Glossary · Milling and pressing
Flotation
Also written water flume, wet handling. Each is a name for the same thing, which is why none of them has an entry of its own.
Definition
Moving and washing fruit in a channel of water on its way to the mill. Apples float, while stones, soil and much rotten fruit sink, so the flume cleans and sorts at the same time.
- Subject
- Milling and pressing
- Also written
- water flume, wet handling
Where this is covered properly
The glossary defines; these pages explain. Each is described in its own words.
Production
Fruit washing
Removing soil, grass, stones and surface contamination from gathered fruit, usually in a water flume, before it reaches the mill.
Production
Fruit sorting
Taking rotten, mouldy and damaged fruit and foreign material out of the crop before it reaches the mill, which is the primary control on patulin in cider.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Orchard
Fruit sorting
Removing rotten, mouldy and foreign material from harvested fruit before milling, by hand on a table or by flotation and mechanical inspection at scale.
Orchard
Windfall
Fruit that has fallen from the tree before deliberate harvest. In cider orchards windfalls are a normal part of the crop; the question is how long they have lain and in what condition.
Milling and pressing
Milling
Breaking fruit down into pomace so that its cells rupture and its juice can be pressed out. It is the step that determines pressing yield more than any other.
Milling and pressing
Sanitation
The routine cleaning and disinfection of everything juice touches. In a cider house it is the single most effective control on spoilage, and it is separated into cleaning, which removes soil, and sanitising, which reduces the organisms left behind.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
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.
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.
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.