Have you ever wondered how we make our delicious, amazing, incredible unpasteurized apple cider?  Well – today is your lucky day.  Last season, Cory from Friends in Photography visited us during a pressing session and got some shots of the entire process.  Enjoy! First, the apples are dumped into an elevator.  The elevator brings the apples up high and then dumps them into the grinder.  The grinder catches the apples as they fall and grinds them up with big metal ‘keys’ almost and crushes them into a mushy pulp.  Jared pumps that pulp into the stacks of pressing trays and wraps them with porous clothes.    You can see that the pulp is so juicy it starts to drip out before the pressing even begins.

Once Jared has the trays stacked to the proper pressing height he attaches a rope to them. He then cranks the loaded apple pulp trays underneath the hydraulic press.   The press pushes down on the trays and squeezes as much juice out of the apple pulp that is imaginable.  While one set of trays is pressing, Jared starts to load a second and continues this process all through the evening.      

When the pulp has all the juice squeezed out of it Jared empties the pulp into a bucket to dump.  It’s amazing just how dry the pulp is.  When the pressing of the apples first begins, we are busy on the other side of the room getting all of our jugs properly labeled.  We do all of our labeling by hand.   Each time we press cider I have to estimate how many 1/2 gallons, quarts, and pints we should fill.  I always do these first and whatever cider is left goes into the gallon containers.  We fill each jug by hand.  We have a system of hoses and pumps that brings the cider from the bulk tank it goes into after pressing to the shut off valve filler I use to fill the jugs.  It’s a bit of an art filling the jugs.  You don’t want to fill them too low so you have to hand pore cider from another jug to get it to the top and you don’t want to fill it too high so it overflows or spews out all over the place.  I’ve gotten pretty good at it but I have a hard time focusing so I may overfill one or two times throughout the night (okay…maybe three or five).     Did you notice?  All we do to make our apple cider is press it – we add nothing – no sugar, no preservatives – just squeeze out the juice and jug it.  Once the cider is filled and lidded, we put them into the apple crates to bring back to the other shed to the storage cooler or the store cooler for selling.   Sometimes folks will bring us their carboys over for filling so they can make hard cider or wine.  We’re happy to do this.  It saves jug and lid costs for our customers and it’s easy for us to fill these big containers. 

So now you know – how we make our unpasteurized apple cider at Lapacek’s Orchard. 

Thanks again Friends in Photography for the great photo story!