|
 Irish Climate
The Irish Climate in summertime is usually cool, and the growing season long. These characteristics combine to yield fruits that are always very flavourful, and often quite soft. This is in contrast with warm-climate apples, which are more typically very firm, though not so tasty as their Irish counterparts.
Karmine apple juice is made using only Irish apples (grown on our family-farm), and there is no doubt that the Irish climate can take part of the credit for the fact that there is no juice better than Irish apple juice.
Excellent Apples
However, in order to make a superb apple juice, more than climate is needed, and the raw materials must also be superb. To achieve this, we use only hand-picked apples grown on our farm in Moorstown. Not just any apples, but ones of the variety Karmijn de Sonnaville. These apples, though not pretty, are very suitable for juice, due to their naturally high acid, sugar and aroma contents. Any apple juice based on the Karmijn apple will always be good, and one based on Irish apples of this type will be better still.
Excellent apples do not arrive out of thin air on the day of pressing however, and a lot of work goes into growing a crop for a year before harvest, and many years into growing the trees before that. On our farm we have about five thousand Karmijn trees, some over twenty years old, and some quite young. Each tree gets personal attention, with winter pruning, summer pruning, disease removal and scouting for pests all done by hand. Include hand-harvesting and hand-thinning (removal of
sub-standard fruits), and each tree receives a lot of individual care for the fifty or so fruits that it gives.
Work such as this is well worthwhile however, because when the time for harvest arrives, and the fruit quality is good, you know that the juice will be good too.
Careful Blending
In our World it is unusual for anything to be exactly as we would like without some intervention. So too it is with juice from the Karmijn apple, which, though excellent, is a little too sweet by itself. In order to balance this, we add juice from our super-acid Bramley apples to the mix to get a perfect balance. This is a daily exercise that we undertake with great care, typically adding between 25% and 33% Bramley juice to our carefully pressed Karmijn elixir, tasting many times as we proceed to ensure that the balance is not tipped too far. Only
when we are happy that the blend is exactly right do we bottle and
pasteurise, and even after that, we re-check the taste, just to be absolutely certain.
A little Vitamin C
Just as a cut apple turns brown in the presence of air, so too does apple juice. This can be stopped with various chemicals, but the best way to do it from the point of view of the final consumer is by adding vitamin C. Vitamin C is a natural antioxidant, and though naturally present in apples, it is not usually there in great enough quantities to stop browning (which is caused by oxidation). At pressing we therefore add a little Vitamin C to the juice (about the same amount as is already naturally present in the apple), and this keeps the juice fresh-looking and inhibits the oxidation.
|
 |
