Day two of making this year's batch of apple butter wrapped up yesterday. I was having issues getting this post up from my parent's house due to their poor bandwidth (their Internet connection is awful) so I waited until I got back home today to finish uploading the remaining photos & videos.

Yesterday we started the fire under the copper kettle at around 6:00 am adding the first apples. Before adding each bag of apples, we ran them through a hand-crank crusher to grind them down to a fine pulp. This allows them to cook down faster. By 9:30 am, we had finished crushing and getting all of the apples in the kettle. From 9:30 until 2:20 pm the apples continued to cook. At around 2:25 pm we added 75 lbs of sugar. After tasting, five minutes later we added a further 10 lbs. Finally a few minutes later after further tasting, we added another 5 lbs. So in total, we had 90 lbs of sugar. At 3:25 pm we removed the fire from beneath the kettle and added 2.2 oz of nutmeg powder were added, 1 oz of cinnamon oil, and 2 drams of clove oil (a dram is .125 oz). At 3:45 we began canning. At 4:30 me canning as well as cleanup was completed. It was a long day.

In total, we made 29.9 gallons or 119.5 quarts. Total cost of materials was $284.20 (Apples, oil, etc). We had 18 people help in total (some people were only to help only one day out of the two).

Here are a few videos taken during the process: