From fruit to juice

I am getting very behind with things, but did download a fascinating series of photos from the big camera, which need to be shared.  During September - season of mellow fruitfulness - we and John's clients were inundated with fruit of all sorts.  We are fortunate to have a juicing press in the area however, which makes dealing with this sort of excess much easier.

Between 3 families, we managed to gather together about 250 kilos of grapes.  Actually if John and I hadn't run out of buckets, patience and flexible back muscles, we could have raised that to 350 kilos, but there we go.  This is what 250 kilos of grapes looks like!

 

Once it is our turn at the press, the grapes get fed into a special machine that whacks them off the tresses - you have to be tall to feed the grapes in.

 

From there, the stalky bits get chucked into one bucket, while the grapes go into the press and the juice comes out into a nice plastic tank.

 

John was daring and got a picture of the inner workings of the press.

 

From the plastic tank, the juice is sucked through a pipe in the wall to the steriliser before being pumped back out into the bottling machine.

 

The juice is bottled at about 90 degrees C, and closed immediately, and the bottles laid on their side so a slight vacuum is created as the juice cools.  Because of this, the juice keeps for 2 years.

Our 250 kilos of grapes produced about 127 bottles of juice, of which our share was 47 bottles - don't they all look pretty?

 
A couple of weeks later, we were part of a consortium doing apple juice.  Despite the best efforts of Dave and Pauline and their tree, we only had 60 kilos of apples, but the consortium as a whole had 550 kilos, producing over 200 bottles of juice.  Our share of that was 31 bottles.  The juices cost about 96 cents a litre, including processing and bottles, and we all know they are free from pesticides, added sugar, and added water.  As well as tasting good, we feel smug that we have made the best use of this year's bumper harvest.

Comments

[Anne Donald]

How fabulous! It must taste so good - I am really envious!