Kehelland Apple Juice Scoops 2 awards at Cornwall Cider Championships!

We are so excited to share the news that our apple juice scooped not just one but TWO awards at the Cornwall Cider Championships, Royal Cornwall Show at the beginning of June.

Our early, cloudy juice 'Discover Pear' ( a blend of Discovery & Cornish Pear Apple) won a silver award and our late season Jupiter Gold (a blend of Jupiter & Jonagold) won bronze.

The comments from the judges were so positive, saying that our juice tasted so bright and fresh, almost as though it had not gone through the pasteurisation process!

Growth Manager, Sally, went to receive the awards but is keen to emphasise what an incredible team effort our juicing process is.

"At Kehelland, we feel what makes our juice so special is not just the huge variety of apples we press ( we have 230 trees and 117 varieties including many Cornish Heritage Varieties), but the joint ownership of, and pride in the process- Our apple harvest involves the whole site and just about everybody on it" says Sally. "Our learners and trainees are involved in almost every aspect - from harvesting, through sorting, washing, crushing, pressing, bottling and then labelling for sales in our shops or to other retailers. We simply couldn't achieve what we do without everyone's help. Thank you team Kehelland and all those people who support us by buying our juice"

In 2025 we pressed just short of 4000 ltrs of juice, so it is no mean feat to get this processed and on the shelves.

It takes around 60kg fruit for a single press. We mostly press our own apples, but we do also undertake contracts for holiday cottages & individual orchard owners (it only takes 5 fruit trees to officially earn the title 'Orchard').

On our annual Apple Day (10th October 2026), we do a Community Press - anyone from the community can bring their harvests to us; the only rules are no less than 2kg and no more than 20kg - this is a way in which many people can contribute and even the smallest harvests can be turned into bottled juice that lasts for up to 18 months unopened.

Our juicing equipment came to us by way of a legacy. Mike Clayton was a keen orchardist and cider maker. He & his wife Maggie, supported our Apple Day from the very first one in 2004. Sadly Mike passed away in 2016 and Kehelland Trust were offered first refusal to ensure his apple processing equipment lived and worked on in his memory. We hope that, 10 years on we have done Mike, Maggie and daughter Becky proud.

The equipment consists of a Speidl electric scratter which breaks the apples down into the 'scrat'. This is then put into the 90ltr Speidl hydropress - water pressure alone expands the central 'bladder' to extract the juice at an incredible rate - we have to have buckets at the ready!!

And nothing goes to waste - pigs really love the spent scrat so we post up on our socials when there is scrat at the gate and it gets snapped up for anyone keeping piggies.

Pasteurisation is vital to ensure adequate sterilisation and a long shelf-life for our juice and, currently, it is the most labour-intensive and inaccessible part of our juicing process. We use 2 kettle-style pasteurisers which can only manage 28 bottles an hour and requires constant monitoring and temperature control (our grateful thanks to Neil & Simon who managed most of this process in 2025 outside of our normal working hours).

On our wish list ( I suppose we should say bucket list really...) is a 3-phase basket pasteuriser which not only manages 150 bottles an hour, but is also a far more accessible process for trainees and learners as bottles can be filled and sealed cold before they go into the pasteurisation bath. We hope we can achieve this at some point in the future and then we can take our production to another level!

If you would like us to press your apples into juice, please get in touch on hort@kehellandtrust.org.uk

If you would like to purchase some of our delicious juice, please visit our on-site shop in Kehelland or our Camborne Town Centre shop at 1, Trelowarren Street (opposite the town square).

If you'd like to know more about our apple juicing process and the work we do at Kehelland Trust, Sally is giving a talk at Falmouth Poly on 16th July. Tickets available by following the link below: -

The Story of a Cornish Orchard - Talks - What's On - The Poly at Falmouth