Brothers haul sophisticated mobile apple-crushing unit on trailer
Gordon Geissberger (left) and his brother Garry operate a mobile apple cider mill as well as a retail outlet where they sell their own specialty ciders.
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
MITCHELL’S CORNERS — Autumn is prime time for custom operators like Garry and Gordon Geissberger, Oshawa-area brothers who occupy a unique niche in the Ontario apple industry.
For the last 11 years, they’ve been travelling to orchards to crush apples into fresh, pasteurized cider, using a sophisticated mobile cider mill that also packages the juice into plastic bags placed within consumer-ready boxes. The bag-in-a-box technology allows the cider to keep for months without refrigeration and without preservatives.
They also run their own retail outlet — Geissberger Farmhouse Cider — at the former dairy farm where their Swiss immigrant grandparents milked cows until 1968. As a sideline, their grandfather operated a small orchard (now gone) and added a conventional stationary cider mill in 1970 to start the Geissberger farmhouse brand as a hobby. That original machine served up until 2012 when his grandsons replaced it with the current German-made model that is used both on and off their operation. They make their own cider exclusively from apples purchased from four other orchards in Durham County, including a popular blend made exclusively from honey crisp apples. They’re also known for sparkling ciders, alcoholic cider and cider vinegars.
Garry Geissberger says that revenues for the business are approximately split between sales of their own cider and off-site custom-crushing-and-packaging jobs. They turn 65,000 to 70,000 pounds of apples into cider each year, including about 45,000 pounds from their own production. Twenty client orchards ranging from Port Elgin in the west to Kingston in the east account for the rest.
The custom service means those clients get the benefit of having another “value-added” product to sell during the short season before Christmas, he points out, but without the need for costly refrigeration equipment to store the shelf-ready cider. They also save the cost of shipping apples to a stationary crusher.
The mobile crusher, carried on a 8-foot-by-20-foot trailer and capable of producing up to 500 litres of cider per hour, is the only one of its kind in Ontario. The Geissbergers bought it through a distributor in British Columbia, who designed it for the German manufacturer. “We decided yeah, it’s a big leap, but we’ll run with it and see how far we go … We’ve been able to go a decade now with it,” he says.
He declined to reveal what the crusher cost but suggested it would be comparable to an expensive farm implement.
The brothers grew up with the family cider-making tradition. It became their full-time pursuit more recently after their retirement from the public sector. (Garry was a teacher, Gordon a watershed authority employee.)
The operation has been earning kudos for years, including a provincial Leadership in Agriculture Innovation Award in 2013. The latest honour arrived in October of this year, when the Durham Farm Connections organization conferred on the brothers its Spirit of Agriculture award.
