The apples on my Ida Red tree have finally gotten ripe, so while the red raspberry wine is working in the primary fermenter (see here for the beginning of the raspberry wine), it was time to pick my apples and press them out.

Ready to start squeezing

I picked 180 lbs. of apples on Friday and washed them up. Got started at 8:30 this morning and had them pressed out by 2:30 with a yield of 9 gallons of juice. Added 9 3/4 lbs. of sugar which will give me an alcohol content of 11-12% when completely fermented. Mixed in the additives and will pitch the yeast tomorrow. I’ll be racking the raspberry into the secondary fermenter tomorrow as well and will be posting on that in the next couple of days. So are any of you thinking about trying this yourself?