Harvest
Shaking and collecting
Bringing fruit down with a pole or letting it fall, then gathering it from the orchard floor — the traditional way most cider and perry fruit has always been harvested.
Known as recogida where it originates. Also called Shaking down, Gathering from the sward, Panking.
- Stage
- Harvest
- Traditional in
- Somerset, Devon, Herefordshire, Pays d’Auge and 2 more
- What it most changes
- Not recorded as moving a sensory dimension
- Safety
- None recorded
What it is
The harvest method of traditional cider country: fruit is either allowed to drop of its own accord as it ripens or is brought down deliberately by shaking the limbs and beating the branches with a long pole, and is then picked up off the grass by hand, with rakes, or into hand-pushed gathering baskets and bags. It treats the orchard floor as part of the equipment. Because ripe fruit falls first, repeated passes over several weeks act as a rough sorting mechanism, taking the ready fruit and leaving the rest on the tree for the next visit.
Why it is used
- It costs a small fraction of hand picking, which is what makes low-value cider fruit worth harvesting at all in a standard orchard.
- Fruit that has fallen because its abscission layer has completed is fruit the tree itself has judged ready, so successive passes gather the crop in maturity order.
- Tall standard trees put most of their crop far out of reach, and a pole reaches what a ladder would take all day to cover.
- In several traditions the crop is wanted slightly soft for milling anyway, so a short period lying on the sward is not a defect but part of the intended condition.
How it works
- A long tapered pole — the West Country panking pole, the French gaule used in gaulage — is worked into the canopy so that the shock travels along the limb and detaches fruit whose abscission zone is already weakened, while immature fruit and next season’s buds mostly stay put.
- Fruit falling into a mown or grazed sward lands on a cushion of grass rather than bare earth, which is why orchard floor management before harvest changes how much of the crop arrives bruised or split.
- Every fruit that lands acquires a coating of soil, grass and orchard-floor microflora, including Penicillium expansum spores and acetic acid bacteria, which is why gathered fruit and hand-picked fruit have quite different intake requirements.
- Time on the ground is the controlling variable: the longer the interval between fall and gathering, the more wounded fruit has been colonised and the more windfall from earlier drops is mixed into the crop.
The chemistry and the organisms
What is actually being changed, and by what. Each entry says what that compound or organism does in cider generally; this page is one place it does it.
Compounds involved
Organisms involved
Penicillium expansum
The blue mould of stored apples and the principal producer of patulin, the one genuine chemical safety issue that rotten cider fruit raises.
Monilinia fructigena
The brown rot of apples and pears, recognisable by concentric rings of buff pustules, and a major cause of fruit loss between the orchard and the mill.
Acetobacter aceti
An acetic acid bacterium that oxidises ethanol to acetic acid wherever cider meets air, and the organism behind most volatile acidity in cider.
Where it is traditional
The places this step belongs to as a matter of practice. It is not a claim of exclusivity — a method can be traditional in one region and perfectly ordinary in another.
What it is done with
Bulk bins, crates and pallets
Fruit arrives in sacks, crates or bulk bins, and the container decides how deep the fruit sits, how well it breathes, how long it can wait and how it will be tipped — which makes it a quality decision as well as a handling one.
Elevators, conveyors and hoppers
Fruit moves by gravity where the building allows it and by flume, belt, bucket elevator or auger where it does not; each method bruises the fruit to a different degree, and each is a machine capable of drawing a person into it.
What can go wrong
Faults that begin at this step, or that this step makes more likely. Each one is set out with its causes and whether it can be put right.
Patulin contamination
Contamination of juice or cider with patulin, a mycotoxin produced by Penicillium expansum in rotting apples — a genuine food-safety question rather than a flavour one.
Mould taint
Musty, earthy, cellar-damp or rotten-fruit character carried in from mouldy fruit or from mouldy equipment, and a marker that the patulin question needs asking.
Vinegar fly contamination
Small flies carrying acetic acid bacteria and spoilage yeasts directly into juice and cider, and depositing them wherever they land.
Styles it produces
Categories in which this step is characteristic or required. Some name it in their definition; for others it is simply how they have always been made.
West Country farmhouse cider
Cider made on the farm from tannic bittersweet fruit, wild-fermented in wood and sold still and unfiltered, in a tradition whose variability is one of its defining features.
Sidra natural
The still, dry, unfiltered cider of Asturias and the Basque Country, wild-fermented from local high-acid fruit and poured from a height to raise a momentary sparkle.
Cidre fermier
Farm-made French cider, pressed and fermented on the holding that grew the fruit, sold as an agricultural product of that farm rather than as a regional or industrial one.
More on shaking and collecting
The traditions that use this method do not use it in the same way. West Country practice has historically shaken the tree deliberately with the panking pole and gathered within a short window, treating the ground as a temporary staging point rather than a place fruit lives; the West Country cultivar descriptions note which cultivars hang and which shed readily precisely because it changes how many passes a block needs. Normandy practice leans further towards letting the fruit fall by itself, with gaulage used to finish a tree rather than to strip it, and the interval before gathering can be longer because the fruit is going into a store where it will be held anyway. Asturian and Basque practice makes the fall central: the crop is the fruit lying in the pomarada, gathered in the recogida, and a fruit that has not fallen is not yet part of the harvest.
That difference is not merely stylistic — it changes the microbiology of what arrives at the mill. Fruit lying in a sward is inoculated with the orchard floor’s yeast and bacterial population, which is one reason wild-fermented sidra natural and farmhouse cider start with a broad non-Saccharomyces population dominated by Hanseniaspora and Metschnikowia species. It also means the crop carries a soil and stone load that a hand-picked crop does not, and that any fruit which fell days or weeks before the gathering pass has had that long for wound colonisation to proceed. Serida’s work on Asturian orchard practice and the French institute’s guidance both treat the gathering interval, rather than the act of gathering, as the point of control.
Where it goes wrong is almost always through the calendar rather than the technique. A wet autumn that makes the orchard unworkable for a week converts a normal drop into a windfall problem; a crew that shakes a whole orchard in one pass to save labour brings down immature fruit alongside ripe and then has to gather all of it; a block shaken and then left because the press is behind produces exactly the mixture of sound and rotting fruit that the intake sort is least able to correct. The method’s low cost is real, but it buys a crop whose condition is bounded by how quickly the fruit can be got off the ground and under cover.
Related processes
Steps that sit alongside this one, replace it, or depend on it having been done.
Harvest
Windfall management
Deciding which fruit that has reached the orchard floor can be used, and getting the rest out of the crop before it becomes a patulin problem.
Harvest
Hand harvesting
Taking fruit off the tree by hand into bags and bins, so that it arrives at the store undamaged and with its stalk intact.
Harvest
Mechanical harvesting
Using trunk shakers, over-the-row machines or sweeper-elevators to bring down and lift a cider crop at a rate no hand crew can match.
Harvest
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.
Harvest
Sweating the fruit
Deliberately heaping or storing gathered fruit so that it softens, loses water and finishes converting starch before it goes to the mill.
Orchard
Orchard floor management
What is grown, mown, grazed or suppressed beneath and between the trees, which affects tree vigour, juice nitrogen, harvest logistics and the biological interest of the ground.
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.
- What is sidra natural — Sidra natural is the still, dry, unfiltered cider of Asturias and the Basque Country, bottled without added carbonation and poured from a height to rouse it. It is tart, funky and made to be drunk in small measures poured one at a time.
- What turns cider into vinegar — Acetic acid bacteria oxidising ethanol, in two steps that both consume oxygen. This is why acetification is an air problem: a full sealed vessel does not acetify however many bacteria it contains.
- Can you use windfall apples for cider — Traditional cider making relies on fruit gathered from the ground, and there is nothing wrong with it if it is sound. Rotten fruit is a different matter: brown rot carries patulin into the juice and should be discarded, not pressed.
- How are cider apples picked
- What does sweating apples mean — Sweating is holding picked fruit in a heap or store for days or weeks before milling, so it softens, loses water and gains sugar concentration. Perry pears in particular are usually held until they yield to the thumb.
- Does cider contain patulin — Patulin comes from mouldy fruit and is regulated in apple juice. Fermentation reduces it substantially, so fermented cider carries far less risk than unfermented juice made from the same fruit.
Where to go next
- How cider is made — The whole sequence, stage by stage, with the choices open at each one.
- Cider science — The chemistry and microbiology the methods on this page rest on.
- Troubleshooting — What goes wrong, how to recognise it, and whether it can be reversed.
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.
A Somerset Pomona: The Cider Apples of Somerset
Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001. ISBN 9781874336877 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library: Liz Copas, The Dovecote Press, 2001, ISBN 9781874336877. The author was Long Ashton’s cider pomologist, which is why this work is registered for Somerset cultivar identity at all — it is the nearest thing to a successor to the station’s own descriptions. No copy was opened. Not digitised in any open collection.
Institut Français des Productions Cidricoles (IFPC)
IFPC · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The French technical institute for cider production. The authority for the French cultivar classification families, for keeving as an industrial process, and for the pectin and nitrogen chemistry that keeving depends on.
Servicio Regional de Investigación y Desarrollo Agroalimentario (SERIDA)
Principado de Asturias · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24
The Asturian regional agri-food research service, and the technical authority behind the Asturian cultivar classification and the analysis of sidra natural. SERIDA’s own site has not been opened; what CiderHQ has read is SERIDA’s varietal characterisation as republished by the Consejo Regulador of DOP Sidra de Asturias, which credits it explicitly. The Asturian measurements therefore cite the Consejo rather than SERIDA — citing the body that did the work, at a document CiderHQ has not seen, would be exactly the kind of borrowed authority this register exists to prevent.
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.