South Brittany Holiday Cottage

I have checked the apple juice again today. It has started to ferment as there is foam around the hole in the top of the barrel, and you can see the pulp around the top of the juice. I have added the pictures of the apples being pressed to our South Brittany Cottage website and they can be seen here: http://www.southbrittanycottage.com/photogallery8.htm

Yesterday me and my parents went to La Roche Bernard and as we left our hamlet of Ste.Anne we found traces of snow. And by the time we travelled 5 minutes it was a white world. It looked lovely over the fields and on the trees, but it never lasted long, it was all gone again within a couple of hours.

I have checked the barrel of apple juice over the last couple of days and I have topped up the barrel with water. As the juice starts to ferment it foams and the foam builds up and overflows out of the barrel, so you have to top it up with water.

Yesterday we had our apples pressed here at South Brittany Cottage, to make cider. We collected the apples and lay them on a sheet of polythene a while back, I then went and seen Hervey, the person my parents bought their house off, to find out where I could get barrels from. He said he had some, and kindly gave me a 200 liter barrel and a smaller one, he said that he thought that the amount of apples we had this year would produce around 200 liters of juice, the smaller one was in case we had a little extra. I then went to another family in our village who i was told had a press. I asked if they could press my apples for me and was told they would telephone with a date. Well the guy arrived yesterday morning 9 o'clock, and we were very lucky with the weather as it was very mild, dry and sunny. The press was towed behind a tractor and operated from the tractors power take off (PTO). We had to shovel the apples into a scoop on the side of the machine, which then mashed them up and via a conveyor belt took them to a top gantry, were the pulp fell into a hessian type of matting, which was spread out, then the matting folded over the pulp and a lattice made of wood placed on top of the matting. This continued placing the matting, pulp and wood boards until there was a large stack in the middle of the press and all the apples were gone. This stack was then winched to the end of the machine under the hydraulic press which then squeezed the juice out of the apples. There was a large house connected to the side of the press that fed the juice into the barrel which was in my cave (pronounced 'cav' where the French store their wine cider etc usually with thatched roofs) I now have to keep topping up the barrel with water each day for the next 3 days, and at the weekend Hervey will return to see how things are going. So I will keep you up to date with how things are going and what has to be done next. I am also going to put photos of the press on our South Brittany Cottage Photo Gallery so if you want to see what the press looks like check out our website.

I think I have stopped the spammers from adding their stupid messages on our South Brittany Cottage guest book. As I stated in an earlier posting we were getting 3 or 4 entries a day on our guest book, with silly wording like ' I send send you and your guests my best wishes' or 'I like your site so much I bookmark it' and it was really getting a pain to keep deleting them all the time.They had to have been spambots (automated) as I played around with the php coding and stopped them from leaving their website url on the guestbook, so if it was a human that wanted to spam they would realise it be of no benefit to them. So I played around with the coding and altered the coding so that where you had to enter an email addres you now have to put the answer to a question - which is asked instead of the wording enter email address. And so far so good, no more spam. I will keep you informed if things change.

We have now added an availability chart to our holiday cottage website. I have been debating whether to add one on our website or not for a while now, and thought I will give it a go. let me know what you think.