Are you interested in the process involved to produce fresh apple cider? Here is a step by step tutorial in the production so you have a better understanding….
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Fresh Picked apples in bins
First of all you need to grow some good quality fruit – harvested carefully by hand at the optimum time for ripeness which gives the juice sweetness and taste…
- The apples are picked into bins which are carried out of the orchard by tractors.
Bins are stored inside our cooler at a temperature of 1-2 degrees celsius to keep the fruit fresh as possible. They stay in the apple cooler until the day that they are to be processed, known as the “pressing day”. We like to use a mixture of apple varieties in order to get more flavor but we almost always include Macintosh apples.
- Bins are loaded 6 at a time and trucked to the processing facility that has all the specialized equipment and machinery to process the fruit. Six bins of apples weigh close to 6000 lbs and usually yields about 1800 liters of juice.
- Arriving at the pressing facility the bins are unloaded one by one and emptied into a hopper where they are fed by conveyor belt through a washer.
- After being tumbled through a spray washer to remove any leaves or particles of debris, the apples are fed to a high powered chopper / masher which chops and grinds the fruit so that it can be pressed.
- The “mash is then fed onto a special screening process that separates all the solid materials like skin, seeds, and stems. The liquid is allowed to pass through this specialized filtering process while the solid mash is removed. This is often used to feed farm animals or just composted back into the farm soil. Here you can see the apple mash being squeezed using great pressure under a massive stainless steel roller covered by a string cloth filtering material. Underneath the juice is collected like a waterfall through this filtering material. It is them pumped through another filter to refine it further before being bottled into plastic jugs….
The pure cider is bottled quickly and immediately the jugs are placed back inside the empty apple bins in order to be transported back to the refrigerated cooler in our store – fresh and super healthy for you to drink and enjoy!!!
