Perry Making

When my mate (and former brew master) told me his parents have a grove of pears that only the sheep eat, I though "what a waste of fermentables". The first problem to overcome was how to get said fermentables from their home in Marlborough to my home in Christchurch. As luck would have it I'd be spending a weekend in Nelson pretty much right when the pears were at the hight of their ripeness. So boxes were collected and a detour was arranged on the way home.

As luck would have it it was a glorious day and I had four willing slaves (an oxymoron?) to help out. Judging how much to pick was a bit of a wet finger in the air. I was aiming at a 23l batch, estimating a 50% yield. Therefore around 50kg of fruit would be required.

As it turned out there were at least four varieties of pear to choose from. I decided to take a selection of each. I'd be keen to hear if anyone can name them...

Anyway the previous week I was presented with problem number two: how to turn these odd shaped fruit into juice? After getting a negative result from RB, the LHBS, and even the local cidery, I decided to make my own cider press. With help from Ally and a week of daydreaming, I had the design down. And as luck would have it I managed to get my hands on a stainless steel laundry tub which would serve as the collection tray. So it was set.

The pressing was set for the following Sunday which gave the fruit a week to mature off the tree. On the Monday I visited the LHBS to pick up some litmus paper. After getting talking about the perry and my plans for the press, the proprietor mentioned he had a disused wine press out back. Needless to say I was driving home with it on the passenger seat.

And while picking up some tools the previous day to make the press, I came across this little beauty.

A bit labour intensive, but should give me a good yield for the pressing.

So the Saturday was upon me and I thought I'd do some sciency stuff to begin. I picked out some samples of the varieties and took the SG and pH of each. Funnily I could only identify three varieties this time...

Variety	SG	pH
#1	1060	4
#2	1057	3
#3	1051	3.5

So I sat down to grate 50kg of pears... At this point I was so keen to get down and dirty I had forgotten to wash the pears to remove any wild yeasts. Never to mind. Away I went and the chilly bin started to fill up with pomace. At one point I had the cunning idea of using my battery drill to power the mill, but it turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help. Back to the grind...

So it took about five hours to mill fifty-five litres of pomace. Needless to say it was a relief to sit down to a brew and some cricket. And so to leave the pomace to sit overnight to oxidise and to precipitate some pectins.

Sunday morning I set up the press for a long day's pressing. I used my new grain bag to contain the pomace while I pressed it.

Luckily the mill produced a well pulped pomace, so there wasn't much trouble getting the juice out. Unfortunately the press wasn't designed too well, with drain holes only at the bottom. This meant juice from the top had to force its way through the entire stack of pomace. And to make matters worse, the top plate did not fit very well and I ended up with pools of juice on top instead of below in the fermenter. I learnt that it was best to squeeze gently and let gravity do its thing. This ended up being more efficient, as I guess the pomace wasn't prematurely compressed.

So I could press about 6l of juice per press, which meant 4 or 5 pressings for the 23l fermenter.

I had a couple of extra bottles lying about so I filled those up and they ended up in Ally's cider.

I measured the volume of spent solids and worked out my yield was around 75%, so was very happy with that.

So with the juice in the fermenter, all I had to do was pitch. Well not quite. It was recommended that wild yeasts should be nuked, which meant dropping some sodium met in. I mixed in a teaspoon which worked out at about 100ppm SO2 from memory. Then I waited 48 hours for the SO2 to give way and pitched 10g of champagne yeast.

I decided to ferment at 18 deg C. Fermentation was a bit slow to take off, but it got its act sorted out. 15 days later I racked to secondary, which in my brewery is two 10l jerry cans.

When I bottled 12 days later I kept six bottles still and bulk primed the rest aiming for 2.2vol CO2.

Bottles are currently conditioning at 15 deg C and I will drop them down in temperature for a couple of months then bring them back up before drinking.

Perry Rhodan
OG: 1062
FG: 1016
ABV: 6.0%