From apples to juice (and wine)

The apple season was pretty good this year, so we were looking forward to our appointment at the Dorfgemeinschaftshaus Reiffenhausen to have our apples transformed into delicious apple juice. The DGH has a still functional Mosterei which allows you to bring your own apples (and bottles) and leave with your own juice. But before that, we first had to get the apples off the trees. It took half a day of shaking the apple trees and gathering the fruits from the ground. The results were about 200kg of apples including Boskoop, Alkmene, and Jakob Lebel.

When we finally arrived at the Mosterei, the place was already busy. In a first step, the apples were roughly cleaned in a big bowl of water and then fed into the grinder. The grinded apples were than pressed with the same machine to extract the delicious juice. In each step,  about 20 liter of raw juice was extracted. The juice was then processed in a centrifuge to filter larger particles. Before bottling, the juice was heated to about 80°C. In the meanwhile, our water bottles were cleaned with hot water to get rid of bacteria.

All in all, the 200kg apples made almost 135 liters of apple juice and it took just about an hour for the whole process. Before processing the raw juice, we took 20 liters in a glas ballon to start a batch of apple wine. The taste was much more intense compared to the heated juice.

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