How About Them Apples?

It rained today, so we were out of the fields. My Dad and friends built a cider press years ago, and I recently got it from a neighbor. I’d been wanting to use the press and this rainy day was a perfect opportunity.

It’s late for apples, but Bender’s Orchard still had some. Bender’s is a great place for apples, they have a self-serve cooler with heritage and unusual varieties. They also let you pick all the windfall apples you want for cider for 4 dollars a bushel.

Crawling around under apple trees on a rainy day was as wet and muddy as you’d expect, but in very little time I had 7 bushels of apples.

The apple press has a chopper on it to chop up the apples.

And the chopped up apples fall into a basket for pressing.

Then you put a disk on top of the chopped apples and crank down a screw, pressing the juice from the apples.

You can get about 3 gallons of cider from a bushel of apples. As I started pressing I realized I had picked way too many apples and I didn’t have containers for 20+ gallons of cider. So I pressed with insouciance, but I still ended up with over 15 gallons of cider. And a big mess.

I wish I had a pen full of pigs to eat that wheelbarrow full of pressed apples.

Like my ancestors before me, when faced with too much fresh bounty, I had to figure out what to do with all this cider. The obvious answer; ferment it! I have 5 gallons underway for hard cider. I’m planning on a carbonated hard cider. Another 4 gallons is fermenting, on its way to becoming apple cider vinegar.

I’m cooking down another 2 gallons to make apple syrup. Much like maple syrup, you cook the cider down until it’s the thickness of syrup. It’s delicious, lightly sweet and bursting with apple taste. The 2 gallons of syrup cooked down to 2 1/2 pints of syrup that I canned.

And the rest we’re enjoying as fresh sweet apple cider. It’s surprising how much better fresh pressed cider is than anything you can buy. Perhaps because it’s not pasteurized (Eek! Food-borne illness! Save me USDA!). It tastes of apples and sunshine and soft rain, of the promise of summer realized in the autumn harvest.

That description may be a bit overdone, but the fresh cider is very, very good.