Pressing apples is not so straight forward as pressing, say, grapes. You get grapes, squash them in a press and juice comes out. Apples have attitude. You take a kilo of apples, shove them in the press and squash them, you’ll get a kilo of bruised and battered apples but little juice.

So the first thing to be done is turn them into something pressable. We do this with a scratter. Essentially, it turns them into a pulp that’s not too fine to go through the press cloth, and not to course to refuse to yield its juice.

And ours looks like this…

We pressed Annie’s Apples and Steve’s Apples today. We combined these to make a total of 30 ltrs, plus an additional 3 ltrs of each which will be made into a single pressing cider for Steve and Annie.

So this is what we had and what we pressed

Annie’s 22kg

Gravity 1.055 which should produce around 7.4% if allowed to ferment to dry

 

Steve’s 60kg

Gravity 1.050 which should produce around 6.8% if allowed to ferment to dry

The combined mix of both has a gravity of 1.052 which will be around 7%