Mill then press, everywhere and always. The two-stage method is not a modern refinement. Roman writers describe it for olives, and medieval European cider making used a circular stone trough with an edge-runner stone drawn round by a horse — the pound house — to crush the fruit before it ever reached the press. The English word pomace and the French marc both name the same thing: the crushed cake that goes under pressure. The screw press itself descends directly from the Roman wine and olive presses, and the mechanism changed remarkably little between the first century and the nineteenth.

What the cloth is for. Building a stack of wrapped parcels with racks between them does two things at once. It keeps the pulp contained so it cannot extrude past the boards, and it multiplies the drainage area — juice only has to travel a couple of centimetres to reach a free surface instead of the full height of the pack. Traditional presses used straw instead of cloth, laid in alternating directions, which is where the phrase “building a cheese” comes from. The straw did the same job and left its own faint flavour.

The one genuine hazard. Penicillium expansum, the blue mould that rots stored apples, produces patulin, a mycotoxin that passes straight through the press into the juice and is not destroyed by pasteurisation. This is why commercial producers reject rotten fruit and why the advice about windfalls is not fussiness. Sound fruit, cut damage away, and the risk is gone. Clarifying the juice and fermenting it both reduce patulin substantially, but starting clean is far more reliable than trying to fix it afterwards.

Sweet, hard and sour are the same liquid at three ages. In British usage cider means the fermented drink and the fresh juice is apple juice; in North American usage cider means the fresh unclarified juice and the fermented version is hard cider. The confusion is entirely a matter of dialect. Left alone, wild yeasts on the apple skins ferment the sugar to alcohol over weeks, and Acetobacter then oxidises that alcohol to acetic acid over months, giving cider vinegar. One pressing, three products, decided almost entirely by how long you wait and how much air you allow.

Non-Alcoholic Drinks

Blueprints (2)

Apple Cider Pressing

Switchel