Apple Cider Pressing

Discard any fruit that is rotten, mouldy or has lain in mud. Patulin, a mould toxin, survives pressing and is the one real risk in this whole process.

Blend sharp, sweet and aromatic apples. A single dessert variety gives flat, one-note juice; the traditional blends exist for good reason.

Store the apples somewhere cool until they give slightly under a thumb. Softer fruit mills more easily and yields more juice.

Tip the fruit into a tub of water, agitate, and lift it out rather than draining — grit sinks and you leave it behind.

Quarter the apples and cut away damage. Stalks, cores and pips can all go in; only rot has to come out.

Reduce it to pieces the size of a fingernail. Whole apples in a press yield almost nothing — the milling is what breaks the cells open.

Too fine and the pomace turns to a slurry that blocks its own drainage channels. Coarse pulp presses far better than mush.

Spread pomace on a square of press cloth, fold the corners over, and build a stack of these parcels with a board between each. This is the cheese, and it is what stops pulp squirting out sideways.

Take up the slack, get a steady flow, and then wait. Cranking hard immediately collapses the outer layer into a seal and traps the juice behind it.

As the flow slows, take up another turn. An hour of patient re-tightening beats five minutes of brute force by a wide margin.

Release, crumble the compressed cake, re-wrap and press again. The second pressing often adds another tenth of the total yield.

Pass it through muslin into a clean vessel and record the ratio. Expect 60-70 % of fruit weight as juice — below 50 % means the mill was too coarse or the press too fast.

Fresh juice starts fermenting on its own from wild yeast on the skins. Chill it, freeze it, or pitch yeast — but do not leave it standing warm and undecided.

The cake is still most of the fruit's fibre and it rots fast. Livestock will eat it too, but only fresh — it sours within a day or two.

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.