This past weekend, my family got together with some friends (and a ton of planning on the part of my Dad) and held our 2nd annual Apple Butter cooking day.

This year's stats:

17 bushels of Stayman Apples
75 lbs of sugar (25 lbs less than last year)
1 dram of clove oil
1.1 fl oz of cinnamon oil
1.1 oz of powdered nutmeg

The copper kettle in the photos is a 50 gallon kettle. We started peeling apples on Friday at 10:00 AM and were finished by 3:00 PM. We started the fire under the kettle around 5:30 AM Saturday morning, adding the first bushels of apples + some apple vinegar. The apples were then ground through the antique grinder you see in the photos and added to the kettle. By 9:00 AM we had all of the apples grinded and added to the pot. Around 3:00 PM in the afternoon we removed the fire from the kettle and began canning. Total 2013 yield: 143 quarts of Apple Butter or 35.75 gallons.