How to make apple juice

I am fortunate enough to have an apple orchard in my garden so that I can get great apples to eat fresh, put in crumbles, dry, bake etc, but there are still far too many for me so what can I do with them? Make the best apple juice in the the world. I can’t take credit for it being brilliant; that’s thanks to nature, but I do know how to get it out of the apples. So if you want to know how to make apple juice, you’ve come to the right place.

Get a load of apples

making apple juice - apples — Yes, to make apple juice you need a lot of apples. They don’t have to be perfect though you should remove any that are badly bruised, rotten or wormy. Rinse the apples and remove any twigs, leaves, dead mice etc.

Shred the apples

making apple juice - the shredder — It is important that you shred rather than liquidise the apples. This is my apple shredder – you feed apples in the top and a sharp blade shreds the apples and empties the shredded apple into the black bin. Once it is full, you can empty the bin into your apple press.

Squeeze out the juice

making apple juice - the press — Fill up the press with shredded apple and add wooden boards to the top. You can then so that squeeze out the juice. It is brown as the cut apple pieces were oxidised when exposed to the air.

Doesn’t it look great?

making apple juice - a jug of juice — Hard to say how much juice you’ll get from a kilo of apples, that will depend on the variety of apples and how powerful your press is.

Cheers!

making apple juice - the final product — Doesn’t it look wonderful? And yes, it tastes as good as it looks.

Presuming you have more apple juice than you can drink, you can either freeze it or pasteurise it. To freeze it, I put freezer bags inside old drink cartons (start saving them now) and fill them up with juice. The frozen apple juice thaws out to taste virtually the same as the fresh juice. It just depends on how much space you have in your freezer…

Last year I bought a pasteurising machine which has worked well. More information on that coming later.