Making Cider from your Apples: Apple Crushers and Fruit Presses.

If you're looking to make cider from your own Apples, you'll need some way of extracting the juice, and this is where a fruit press comes in.

The fruit press enables you to extract all of the juice and leave behind the fibrous pulp that makes up the rest of the Apple.

Apple Crushers

Apples are incredibly hard, so you can't just put them in a press and hope for the best. If you do this, you're press is likely to come off worse than the apples! You'll need to crush or pulp the apples first to get the right kind of consistency for pressing.

Ideally you want to break your apples down to the point where they have a loose but not liquid consistency. Imagine what an apple would look like if you stomped on it. You're looking for a rough textured pulp that you can run your fingers through, but you don't want to pulp the apples so far that liquid starts to escape or so that the apples become mushy.

The best way to pulp apples is to use a proper crusher, such as our Small Stainless Manual Crusher. This is specifically designed for crushing apples, with coarse cutting teeth and a stainless steel hopper to resist the acidic apple juice.

Our range of apple crushers are the best way to prepare your apples. However there are alternative (and cheaper) methods available.

The cheapest method of preparing your apples is to literally pummel them in a bucket with a large piece of timber. This is a surprisingly effective method, but gets tiring rather quickly.

Alternatively you could use a Pulpmaster. This is a rather crude solution to the problem, but it does get the job done. The pulpmaster requires a power drill (we recommend a mains powered corded model) as the Pulpmaster is in essence a coarse blade on a spindle which fits into a drill chuck like a normal drill bit. The Pulpmaster fits into a 5 Litre bucket and the built in lid/shield stops apples going everywhere. For obvious reasons we recommend caution when using this tool.

Apple Presses

Once your apples are pulped you're ready for pressing. The most important point to consider when looking for a press is capacity. As a general rule, you can expect to yield around 1/5 to 1/4 of the stated press capacity in juice every pressing (assuming the press is filled to the top). So for a 20 litre press you can expect four to give litres of fresh juice. Therefore you'd need to do five or six pressings to extract enough juice to make 23 litres (40 pints) of cider. It goes without saying that a smaller press will require more pressings (and more time) and a larger press will require less pressings (and less time).