In America, apples are probably the most prolific food available to forage freely. This is presumably the case in much of Europe too. No other food can be found so commonly and taken freely in such huge quantities as apples. Nothing else comes close. Even in arid Colorado, I freely picked fifty or so gallons of apples from around my town in a good year. Here in the lapsed farmland of northern Michigan, where nearly every single parcel of land has mature apple trees, I could pick thousands of gallons. I'm only limited by my own time and energy. That's the potential to get a LOT of free food.
So around autumn every year, my diet becomes very apple heavy. Apple pie, Cheshire pie, apple crisp, dried apples, fried apples, apple sauce, and fresh apples carefully stored in sawdust in the garage. But perhaps more valuable than all of those would be to turn the apples into booze. As it turns out, hard cider is the absolute easiest way to make decent tasting alcohol that I've ever tried or heard of, provided you've got the apples. It's also very based and trad: hard cider was the drink of choice for the average preindustrial rural American anywhere apples could be grown (it was probably more common than beer at the time), and their tradition came from their European (particularly British and French) ancestors, and it goes at least as far back as the Romans.
This won't be a complete tutorial on fermenting cider, but rather a focus on the gathering-the-apples-then-pressing-them-into-liquid stage. This can all be accomplished with a couple specialized but simple and resilient tools.
GATHERING
Finding apple trees is best accomplished by simply waiting till the time of year when apple trees make themselves obvious (August-October) and driving around looking for them. You'll have the most luck in areas that were farms before WWII. Many are right on the roadside or in a clearly abandoned field, and are free for the taking. If the area around them looks tended or they're right next to an occupied house, better to ask permission.
Now the good thing about gathering apples for cider is that you don't need to be picky. Bruised? Scarred? Partially eaten? Turning brown? All perfect fodder for your press. The only ones I wouldn't take are apples that are black or that have brightly colored mold. But certainly don't be afraid to pick apples off the ground instead of off the tree. Pro tip: if you can shake the branches of the apple tree to knock all the apples off, this is usually the fastest way to gather them. Alternatively, you can wait for them to fall off naturally but animals might steal much of the harvest. I find that with this method, I can fill a 5 gallon bucket with apples every 10-12 minutes. A 5 gallon bucket might seem like a lot of apples, but for cider it's really not: 5 gallons of apples yields about 1 gallon of cider, give or take. So if I'm trying to make enough cider to have a 5oz glass of it every evening for the ENTIRE YEAR, I'd want a little over 14 gallons of the stuff. More if you drink more, or if you plan to give some away (which you should, it's a great gift). So it's not uncommon for me to gather 60-70 gallons of apples in a season, and I'd like to ramp up even more in the coming years.
It's worth noting: 5 gallons is a very convenient unit of measure for me. I don't use bushels, because bushel baskets are more expensive and less convenient than 5 gallon buckets. It also so happens that the press I use later in this blog post holds 5 gallons worth of apples, so 1 bucket = 1 full load for my press = 1 gallon of cider. Very convenient. It's also worth noting that a standard square milk crate holds 5 gallons of apples with a bit of room to spare so you can still stack them. They also let the apples breathe so they won't go moldy if made to sit for a while before pressing.
GRINDING
So once you've gathered your buckets of apples, they can sit in an uninsulated space for up to a couple weeks without spoiling, while you frantically try to build or order a cider press. Just don't let critters get to them.
Before they can be put into the press, they have to be roughly ground up first. Don't skip this step or else your press won't work. This can be done with a blender, a food processor, or a garbage disposal. But the simple, resilient, Trad™ way to do it is with one of these:
This is a hand cranked fruit crusher made by Biltek. It's got a hopper you put apples in, which feeds them into two hand cranked rollers with big metal claws to grind them, then it drops them out the bottom. Basically a mini tabletop version of that thing Chinese workers are always getting sucked into. There's several Chinese companies making slight variants of this thing (including one with a nice looking flywheel). I got mine on ebay for $73 shipped.
Here's my little grinding station. The hand cranked grinders buck and vibrate a lot when in use, so you'll want to clamp it down as secure as possible. Besides that there's some other useful things you'll want:
a stand to get your collection bucket as close as possible to the bottom of your grinder. This minimizes spillage
a wooden push stick to stick into the hopper when it occasionally jams. Do NOT reach your hand in there
a cutting board and a large knife for splitting large apples. The grinder has trouble with anything baseball sized or larger, so pick these out and roughly chop them in half before feeding them into the grinder
a waste bin to put any large twigs, bark, leaves, etc you find. A bit is okay, but big woody pieces can jam your grinder
Just feed in apples and crank that handle. You'll find that it yields a nearly equal volume of ground apples vs whole apples. Like nearly every step of cider making, this one goes much faster with friends to help and it's easy, fun work. Makes a great social gathering. Once you've ground up enough apples to fill your press, you can move onto the next step.
PRESSING
You're finally ready to press the crushed apples into juice. For this I got the Vevor 18L fruit press. I know this is the second Vevor thing I've mentioned on this blog and I promise they're not sponsoring me, but they make the cheapest decent looking fruit press on the market. This cost me $79 shipped, which makes about $150 for both of the important tools to press cider in large quantities. Not bad. They make several sizes, and I got the 18L one specifically because it's close to exactly 5 gallons, my collection bucket size.
So does it work? Yeah, more or less. It's pretty hard for even the Chinese to mess up this simple device, and it does the job it's intended to do. Here's my takeaways about it:
You HAVE to bolt this thing down somehow. It comes with some puny mounting holes, so I bored them out to fit 1/4" lag bolts and secured it to a pallet. Bolting it directly to a floor would be even better
It had a minor leak out the bottom when I first used it, but that quickly went away
One of the wooden plates on top (supposedly oak, but I doubt it) cracked almost immediately, but held on and still did its job
The bags that come with the press are too short. I simply sewed another one, but you might be better off using an old cotton pillowcase
The kit didn't include enough wooden plates, but this is typical, and not a big deal. I cut a couple more out of a 2x4
I also coated all the wooden components with beeswax to keep them from harboring bacteria. Not sure if it helped, but it made me feel better
The diameter is slightly less than that of a 5 gallon bucket. Which means when you try to pour your ground apples in, they tend to spill. Maybe some sort of funnel would help this?
Anyways, you insert a bag into the wooden barrel of the press, pour in your ground apples, put the plates and trunnion on top, then start cranking down on the press. The fruits of your labor flow out of a spout in the base, where you can place a bowl to collect it. I find that when cranking this press about as hard as I could without a longer handle, I would get 0.9-1.0 gallons of cider per full load. This is about typical from my experience. Supposedly there are other custom built press designs that can get you more cider per apple, but I have yet to try them.
Once you're done pressing, your cider can be run through a mesh strainer and either into a pot where you'll pasteurize it by heating it to 165 degrees, or into your fermentation vessel to turn it into hard cider. That process is a bit more than I'd like to explain here, so check out that link. However I will say that while there are many commercial yeasts you can purchase, our ancestors usually relied on the wild yeasts contained in the cider itself to ferment it. I've done that before to good effect, and I'd urge you not to be afraid to do likewise.
You'll also end up with a whole bunch of ground, pressed apple mush at the end. This is called pomace. It can be very easily turned into apple cider vinegar, or it can be used to feed livestock, or it can be used to bait deer, or it can be added to your compost pile. It's valuable stuff, so definitely try to make the best use of it.
Apples are a valuable food resource that can likely be found in your local area, and can be had for free with a little work. Turning them into cider is an excellent way to preserve their value, and have fun with friends in the process.
Thanks for reading, and as always, if you have questions feel free to reach out on Instagram or at support@nixieworks.com
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