Single Variety Sweet Cider

We just pressed some Dudley apples, smalls and rejects. Many had been stored awhile and took some judicious “pruning” before going in the chopper, but about half were fresher. Dudley is rather a tart apple though it does get more on the sweet side when riper. But it isn’t what I’d call a sweet apple even then. Yet to my surprise, the cider turned out to be quite sweet. I hadn’t expected that. It is a very good sweet cider and I was sorry later that I hadn’t swiped more fruit from the stored stash.

I’m wondering if others have experienced pressed juice being quite different than the flavor of the fresh apple? My previous cider experience has been almost exclusively with Beacon which makes a very good sweet cider as well, but it’s been awhile and I can’t recall how it compared flavor-wise with the fresh apples, or if I even noticed. I remember I liked it best after 2-4 days. I didn’t have enough Dudley cider that I wanted to experiment with it so canned it all right away.

Are there other sweet cider makes on the list?

pressingcider2017-gf

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I have the same rig and also enjoy exploring single variety ciders (mostly sweet). Sometimes I have had the same experience of surprise when the juice of an apple is different than the flavor of the same one fresh eaten.

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I picked about 200 liberties I’ll have to try them separately before adding others.

We haven’t done single variety apple cider, but in our mix this year was a higher percentage of wild apples growing in our woods than we have normally used. In many batches more than half the apples were wildings. None are particularly sweet (a friend described one as “appalling”), but we had consistently sweet cider batches using them. Other known apples did go into the mix, Mother, Macoun, Hubbardston Nonesuch, and Kidd’s Orange Red.

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Don’t try Red Delicious as a single variety. The flavor comes out as being a bit earthy or pehaps muddy is a better word to describe it. It was drinkable but I will not make that mistake again.

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My neighbor bought three red delicious trees from Home Depot no one really eats them so I’ve been adding them with other apples. It’s not a very good apple. It’s funny all three seem a little different. I now there are a lot of different sports and Homedepot gets the bottom of the barrel.

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