Country diary: The alchemical wonder of turning apples into juice

It's juicing day! The highpoint of the year for Transition Town Wellington (TTW), and a cloudy‐sunshiney mixed autumn day it is. Perfect apple weather.

The team rock up early at Brendon Orchards' community press, and unload the crates. Run by a cooperative, the press was set up in 2007 in order to "stop the tragic waste of apples", and this time of year it's booked up solid. Somerset is apple central, with over 150 varieties to chose from, and the TTW volunteers have been harvesting windfalls and excess apples from local orchards and farms for the past three weeks.

Booted, aproned and sporting white dinner-lady hats, we set to work. Each apple is cleaned and sorted. Duke of Cornwall, Newton Wonder, Peter Lock and Blenheim Orange. Tiny sour cider apples and pale green monsters that hardly fit in one hand – they all go into what I've been calling the "hopper‐chopper" but I am reliably informed is actually a scratter. They tumble in the funnel with a satisfying thunder-roll, the blades whirr, and out comes splat after splat of scrumptious pulp.

The pulp is then loaded into the press: a metal cylinder, lined with a coarse mesh, with a bladder in the middle. As the scratted apple is shovelled down the sides, the juice oozes gently through the slats in the cylinder, pressed out by its own weight. I help the process along by shoving it down with my hand. Soon I'm up to my elbow in fruity, fragrant, squelchy pulp – "doing a James Herriot" as one of my fellow juicers puts it.

Once full, a heavy metal lid is screwed in place, the water is turned on, and the bladder inside starts to fill and expand. As it presses the pulp against the sides, liquid cascades down, siphoned into a waiting barrel. The valve is released, the water gushes away and the remaining pulp can be lifted out in one piece, moist and pliable as flapjack from the oven.

The bottle-filling contraption is another clever combination of gravity and hydraulics, and by now the team has a nice flow going. Scrat, heave, squish, fill, cap, load. The bottles enter the pasteurising tank tannin brown and come out liquid gold. And the juice? It tastes like heaven.

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