Introduction

 If you are an amateur, there are only so many apples, whether fresh, cooked in various ways or used as ingredients in other products (mincemeat, chutney etc.) that you and your family and friends can eat. The great beauty of fresh apple juice is that it uses up large quantities of fruit, including windfalls and blemished fruit, to give a product for which demand is high throughout the year. Juice makers are more or less fastidious about maggoty apples, while brown rot should be largely avoided as it contains the toxin patulin.

 Apart from sundries, two pieces of equipment are required: a mill (sometimes called a scratter), to mince the apples into a slurry, and a press to then squeeze out the juice. The juice can either be stored in a deep freeze or pasteurized and stored in air-tight bottles. Both are relatively recent methods of storage (which is why cider is the traditional apple drink), and in fact fresh juice has been made widely in Britain only since the 1970s (Lea, 2008).

 Varieties ‘good for juice’

 This is a natural question if juice is to be made from single varieties, a practice prevalent in commerce. Commercial orchards naturally settle for a few varieties with familiar names, and some of these names probably have marketing value in their own right - ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’ ‘Egremont Russet’, ‘Bramley’ etc.

 Some varieties are indeed well suited to single variety juices but not most dessert varieties since juice is subjectively sweeter than the fruit it comes from. Thus, dessert varieties easily give a juice that is over-sweet and may be rather bland, while cooking apples give juice that is very dry or tart and can be rather thin. For most British palates something in between is preferred, made either from a blend of dessert and cooking apples, from a relatively small number of so-called dual-purpose varieties (‘James Grieve’, ‘Annie Elizabeth’, ‘Gravenstein’ etc.), or from well-ripened culinary varieties most of which are not as acidic as ‘Bramley’.

Bittersweet and bittersharp cider apples contain tannin, which makes them unpalatable when eaten fresh but is pleasing in cider. Some cider varieties, for example ‘Kingston Black’, are characterized by a relatively low tannin content (0.19% on average in the case of ‘Kingston Black; Copas, 2001) and make highly regarded single-variety juices. Thus, cider apple varieties, including the sweets and sharps which have very low tannin contents, could be included in juice blends in any proportion to give a desired content of tannin.

 Blends can of course include other fruits, whether to change the colour of the juice or its flavour, while Lea (2008) suggests 15% tinned mango puree! You are limited only by your imagination.

 Other variables affecting a variety’s suitability for juice include juice productivity, which is determined by the heaviness of the crop, and the volume of juice per unit weight of fruit (juice yield). The latter depends on the quality of the milling, the pressure applied in the press and the texture of the apple, a loose ‘juicy’ texture lending itself to a relatively high yield. The yield from fruit milled in a small-scale hand mill, if of a dense texture, may be increased by re-milling.

 A practical perspective

 Perhaps it would be possible, with enough experimentation, to find the perfect single variety juice for your palate, but it is more practical to grow several varieties and to blend them. In practice it is also helpful to have varieties ripening at different times so that batches of juice can be made at intervals throughout the harvest season (and beyond in the case of those later varieties that need a period of storage after harvest to ripen fully). Having more than one variety of any one kind ripening at any one time further spreads risk, bearing in mind that individual varieties can crop well or badly in any one year.

 It’s a good idea, at least in the family context, to produce more than one quality of juice to avoid eventual boredom and a slackening of demand. Different batches if made at different times are likely to vary somewhat anyway, particularly on the small scale, and this variation could be increased by deliberately varying the proportions of each variety in the blends or by adding other kinds of fruit. A handful of raspberries added to 20kg of apples makes an appreciable difference both to colour and flavour.

 For good juice it is important that the fruit is well-ripened. Variation in ripeness (ie. within the variety) can be at least as important as the variation between varieties.

 References

 Copaz, L. (2001). A Somerset Pomona: The cider apples of Somerset. Grenadier Publishing, England. ISBN 1 874336 87 3.

 Lea, A. (2008). Craft cider making. The Good Life Press, Preston. ISBN 978 1 904871378.