After a year of brewing wine, Louise decided to have a go at cider, having been coaxed by a couple of her friends who also thought that cider would be a good idea. The three of them banded together and one found that there was a communal pressing of apples going on at Penne so after a successful scrumping mission which amassed approximately 60kg of apples they descended on Penne this past Saturday morning. As this was their first visit there was the initial degree of what do we do and who do we see (the French have been doing this for years and were old hands at this). Finally they went to the weigh-in and were asked for their bottles whereby they duly handed over their plastic containers and the response was Non! they need to be glass as the pressed juice is heated and your plastic bottles will not take the temperature.
Okay what do we do now? they said, but happily the solution was close at hand as they can buy some bottles. Good. The financial transaction was completed and the bottles were labelled with their names and would be ready in four to five hours. Oh, 4 to 5 hours wait!, we will have to come back later. Well, said the lady, helpfully, you could always come back on Monday and help if you like as we have plenty of helpers at the week-end.
Okay, see you Monday then. On Monday after turning up there were, in fact, less people but a huge pile of apples that still required pressing so we introduced ourselves and got stuck in with the operation. First the apples were sorted and any rotten ones were thrown out, then the sorted apples went into tubs ready for pressing. The pressing operation was in two parts, first the apples were tipped into a hopper and mashed by a huge rotating cheese grater then the resulting mush was laid on the press, wrapped in a cloth and covered with a wooden board. This was repeated until you had a tall stack of mashed apples and boards then the press was hand operated causing the juice to flow out into a large vat. The juice was pumped from the vat into the heat treatment plant then onto bottling and finally stacked into crates.
At lunch we shared lunch "auberge espanol" style and then after lunch the whole process was repeated. We even had a visit from the local school children who were shown how the apples were processed and a few even had a turn on the press with some amusing results (pictured). Finally at 4pm all the apples were pressed but it still took a couple of hours to bottle the contents of the vat and to wash down all the equipment.
Boy, did we sleep well that night.
Nev
