Got lots of pears and wanting to try this. What equipment would a person need?

AgsMnn said:

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Got lots of pears and wanting to try this. What equipment would a person need?

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You'd be fermenting fruit juice, so step 1 is juicing the fruit. But you have to be very careful of introducing the wrong wild yeast/bacteria. Essentially pears would be processed the same way as apples. So you have to turn them to mush and then press them.

After that, its fermentation time in a sealed container with an airlock. However, fruit juice is 100% fructose sugar and will give you a final ABV of roughly 4.5-5.5% product. "Wine" is roughly 12%+. So you'd have to add additional sugar to hit that mark.

All said though, you need a ton of fruit to get to a 5 gallon batch which is standard for most homebrew equipment, but you can find 2.5 or 3 gallon fermenters.

Wherever you are, reach out to local homebrew or wine clubs and they can give you much better targets and sources for equipment. Its not exactly easy, but it is a lot of fun. (If you enjoy labor)

Just for reference, I watched a video on making a pear cider, and five pounds of pears yielded a pint of juice. So if my math is right, you're going to need 40 pounds of fruit to yield a gallon of juice. And by the time it settles out, you'll end up with about three quarts.

The point of this being, depending on how many pounds of pears you actually have, you may be better off making a pear butter and canning that.

Exactly. You need a ton of fruit and its a lot of labor.

Plus a way to grind the fruit into pulp just to press it. I saw one video years ago where they quarted apples then had a jig setup using a garbage disposal to macerate to pulp, all all the free flowing juice was collected as well.

One reason Perry is more common, its a blend of apple and pear juice.