There are several factors which determine whether you need a crusher or not.
For Apples, Pears and other hard fruits, a crusher is an extremely useful tool that can help save you a lot of time.
More importantly perhaps, a proper crusher will break down your fruit to the correct degree for pressing, helping you extract maximum juice from the fruit. This is extremely important when pressing apples or pears, as if the fruit is pulped too much, the juice will not be able to escape the pulp when pressed, resulting in the press locking up, and a lot of frustration!
For almost all users, we would recommend our Small Stainless Manual Crusher for Apples & Pears.
Grapes are probably the easiest to deal with as these can either be placed inside our Crusher unit or they can be cut (if you are only doing a small amount) and squeezed.
Other fruits can be a little more troublesome as there are so many types and it is not easy to generalise. With Berries you can crush these sufficiently with your hands, or use a small piece of timber or other such blunt instrument. The idea is to break open the skins of the fruit. You don’t need to do much more. With larger fruit like Apple, Peaches, and Apricots cut them into pieces and then crush them.
It is easy to over crush the fruit and that’s not the object of the exercise. For this reason we don’t advise food processor or blenders. They are too severe and produce a must which is bitter and will take ages to settle out after fermentation has finished. Depending on the volume you are currently doing will determine the need to invest in one of our Crushers