Marguerite's Blog

Apple juice.

Posted on 22 Jul, 2008 6 comments

Whilst my hubby was harvesting all those apples, and being very picky, he had to throw a lot of damaged ones on the ground. Only the good ones will do for the market. “What a waste”, he thought aloud. So slowly but surely he was brewing this novel idea of making apple juice from them. He did some research, bought a crusher with a rack and cloth press from America and made a little juice factory. We aquired a bottle filler, pasteuriser, made benches, etc. and waited for the press to arrive. It was made from oak wood I believe. So the whole family got together on weekends to gather these fallen and reject apples from the grader and we set off to work. The apples were crushed, the crushed stuff went in the cloth, folded over, rack on top, new cloth, new apple crush, new rack, and so forth till the pile was high and then we pressed hydrolic. Great fun to see the fresh juice run off, sticky too. The first glass tasted promising, delicious in fact. We didn’t filter the juice, so the goodness stayed in it. We made about 900 flagons a week end, which was a pretty good effort. The kids were getting pocketmoney for their little jobs and they were happy too. We found outlets to sell the stuff, healthfoods shops etc. Most apple juices on the market were made from reconsituted juice, but ours was fresh, only pasteurised. Then one day we wanted to replace the glass flagons ( heavy to carry ) with plastic 2 liter bottles. We didn’t pasteurise the juice then, we put preservative in it. All went well until one day we got a call from the markets and said they were going off. Not bad, but exploding! Haha. This system was not reliable and probably air had come inside through the caps and the stuff had started to ferment! Wow, not wanting to waste any of it, hubby took the load back home. It didn’t taste bad at all, a little sparkle in it. We then had the brilliant idea to make it into cidre, which we never regretted. We transferred the juice into beer bottles and put some sugar in it and sealed it. We now had about 1500 bottles of cidre, which we drank ourselves over the following years. We continued with the glass flagons and pasteurizing, until the kids had too much work at highschool and so we sold the business, and supplied our 2nd grade apples to a huge juice factory. I forgot to mention after 2 years we had an engineer make a totally different, better and stronger crusher and stainless steel press and we used thinner easy wash and care cloths. The worst job of it all was cleaning after finish. I can still smell the sodium methabisulphate in my nostrils! But it was worth our while and gained yet another farming experience.

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