We’ve been planning the 2009 cider making for a while now and today the plan came together in true A-Team style. We met our scientist friends at the disused wartime railway and harvested the apples which lined it. I had doubts that we were a little too early but we managed to get a bumper crop off half the trees and although it wasn’t as much as last years effort,it was still a good effort. We’ll go back for the others next month.

So now it was just a case of organising ourselves and it wasn’t long before we had a production line going in the back yard - washing, chopping, mincing and pressing. Although it may look small, that little press can produce quite a lot of juice in next to no time.

As we were working away all day, we called it a day having worked through about two thirds of the apples collected today. We didn’t fill the five gallon bad boy up as much as we would have liked, our final level came in at 4 gallons. Unfortunately when we commence with phase 2 in a months time we can’t top this up so we have to start a fresh with new containers.

Now all we need to do is tuck it in every night and think of a name to stick on our labels.