Dr Nevin J Stewart with his Juice & Strain kit.

Dr Nevin J Stewart of Scillonian Road has produced a kit called Juice and Strain (J&S). At its core (pun intended) is a high performance centrifugal juicer which does the ‘juice’ part. This is connected through a hose to the ‘strain’ part. The two operations occur at the same time, and according to its inventor, that makes it a simple single-step process.

The kit in operation.

In his retirement Nevin is a home cider maker who undertakes his hobby with neighbours and friends. He says the kit he has devised is clean, efficient, quick and relatively low cost; and transforms accessibility for the aspiring home cider maker who may have an annual surplus of garden apples.

Extracting the juice.

He says: “One estimate, by Sir Richard Paget, is that up to 90% of all garden apples in the UK go to waste. I find this a shocking statistic as it translates into thousands of tons of wasted fruit annually.

The kit, supplied with a Rommelsbacher whole fruit juicer, costs £212.90, and Nevin claims that anyone processing up to100 kg of apples can generate a higher juice yield than someone using a small press. What’s more, he says the apples are processed in a shorter time. A cheaper kit can be bought without the fruit juicer.

He adds: “Whole apples are fed in at one end and clear apple juice is drawn off by the gallon at the other.”

Click here for details of the kit on Virgo Presses’ website.

Nevin’s own cider called Onslow’s Dry®.

Nevin also produces his own cider called Onslow’s Dry®. Of the name he says: “We live adjacent to Onslow Village. The land on which it is built was sold by Lord Onslow at a handsome discount in the 1920s. However, he had restrictive covenants placed on all of the property deeds. One of these was a prohibition to sell alcohol. To this day there is no pub or off licence in the village, so Onslow is dry, and our cider is very dry. That’s the pun!”