Making Cider 2015

Much like everything else this year, cider pressing kept getting pushed back until it’s almost too late. We bought a lightly used, homemade cider press earlier this year for a mere 300 dollars and immediately couldn’t wait for apple season. Once the apples finally started to ripen we were swamped with wedding stuff and then once the wedding was over we had so much other stuff to catch up on it just kept getting forgotten. Seriously though, who could possibly own a cider press and miss out on making that sweet brown nectar?

Making apple cider is no new adventure for me. My family made gallons and gallons every year up until recently with my uncle’s antique press. He had an electric motor to chew up the apples and a big threaded pipe to press the juice out of the fruit. The whole family would bring bins and bins of apples and apple dishes and everyone would help out to make the golden goodness. We called the annual event the “Apple Squeezin” and every year whoever put in the most work would be crowned as the “Apple King or Apple Queen.” It was a great time and everybody always went home full of apples and happiness (those are arguably the same thing, no?)

Our cider press

We don’t get too fussy about our cider; we never did at my uncle’s either. If you try to buy all your apples like you would eating-apples you would go broke. In my family we would go to a PYO orchard and make a deal with them to take totes of drops for a very cheap price. Bruised apples don’t affect cider as they get all chewed up anyway. We would try to leave the wormy ones out, but let’s be honest; a little extra protein never hurt anyone. This year we got our apples from a friend with some trees that couldn’t use all the fruit she had.

That's a lot of apples

We also don’t pasteurize our cider. Some people wouldn’t touch it, but I’ve been drinking it since I was two and I’m still here. We (I was) were planning to try and brew some hard cider, to put a bunch in the freezer, and to leave some out for drinking and mulling. We (I) made all these plans of course before we broke our little press and ended up with only a half gallon. Matt apparently knew this wouldn’t work out. He’s an unbeliever.

Well, we had great plans to recreate the Apple Squeezin’ with a few friends and family this year but it never materialized so we decided that we better get some apples and try our new magic maker out before all the apples turn into applesauce.

Our press is very simple in comparison to my uncle’s beast. Ours has a hand cranked scrater (that’s what I call the thing that chews up the apples; SKRATE-ter) made up of some stainless steel screws on a round pole that turns. This seemed like it should work well enough and I was so excited to start pulverizing the apples. Welllll, it didn’t work so hot. It just kind of twirled the apples around and never really chewed them up. This was disappointing.

To make things worse, I never ordered those nifty cider bags you’d need to use with our press because the slats on the pressing bucket are so far apart. I bought these turkey stuffing bags on sale at Wal-Mart thinking they would work…hah. No.

Don't skimp on cider bags. Just. Don't. Do. It.

At full capacity they were about the size of a tube sock and it took a lot of doing to fill them to begin with.

So we decided we needed to get creative. We had a billion apples after all. So we started to cut the apples in half and put them directly into the pressing bucket and squish them that way. That sort of worked for a little while but it wasn’t great.

This is about as productive as it got

At this point we started to hear some cracking and popping sounds and Matt (who was running the bottle jack) said, “That doesn’t sound good”

To which I said, “It’s just apples Matt. Don’t be so stupid.”

“I think that might be more than apples.”

“No. Keep going. Why are you stopping? It’s the apples. Keep GOOOOO-ingggg”

About here is when our pressing basket blew open with a startling “POP” that even jumped the dog and Matt gave me that “why can’t you ever listen to me look.”

Not much, but sooooo good

So with our bin of apples still more than full and a mere half gallon of cider we threw in the towel and cleaned up our mess. With great disappointment we dumped our mangled apples in the compost and went back inside to plan how to re-engineer the entire unit. We may not be able to make much cider this year, but next year it will be in the fridge, in the freezer, in a warm mug with spices, and in a large glass vessel getting more potent by the day.

Cheers!