HyVIDA: First Hydrogen Infused Cider
July 2, 2021Boutique Cider Store Selected for NY Research Study
July 29, 2021Picture This
A cider maker, woefully passing their days away inspecting fruit, testing apples and sipping delectable cider all while in a fashionable yet not too fashionable pair of well trodden boots, a band tee picturing a musical group so cool you’ve never heard of it while wearing a well-worn baseball cap. The picture of effortlessly cool. What isn’t shown is the grueling amount of labor required to get to this point. It does not illustrate the early days of manually sorting through their harvest, transporting the good, bad and ugly fruit to its respective spots. The chosen fruit, poised for pressing, is then ground into pomace via a cider mill.
Bladder Pressing
Once that pomace-spitting dragon of a grinder has turned your fruit into a mash, it is ready to be pressed, which can be done in a variety of methods. One of the most common presses you will find at a cider makers fingertips is the bladder press. Pomace is transported to the top of the press as it fills around the bladder, situated in the middle of the cylindrical press basket.
Moving the pomace is a whole other beast as it can be described as the grunts of shoveling mash into buckets and tipping them into the press to the click of a switch that initiates a mash pump that squirts that directly into the press until the sound of that click with the pump turning off again. Its now the press’s time to shine! Freshly filled with mash, the bladder is slowly inflated. Water flows in to increase the pressure applied to the mash against the press’s outer screen. This pressure extracts the juice and it trickles into a collection vessel beneath the press. In terms of capacity, you can expect to press 360 lbs/hr in an 80L bladder press.
Sweat Level 9/10
Racked Up With Labor
Next up is the popular, but labor intensive, rack and cloth press. The frame holds several layers that are removable to be filled with pomace individually. Each layer filled with pomace is wrapped in the cheese cloth and folded over itself before the next layer is stacked above it. The layers can be filled by hand or by a mash pump as mentioned earlier. The number of layers is dependent on the model of rack and cloth press. Once the layers are filled, a metal head almost identical to the hydraulic press, is attached to the top and ratcheted down to create pressure high enough to extract juice. There are a variety of sizes but a midsize press can fit approximately 88 lbs per batch with the ability to do about three batches per hour.
Sweat Level 8/10
Slow & Steady Squeeze
The third type is a cider press that looks like a large rack and cloth press on its side. It extracts juice by having numerous mash bags that are squeezed together each batch. The processor takes the pomace from their grinder and fills each bag individually. The ease in labor for this unit allows the user to not have to fold cloths between bags but are still required to fill and clean out each bag every batch. A minor improvement for quality of use while the time investment for preparing a batch reduces. This allows for a long, slow squeeze from the press. The larger models have a functionality that allows the press to tip the bags so the processor can scrap out the spent mash. This allows the batch time to speed up but the labor associated is still quite taxing. A mid size unit of this style can process up to 480 lb (217 kg) per hour.
Sweat Level 6/10
So we’ve described the various styles of presses utilized by cider makers, what does your image look like of their daily work life? Are you envisioning a sweaty and labor intensive process with mash spattered walls (and sometimes ceilings)? Good, us too. So how does one go from a mash bearing, overworked, back aching, fruit pressing extraordinaire to the effortless ease of that plaid wearing, cider sipping cool cat?
That’s the Secret We’re Talking About
This secret weapon is none other than a belt press. One of the biggest advantages of employing a belt press is the freedom it gives you, to do all those peripheral tasks involved in cider making. The belt press requires a mostly ‘hands off’ approach demanding only an operator maintaining a healthy fruit supply to the infeed equipment to keep the press continuously full steam ahead. This speaks to the cider maker who has a multitude of tasks, some of which are time sensitive. Maybe, they can only press a certain amount of apples because they have to shift bottling their product. Or possibly, their pressing schedule is turning into long, harrowing days due to their delectable cider’s uprising demand, and their other tasks are piling up into a monstrosity of a to-do list.
Press for Success
That’s why we are such strong advocates for belt presses. We have solid evidence from our clients of how our equipment has allowed them to relieve themselves of strenuous manual labor while increasing capacity. This is achieved while creating more time to tackle that to-do list as well as all the other responsibilities involved in creating a delicious beverage such as cider.
To illustrate this point, we asked Andrew Hefele, a cider maker for Twisted Roots Cider, “On smaller press days I do it myself now. Or, if I have someone else helping, I can step away and deal with other issues at the farm. It takes about half the time now with the new press, and with two people vs five. A 4,000 liter press day takes us six hours with cleanup vs almost twelve before,”.
Or how about this? This is what our friends at Kauffman’s Fruit Farm had to say, “There is two aspects where we saved time. One is just the amount of labor we are not doing on the press, not cleaning out each bag every time. So there’s that but that also means we can run faster so we’re actually pressing more gallons per hour than we were in the past. And with this one press, we are doing what our two old presses could do at max speed for an entire day.”
Sweat Level 2/10
How Bout Them Apples!
That’s a big difference! What would you do with that extra time? How would that change your organizational structure? How would more cider in less time affect your distribution abilities? We want our equipment to allow you to think big! To make the impossible, possible! Kauffman’s Fruit Farm’s goal of ” to supply the entire East Coast,” demonstrates this perfectly. How bout them apples! Read more about their story HERE.
Now that you know about the different types of pressing and the effort involved, we challenge you to think about the efficiencies of your own operation. Do you have bottlenecks? Maybe you’re exhausted and the thought of more pressing days has you dreaming of escaping to Timbuktu? Whether that’s where you’re at or you just want to chat options, Juicing Systems would love to chat. Reach them directly at 1-877-395-3534 or email sales@juicingsystems.com and lets get the conversation started! Their website: www.juicing.systems