Making Apple Juice

Drinking the Fruits of Your Labour

Drinking fruit juice is the easiest way for our bodies to digest all of the naturally occurring enzymes, vitamins and minerals that are present in fruit. In its liquid form the body doesn’t have to expend energy ‘working’ to extract the goodness, it takes it all up straight in to the blood stream delivering maximum nutritional value.  Most commercially produced fruit juice has been pasteurised (heated) to stop the juice going bad and increase its shelf life – all good and well, except that in the heating process nearly all of those beneficial enzymes, vitamins and minerals are lost. The best solution of course is to make your own, getting the tastiest juice with all the health benefits! In fact, why not try planting some apple trees specifically for juicing? Even in the tiniest garden, dwarfing rootstocks will keep trees small but still give you enough fruit for some delicious homemade apple juice.  Here is some advice for matching the right variety with the tastes you hanker after!

Flavours

Sweet juice: Ashmeads Kernel, Egremont Russet, Claygate Pearmain, King of the Pippins

Medium juice: Jonagold, Laxton’s Superb, Cox

Sharp juice: Bramley, Browns

Blending a sharp juice like Bramley with a sweeter juice will give you a more complex flavour.

Juiciest

Jonagold is a particularly juicy apple so great for home juicers! Katy and Discovery are also good.

Storage

If you’ve got room for a few trees, plant some varieties that will ripen at different times, or varieties that will keep in store, to give you juice throughout the season – Winston will stay on the tree until November, Kidds Orange Red, Ashmeads Kernel will keep well until January.

Colour

Sops In Wine will give you a lovely pink juice – mix it with Discovery for a delicious

and colourful blend.

Vintage Cider

‘Vintage’ varieties will make excellent cider without the need to blend with other apples:

Black Dabinett is a good ‘bittersweet’

Kingston Black is a good ‘bittersharp’

Browns will make a good sharp fresh juice and a sharp vintage cider

Top picture: Vigo apple crusher

Above: A table-top Vigo apple press

What are these spots on my apples ?

It is generally a pretty poor result for apple yields this year. With the unrelenting rain that occurred over late spring/summer, our insect friends were denied much opportunity to pollinate the flowers. But whilst it might not be a good year for fruit, it has been a good year for scab! Scab is an air-borne, fungal disease that affects apples and pears and is easily recognisable by the black-brown spots that appear on the leaves, fruit and bark. It is a disease that favours damp climates and wetter regions, so all that rain provided the perfect environment for scab to flourish.  Infected leaves will develop blotches early in the season that can merge and cause premature leaf fall. Scabby lesions can also develop on the bark and young shoots. Similarly on infected fruit, brown-black spots and patches form on the skin that can scab and crack as the fruit grows, allowing further infection from other diseases. However, light infection on fruit skin is purely cosmetic and will not affect the flesh – so don’t be too hasty to throw your fruits on the compost heap! 

 

Above: Scab infected leaves and fruit

Is it worth spraying ? By the time you have noticed scab, it will be too late to control. Besides few chemicals are available to the amateur, and you would have to spray the whole tree from May until July to be effective.

The two best forms of defence against scab:

1.       Natural Resistance - Planting suitable varieties of fruit tree that have some natural scab resistance. Mostly these are varieties that are happy to grow in the wetter, Western regions of the British Isles like Discovery or Lord Lambourne. Similarly older varieties and local varieties, which were grown before the modern commercial use of fungicidal treatment, tend to have good scab resistance, apples like Ashmead’s Kernal, Beauty of Bath,Pitmaston Pineapple and Tom Putt.

2.       Good house keeping – Correct pruning practises will remove infected wood and maintain good airflow inside your trees, reducing the damp microclimate beloved by scab.  Scab will also harbour in fallen leaves over winter only to infect next year’s new growth, so it’s a good idea to either rake up fallen leaves in the autumn or collect them with a mower. 

Pitmaston Pineapple 

 

Please contact us for further advice on suitable planting varieties and information on pruning services.