Equipment
The centrifuge
What does a centrifuge do in a cider plant?
In short
A disc-stack separator spins liquid in a bowl containing a stack of closely spaced conical discs. Solids denser than the liquid are thrown outward, slide down the discs to the bowl wall and are ejected; clarified liquid leaves from the centre.
It replaces settling time. Juice that would take a day or more to fall bright, or lees that would take weeks to compact, can be separated in a single pass at a defined rate.
It removes yeast and gross solids but is not a sterilising operation; a centrifuged cider is bright, not stable.
What it is used for
Its role is nearly always to save time and to protect a downstream filter, rather than to achieve something no other process can. A small producer who has cold storage and patience can reach a similar clarity by settling; what they cannot do is reach it in an hour.
- Clarifying juice before fermentation, as an alternative or a complement to settling and enzyme treatment.
- Removing yeast at the end of fermentation so that maturation begins on a much lighter lees, or so that a ferment can be arrested quickly.
- Recovering cider from lees, which at commercial scale is a substantial volume that would otherwise be lost.
- Reducing the solids load ahead of filtration, so that filter media last far longer.
The costs and the risks
Centrifuges are among the most expensive pieces of equipment in a cider plant and among the most maintenance-hungry. The bowl runs at very high speed, the seals and bearings are precision components, and the machine must be balanced, serviced and inspected on the manufacturer’s schedule. It is not equipment that tolerates neglect.
The quality risk is oxygen. A poorly set-up separator can draw air into the feed or leave the bowl only partly full, and cider passing through a spinning bowl with air in it picks up dissolved oxygen very efficiently — the geometry is close to ideal for gas transfer. Machines used on finished cider are run hermetically or with the bowl and discharge under an inert gas blanket for exactly this reason.
The second quality risk is shear, though it is less severe than a rough pump: what a centrifuge does to lees particles is remove them rather than break them up. The bigger stylistic question is what removing them costs. A cider that would have matured on its lees loses that, and a producer who centrifuges for speed has made a decision about texture whether or not they meant to.
Centrifuge, filter or time
These three are alternatives for the same problem and they are not equivalent. Time — settling, cold storage, racking — removes solids gently and selectively and costs tank space and months. A centrifuge removes them quickly and fairly indiscriminately by density. A filter removes them by size and, in the case of depth media, by charge as well.
Most commercial operations use all three in sequence, and the interesting question is where each one is placed. Putting the centrifuge early, on juice, saves settling tanks and lets fermentation start clean. Putting it late, on finished cider, saves filter media and shortens maturation, at the cost of whatever the lees were contributing.
For a producer whose product depends on lees contact and colloidal body, a centrifuge on finished cider is the wrong machine at the wrong point, however convenient. For one making a bright, consistent, filtered cider at volume, it is close to essential.
Also answered on this page
Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.
- What is a cider centrifuge for?
- Does centrifuging cider remove yeast?
- Centrifuge or filter for cider?
Related
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- How do you stop cider from fermenting — By removing the yeast, by chilling, by filtering it out, by pasteurising, or by a combination — and in practice a home maker cannot reliably stop a ferment mid-way with chemicals alone. Sorbate prevents yeast multiplying but will not stop an active ferment.
- What does a farm cider mill or a commercial cidery actually consist of
- What is oxidation in cider
- What kinds of filter are used on cider and what does each remove
- How is apple juice clarified before fermentation
- Why is my cider thin and watery — Thin body usually follows from dessert-fruit juice with little tannin, over-dilution, aggressive filtration, or a ferment that stripped everything out. Body in cider comes mostly from tannin, glycerol and residual sugar.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Hochschule Geisenheim University — beverage technology
Hochschule Geisenheim · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
German beverage-technology research covering apple wine and fruit juice processing, including the enzymology of clarification.
Cider and perry production technical training material
Peter Mitchell / Cider and Perry Academy · reference work · registered as competent for this subject
Searched again on 2026-08-25 and it remains the one printed source here that a bibliographic check cannot fix, because it is not a published work with an edition. It is course material issued to participants of a training programme, so there is no catalogue record to verify, no ISBN, and no lawful public copy. Its state stays `registered` for that reason rather than through inattention.
Where to go next
- Cider making equipment — The rest of the equipment material, grouped by what each piece is for.
- How cider is made — The methods this equipment exists to carry out.
- Troubleshooting — The faults that are traced back to equipment and to cleaning.