Juicing apples

The Homebrew Forum

Help Support The Homebrew Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

tonyhibbett

Landlord.
Joined
Oct 24, 2010
Messages
2,725
Reaction score
159
Location
Isleworth, Middlesex
This is an update to an earlier posting.
Using a whole fruit juicer, I have now processed about 36 kilos of apples, resulting in a raw extraction rate greater than 70% by straining the waste pulp. Having removed, by siphoning, the froth and sediment, after settling, I ended up with 55% translucent juice, which I believe exceeds the product of traditional crushing and pressing (up to 50%), and at a fraction of the cost of equipment. But you have to be organised. I picked enough apples to fill a 3 gallon bucket, (about 7 kilos), filled it with water to wash and set up 2 x 2 gallon buckets, one for the juice and one for the pulp, with a muslin straining bag inside the latter. Then placed the juicer and collecting jug inside a clean plastic tray, as things get rather messy. You can juice 3 average size apples in one go. After 2 litres of juice, empty the pulp collector into the muslin bagged bucket and strain out the juice, putting the dry pulp into a plastic bag and the resultant juice with the rest in the first bucket. Continue until all apples processed. Skim off most of the thick foam in the bucket and transfer juice into a demijohn to settle for a few hours. Cleaning out the juicer is somewhat tedious, so process as many apples as you can in one session.
Once the juice has settled, siphon out the translucent juice between the foam and sediment and either discard the waste, or drink it. It's very 'wholemeal'! Add 1 crushed campden tablet, (I use clean pliers) a teaspoon of pectic enzyme to 'clear' juice, stir and fit fermentation lock. If natural fermentation has not started within 48 hours, add nutrient and yeast.
 
To calculate the %, I weighed the apples, measured the juice and weighed the strained pulp. As the juice is mostly water, 1 litre weighs 1 kilo. Subtract weight of raw juice from weight of apples then divide result by weight of apples and multiply by 100. eg, 9 kg apples, 2.2 kg strained pulp. Result 24.44% pulp, so 75.55% raw juice. After siphoning out 'clear' juice, using same method with sediment and froth is not so precise as the froth is mostly air and some sediment remains suspended in the juice which will be removed after fermentation and fining, by which time 45% of the sugar content is lost as carbon dioxide, about 2.5% of the original volume. Basically, you need slightly less than 2 kg of apples to produce 1 litre of 'clear' juice, hence the figure 55%.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top