Behind the scenes look at Curran’s Orchard’s apple cider making process

ROCKFORD, Ill. (WTVO) — Apple season is still going strong and a well known Rockford orchard is busy squeezing cider for the crowds visiting their grounds.

Patrick Riofredo shows us how Curran’s Orchard in Rockford makes apple cider. He said he loves harvest season.

“My favorite part of the entire orchard really is that people get to come out and make memories as a family and enjoy yummy apples donuts and cider,” he said. “We work the whole year preparing for the fall, and this is harvest time and when we get the see the fruits of our labor.”

He said the first step in making apple cider is picking the apples.

“Once they’re in the apple barn, we put them in this water bath and wash them,” he said. “Right now, they’re going up the conveyor belt, then they’ll go into a scrubber, which kind of polishes them, rinses them off with fresh water. And then they come out the other side. They go over a chain grater, which is a sizer basically. You can see apples falling out the bottom there. Those are apples that are too small to put in a bag.”

“Then after that, they go over the chain sizer onto our sorting table here where we, by hand, every apple, look them over, make sure there’s no bad spots on it,” he said while holding an apple. “It’s a good apple. And we’re washing for cider, so they go right back into the bins they came out of, and then we take them over to the cider room.”

Then he took us to the cider room.

“So we dump the apples on the conveyor belt here,” he showed. ” They get lifted up to the cider mill, crushed up into little pieces. And then they fall down into our rack and cloth which we stack up four high. And then we slide them down to the hydraulic press. It’s a big plate that basically just squishes the apples to get all the juice out of them. Once the juice is squeezed out, it’s gets pumped up into our refrigerated tank, and then it’s cider.”

It’s straight from the orchard to you.

“This is it,” he said. “This is what all our hard work went into, our fresh-squeezed apple cider. No water, sugar, preservatives. You know, we went from apples, washed, pressed, bottled, and then ready for you to enjoy.”

He said there’s a lot of pride in making sure, “someone can take home a produce so fresh and delicious, really.”