Today we racked all the cider. This is the next part of the process after fermentation, where all the cloudiness has dropped out of the fermented apple juice. The ‘lees’ all falls to the bottom of the barrel, and we take the clear cider from over the lees, and pump it into a new clean barrel. In fact, we do take a small amount of the cloud too, as we like our ciders to be slightly cloudy, if that’s what you want. It’s why there’s always a small sediment in the bottle. If you want cloudy cider, shake it first. The cloudiness is apple and yeast, and perfectly good to drink.

This is Apple 5135-286’s 9th lift, although in this case, it was mostly done by the pump. We did have to shift the 100ltr barrel he was in though.

Every barrel we had was racked today. This process is, clean a new barrel. Move the cider from the old barrel to the new one. Clean the old barrel. Repeat.