Milling & pressing
It’s so easy to enjoy cider and perry it can be easy to forget just how much hard work and magic go into our favourite drinks. With a little knowledge and armed with some fascinating new facts you can start to hone your appreciation of cider and perry to the next level.
In the second installment of his series on how cider is made, Gabe Cook takes us on the journey that fruit makes, from arrival at the cidery, to juice ready for fermenting.
With 10+ years of experience working in the cider industry, Gabe is leading the charge for a cider revolution. AKA ‘the Ciderologist‘ Gabe is an international consultant, writer, broadcaster, and educator on all matters cider. Resident cider expert for C4’s Sunday Brunch. Gabe also chairs the International Cider Challenge.
With harvesting complete, the next phase of the cider making process moves from orchard to cider mill. This is the term traditionally utilised to describe the place where the cider is made but can cause some confusion because it is also the name of a particular piece of equipment (which you will shortly be introduced to). I’ve started to use the term cidery, akin to the word winery to help avoid any misunderstanding.
The first job in the cidery is to receive the apples (or pears) and prepare them ready for milling and pressing. If the fruit has been picked from the ground, as will be the norm for West Country Cider apples, then they will tend to arrive in anything from a couple of old sheep feed sacks to articulated lorries carrying up to 28 tons!
Whether a large or small cider maker, this process will involve some kind of Quality Assurance system to ensure that apples, and apples only, are processed. Even when hand picking apples, but especially if machine harvesting, it is amazing what else can be brought into the cidery from the orchard. I have personally borne witness to the removal of grass, mud, twigs, barbed wire, tree stakes and even a pineapple (no word of a lie).
If a cider maker is using dessert or culinary apples, they will generally be receiving the fruit in apple bins, picked straight from the tree at harvest time. These apple bins will either head straight to the cidery for milling at pressing, or head to a cold storage facility to be utilised by cider makers throughout the year at their discretion.
It’s also at this point that those cider makers endeavouring to minimise, as much as possible, the opportunity for microbiological issues further down the line to ‘grade out’ apples that just don’t make the cut – the rotters. There is sometimes a fine line between ripe and rot and it is up to each cider maker to make a call on this.
So, with the fruit thoroughly inspected, graded and washed, it is now time for its transformation into juice. Unlike grapes, which are wonderfully soft and can even be crushed under foot to release the juice, apples have such a strong cell structure that it necessitates a two stage process – milling & pressing. Any endeavour to skip the milling stage is foolish and to crush apples underfoot might well result in bruised soles!
Traditionally the mill was a heavy, circular stone, placed in a stone trough and pushed round by a horse (or naughty child) to crush the fruit – much like a flour millstone. As an aside, it also crushed the pips, which released its trace level of cyanide into the juice, resultant cider and eventually accumulated in the human gut.
Pre 19th century, this led to some of the old boys and girls who consumed vast quantities of cider to experience stomach cramps or potentially much worse!
Today, thankfully, blades are used to chop the apples into a pulp (no pip crushing!), with a coarseness just perfect to maximise juice extraction. It generally comes out in a consistency not unlike porridge or baby food. It is most common for this pulp to be immediately pressed, but a cider maker may choose to allow the pulp to sit for a while to macerate.
This would most commonly be undertaken by someone using fruit containing tannin, as the maceration helps to oxidise the tannins – increasing levels of soft astringency rather than harsher bitterness.
Maceration, which can range from 4 to 48 hours, will also be used if someone wishes to undertake the keeving process. This helps to ensure a slow fermentation and can result in an incomplete fermentation, and the desired retention of natural sweetness (see part 3 of How Cider is Made).
It’s now time to press the pulp. Despite the efficiency of pressing technology having improved significantly over the centuries, the basic principle still remains identical – an application of pressure to the pulp across a membrane, to separate the liquid juice from the solid pomace.
The classic rack and cloth presses that have been used for a millennium or more, are supremely simple by design and are still used by many small cider makers today.
A square frame is placed onto a base board, and then a cloth (often referred to as the hair, on account of originally being made from horse hair) is placed across the frame and is filled with pulp.
The corners of the hair are folded over to make a neat parcel, at which point a wooden lattice, known as a slat, is placed on top of the parcel, and then the process is repeated.
When several layers have been built, the resultant stack in known as a cheese. The cheese is then pressed down (or up depending upon the technology), squeezing it, and allowing the juice to run down the sides in a rather aesthetically pleasing fashion before being collecting in a tray at the bottom.
Those producers that have grown a little larger, or who wish to reduce the people-power necessary to extract the juice, can choose less labour intensive models including a hydro press, a belt press, or, if you get really big, a Bucher Guyer press. But as I said, they all do they do the same job, just progressively more mechanically and efficiently.
Another factor determining the amount of juice extracted is the nature of the variety being pressed. Tannic apples tend to be quite fibrous in texture and squeeze well. Dessert apples, pears, and some select tannic apples (I’m looking at you Harry Masters Jersey) can be much more sticky and squidgy (technical terms), resulting in a lower juice yield and sometimes a high pressure jet of pulp up the wall of the press house. Typical figures for juice extraction, however, would sit in the range between 65 – 75%.
The ‘waste’ pomace, in ye olden days, was rewetted and pressed again to extract the final remaining amounts of sugar, to create a low abv drink for the labour force called Ciderkin (the first known product in the low/no category). The pomace would then be fed to the pigs or cows, and in many places still are. The bigger producers send their pomace off to giant anaerobic digestors to be turned into biogas.
So, the cider maker now has a lot of juice at their disposal, but a few considerations come into play before they decide where to place their sugar-rich liquid.
Firstly, do they ferment their cider as a single variety, or do they blend different apples together in the one vessel? This decision might already have been made if a range of different apple varieties were picked, milled and pressed together. Cider makers are often encouraged to ferment their ciders as a single variety early in their careers so they can get to understand the innate characters of the apples.
However, there may also be a consideration about the microbiological safety of the cider. The high tannin apples normally have a pH level above 3.6. When it starts reaching 3.8 pH, it becomes much more susceptible to bacterial infection. The addition of some higher acid apples (whether they be sharps or bittersharps) will help to bring the pH into a safer zone and is an option that many cider makers choose.
And now, the magic of fermentation…
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