When life gives you apples, make apple cider!

From bottom to top:
--7 bushels of apples
--apple pulp
--pureeing of apple pulp
--final contraption of the apple pulp straining juice, this will sit until all juice is pressed and then will be bottled.

Yes, I am in the process of making apple cider. It started with a phone call from a friend asking if I could drive him and two of my other friends to get 350 pounds of apples (since I have a big enough car to fit them all). Slightly taken aback, I say, umm, what are you buying that many apples for? And they say, we are making sparkling apple cider (apple wine, hard cider). So begins our journey to Meadowbrook Farms, about 30 minutes from school, where we buy 7 bushels of apples, costing 10 dollars a bushel, (about 75 dollars total) which breaks down to about $.20 per pound!
Our night begins by setting up a nifty contraption in which to make the "to-become-hard cider." We buy four 18 gallon plastic storage buckets and cut a hole in the bottom of two of them (we are making two sets of fermenting juice). We then take an oven rack and lay it over the bottom one (without the hole). We lay a sheet inside of the one with the hole on top of the oven rack. The idea behind it is to put the pureed apples into the sheet, and the juice drips through the sheet into the bottom bucket, where it will then ferment. The pulp is being pressed to squeeze the juice out. Once the juice is all pressed, we will bottle and cork it (we know people who supplied us with corks, bottles, and a corker contraption). It will then ferment in the bottle, creating apple wine or hard cider.
The couple who I am making this with already made apple spiced cider this summer using this method, so we know it works, but they made only about 1 gallon where we are going to yield about 14 gallons. And they are taking it one step furthur by fermenting it....illegal? maybe? dunno...
After setting up our contraption, we got to work pureeing the apples. We had a small little food processor, so with that, we were able to puree 3 1/2 bushels in 3 hours. We started around 9 pm last night and finished at 3 am this morning. We worked in shifts, so I chopped apples to be pureed until 12:30 then someone took over for me. I have attached pictures of what we have so far. I also attached a picture of the final contraption.

The cider should be ready around the end of June to drink.

Wines class: the 3 weeks when drinking and studying consumes my life

Wine Studies: The hardest class in the school. I survived! It was difficult. Three weeks long (though now that it is over, I wish it was longer). We divided the class into three parts--New World (USA, Canada, eh?, Argentina, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand), France and Italy, and Spain and Portugal. It is a lot of information very quickly and a lot of memorization is required. I enjoyed the class though. It was nice to have a challenging class again where studying consumed my life.
Every day, we had wine tastings which included about 10 wines. We had to spit the wine though (but I didn't always do that since some of the wines were "out of this world" delicious).
It is one of the most failed classes in the school (three people in our class failed this block and lots of other came very close to not passing). I just did my best to not let it stress me out. I know a lot of people who just died during it because they were not used to all of the studying necessary to pass the class. I did fairly well in the class, though not as well as I hoped. There were two quizzes, a test, and a paper. On the second quiz ( France and Italy) I did not do so well. I just could not learn the information in time because it was so broken up from a weekend, so that brought my grade down unfortunately. I am still very happy with my grade considering the reputation of the class.
I really enjoyed learning about wine. It has always been a subject that overwhelmed me and I did not like to try new wines, but now that I have a wealth of knowledge, I can use it in my future culinary applications. I cannot wait till I am 21 and I can go to a wine store and actually KNOW what to look for!