This is another thing that I have been procrastinating this year. I cannot believe the yield of grapes this year. Now, I am almost at the end of the season. I should have done something with the grapes a month ago. The same malaise that is effecting my writing is also afflicting my chores around the house.

It gets to be after dinner time and I have lost motivation to do anything. Part of it is I know that I should be training but it is dark or cold or raining and so I sit on the bed and scroll through the news while my wife watches TV. It is ‘just a break’ that turns into ‘too late to start anything’. I know some of it is seasonal, I also take it as a sign that I need some rest. But really, I can’t afford to check out after dinner.

This is the forth different iteration of juicing hat I have tried. Year one I used inexpensive crank juicer. It worked well but it plugged up the screen something fierce. I would take hours of trying to get all of the fibers out the screen. The next year I tried the cider press. That worked pretty well but it required hours of machinery cleanup. The third year, I tried steaming. This was OK, but I really didn’t want to cook the grapes. This year, I thought I would try the juicer.

I know that wineries just crush the grapes, stems, good and bad ones. The fermentation process is a preservative method. I don’t like the thought of raw bird poop in my juice. I pick out the bad ones and wash the clusters. Then I destem all of the good ones to put in the juicer. Washing the grapes is a step that I do for all of my juicing by the way. In fact, this is the amount of prep I would do for the old juicer too but not for pressing or steaming. Get settled in for a long evening.

I found the Breville juicer to be the easiest to clean up of the methods that I have tried. Nothing got plugged. It was like washing a food processor, lots of plastic parts and some sharp ones. My observation of the leftover pulp was that it wasn’t very effective. It is amazing that two sticks of celery can yield half a cup of juice but a gallon of grapes was about 16oz.

The juice itself was probably the lightest I have tasted. I suspect that has to do with the overall yield plus the amount of air that is whipped into the process as the liquid is centrifuged from the solids. There was a fair amount of striation of the resultant liquid. This indicates that for pure juice, you would want to let things separate and skim the lighter level off.

Based on the four methods I have tried, the one that has the least amount of prep as well as best yield is the steam method. You cannot underestimate how much effort is required to prep and clean. The product was so-so by comparison, but it beats going to waste because you don’t want to deal with it. I would use the Breville if I was dealing with a small amount of grapes, like making a daily juice due to easiest cleanup. Ultimately, it is too much work and too much loss to make this a primary method.

End Your Programming Routine: Experimenting is in my nature. It is why I studied science in the first place. It is a real shame that I am going to let so much of a bounteous crop go to waste. But, we have plenty of grape jelly and it doesn’t make good wine even though I have made plenty of it. I guess that is why our modern food system is kind of marvelous. It takes hours of work and distills the result down to a couple of dollars. It doesn’t pay for my efforts, only as a labor of love.