putting through about a bushel of apples at a time, a little under a bushel of apples, to fill up a five gallon bucket of pumice. Pumice is ground apples. And then I'm gonna take that inside. What I have to do is get this five gallons of pumice or shredded apple into this empty bottom, it's kind of like a bucket, but it's got open sides. So at the bottom, I've got this piece of wood with cutout. So the, any trapped sap on the top side of this can drain out. So that's kind of like a drainage board. And different pieces of fabric that kind of hold all the pumice in from squishing out of the slats. Each separated by a couple of different pieces of wood to help distribute the pressure a little better. If you didn't have those, just the top would get pressed and the bottom would still say pretty soggy. This allows the pressure to be distributed better. And that will all run out into a collection bucket. And then I will pasteurize it and make apple juice. And I will also kick in some yeast to a large carboy to make some hard cider for later. So, so here we go. My friend of mine in Madison who had built this in the 19, was it 30 years ago in a shop class and just never used it. So I mounted it to this and put a handle on it. And now, through the wonder of physics, et cetera, et cetera, I can exert quite a lot of pressure down on here. I have about a gallon out now. I expect another gallon and a half, if not two gallons out of this five gallons of pumice. So about half of this volume is liquid. I get my two and a half gallons. So I got a gallon here, a gallon here and a half gallon here. And I put them in pots with water. And then this water will be brought up to 75 degrees Celsius, about 170 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the internal temperature of this liquid reaches 170 or 75, I start a timer for 20 minutes. It pasteurizes for that time. At the end of the 20 minutes, I clean the lid, put it back on, and they're sealed. And then they sit and cool down. And they should be shelf stable for a half year to a year. Today we're continuing the cider making. And here I've got my press. I've got press full of apples, three different cheeses. They're called cheeses when you make a bundle of apples and press them. And then in here, I've already pressed one bucket full. I've got about three gallons out of that. And so this is a six gallon carboy. So I'm about to pitch my yeast. And this is just an active dry wine yeast. And luckily I had some still on hand. But next year, I don't know quite what I'm gonna do because I'm not gonna be able to order more yeast, right? So I might have to wash and save some of this yeast. Might also try and save some of it as brewer's yeast. We'll see how that goes. But so there's different ways to pitch this. I'm just pitching it directly and right before I do a press. And then all that yeast will get incorporated as everything drips through. I'm also gonna add, I mean, while I've got it, yeast nutrient because cider doesn't have quite everything that yeast needs to be happy. So I add a teaspoon of yeast nutrient per gallon. One, two, three. I have a little helper here, four, five. And this is food grade urea. And if you know anything about urine, urea comes from urine. So I could in theory make my own. Next year, we'll cross that bridge and we come to it. So now I'm going to run the press and get some more juice in here. Yeah, and he is worse than a wasp because he's got hand and he can move these things around. So I have to keep him at bay while I press this. Uh-uh, he is very interested in all the apple juice. Yesterday we pressed gallons and gallons of cider or of unfiltered apple juice that I pasteurized and saved in bottles. And now I'm working on the hard cider. And he's still very interested in what kid doesn't love gallons and gallons of apple juice. This is about chickens. Give our chickens diabetes with all this sugar. Diabetic chickens. So one problem I was talking about is that I don't have access to more yeast. And so if I needed to, I could harvest yeast. And this is washed yeast. And so essentially, what I'm able to do is at the bottom of my fermentation tank, a lot of the pectin and the yeast will settle out to the bottom and create what are called leaves. It's sediment, it just sits there. And in the bottom, above it, there will be an active zone of yeast. And so what happens is when I have one of these car boys full and I'm ready to decant it and let it settle out, I can pull off all the top stuff and leave that bottom inch. And then when I draw that bottom inch out, leaving as much sediment behind as I can, then I can pour some distilled water in there, shake it around. In this case, I'm using reverse osmosis water because I don't know, just a little water. And then this could be a third of this could have been poured into each of the car boys. And that would have brought active yeast into the new cider to promote fermentation. But because I still have some good purchase yeast, I'm using that. But once I run out, I'll be switching to washed yeast. Yes, yes, you're very chatty. All right, now I'm down in the basement and it's January and I've got a whole bunch of different casks here with my different ciders. So here's a cider from that you just saw being pressed and here's another cider. Over here is a grape wine that I made in a previous video. And here are some other ciders. So these are all ciders, they're just kind of sitting here waiting to be moved into secondary fermentation. So basically they fermented in these containers and now I'm gonna take them out and put just the cider and leave all these leaves or the remaining the remaining yeast and leave that out. And then up here, you can see a variety of bottles. We have mead and cider and other things from previous years. So after they've sat for a while, then we'll be putting them into these empty bottles and then they'll just age. Generally my mead has to age for at least nine months. My cider depends on the cider. Some ciders drinkable in six months and some needs a year and a half. So it really depends. But yeah, looking pretty good going into the winter with lots of cider for drinking, which is kind of nice. I thought it was time to do a little bit of an update because it is midwinter now. And this was completely full of jars going into the summer or going into the winter. We're still doing pretty well. We have plenty of pickles. We have quite a bit of honey. We're starting to get down on our maple syrup. Our jams are doing okay and we're about halfway through our tomatoes and it's January. So we're going to do okay going into the spring. Eventually once we start running out of tomatoes our soups will be less exciting. But we do have lots of potatoes. So let's go look at those. So over here in the hurricane door that comes down to our basement, we have lots of potatoes in boxes. We are in milk crates. We have one, two, three, four milk crates left of potatoes, not to mention all of our carrots that you saw me putting in sand, cold Robbie turnips. We're doing real well on the root vegetable crops. And that's not to mention that we have lots of squash still remaining. We probably have a dozen or so of these Long Island cheese squash. These are my favorite. They store really long. This will be good well into March, April. And then here in these crates we've got apples. And I picked this apple in September. And yeah, I've got some spots on it but it's totally edible. Great for pies, all those sorts of things. And then down here we have sweet potatoes and more apples. So we're doing pretty well. Not to mention I have a dozen quarts of apple sauce still. I barely even touched that. So that's, and then grain wise I see one, we probably have about four bushels of grain left. I originally made nine bushels of grain. So we're a little about halfway through our grain supply. And that will be replenished in July. So we're doing okay. And finally over here we have our store bought stuff. This is the things that we can't replenish. We've still got, let's see each of those is three pounds of salt. We've still got 18 pounds of salt. We've got a couple quarts of olive oil. We've got a couple gallons of cooking oil, olives, peas, oh, quite a lot of legumes. So like lentils and peas and beans and other kind of snacky things. We do a little bit of store bought pasta, bullion, peppercorns, you know, we got a little odds and ends. We're doing pretty well coming into February. And the spring is generally the hungry time. And so that's when we would start to imagine that we were gonna be having trouble. But really we're sailing through. We will have problems though in terms of cooking oil. That's gonna be our Achilles heel. We don't have a way to make cooking oil. We don't have animals to make dairy, to make butter or other types of oil or fat. So really oil is going to be our Achilles heel. Another thing that we're missing is onions. We ran out of onions. My onions just didn't grow enough. I didn't grow enough of them. So we've been having to put cut up cold Robbie and cook that with onion powder before we do a soup instead of onions and that works okay. Gives us some onion flavor, but it's not the same. So I'm looking forward to having onions. And it's one of the first things I've started in the garden already at the end of January. I already have onions growing.