South Brittany Holiday Cottage

Yesterday we had our apples pressed here at South Brittany Cottage, to make cider. We collected the apples and lay them on a sheet of polythene a while back, I then went and seen Hervey, the person my parents bought their house off, to find out where I could get barrels from. He said he had some, and kindly gave me a 200 liter barrel and a smaller one, he said that he thought that the amount of apples we had this year would produce around 200 liters of juice, the smaller one was in case we had a little extra. I then went to another family in our village who i was told had a press. I asked if they could press my apples for me and was told they would telephone with a date. Well the guy arrived yesterday morning 9 o'clock, and we were very lucky with the weather as it was very mild, dry and sunny. The press was towed behind a tractor and operated from the tractors power take off (PTO). We had to shovel the apples into a scoop on the side of the machine, which then mashed them up and via a conveyor belt took them to a top gantry, were the pulp fell into a hessian type of matting, which was spread out, then the matting folded over the pulp and a lattice made of wood placed on top of the matting. This continued placing the matting, pulp and wood boards until there was a large stack in the middle of the press and all the apples were gone. This stack was then winched to the end of the machine under the hydraulic press which then squeezed the juice out of the apples. There was a large house connected to the side of the press that fed the juice into the barrel which was in my cave (pronounced 'cav' where the French store their wine cider etc usually with thatched roofs) I now have to keep topping up the barrel with water each day for the next 3 days, and at the weekend Hervey will return to see how things are going. So I will keep you up to date with how things are going and what has to be done next. I am also going to put photos of the press on our South Brittany Cottage Photo Gallery so if you want to see what the press looks like check out our website.