OT: Today is the day.

JB

I know. I've been drinking Weston's scrumpy in my local and my brew has a similar smell and colour, so hopefully it will turn out OK.

If it doesn't, did you know that you can buy direct from

A 20L (35.2 pints) box of their Traditional Scrumpy is £48.55 including VAT and delivery - that's just about £1.38 a pint!

Bloody hell, the pub charges £2.60 a pint.

If I get a bigger batch on the go, and a beer fridge, I'll polypin mine and serve it from the tap.

BASTARD. I love my cider. Last decent stuff I had had been fermenting for a decade. Apparently I was the only person to drink more than 1 glass and still be able to walk - I actually had 4 but being fat helped.

I'm a bit spoilt, as within about 600M of my house is this place:

JB

Last time I was in darkest Dorset, I happened across a proper yokel coider press - a wonderful 400 year old (well, so said yokels claimed, and it certainly looked the part) huge wooden contraption hidden in a barn and surrounded by barrels of the previous years pressings. After making a tit of myself helping with the 'oaring' I was offered a couple of pint jugs of 'the good stuff'. Only afterwards did they explain that it was around 15%. Bastards - I had to leave the car and walk 8 miles back to the campsite, and then back again the next day. I'd probably have been ok, from the point of being nicked, since one of the chaps involved *was* the local plod...

That does look very nice, and the colour/clarity looks like mine as it is starting to clear.

I might make my next batch all still, and rack it off to clear fully before bottling instead of carbonating through bottle conditioning.

You and Conor are Jammy sods, although I normally draw the line at about

LOL. Can't beat a good bit of well aged Cider. Tastes completely different to anything you can buy in cans, bottles or pump.

On Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:53:53 +0100, Conor spouted forth:

Too right. My uncle lives down in Somerset. I went to visit him a couple of years ago. He took me up to a friend's farm, some old boy who made his own cider.

I vaguely remember getting back to my uncles house. I don't remember carrying 2 plastic gallon containers of free cider back with me. Or much of the next day or so sitting in the garden drinking them.. ace

Mike P

Oh I know. Even the turbo stuff ages up well, it is made to be drunk young, so very few people age them, but the ones that do put a bottle aside have noted how much more rounded and mellow it is.

I'm planning that from each batch I make, to put one two litre bottle away, labelled how I did it and whether it is still or carbonated, and constantly have at least one batch on the go.

Then I can see how they compare.