After last year’s apple bonanza apples are scare here this year. My trees had hardly any. A nearby orchard where I’ve gotten apples didn’t have any for cider. I looked on Craigslist though and found an orchard about 20 miles away that had plenty of seconds for cider.
After getting an inch and a half of rain in the last two days we’re out of the soybean fields for a while, so Tom and I crushed apples today.
The old cider press, cleaned up, sanitized, and ready to press!
With two baskets it really goes fast. One of us would be throwing apples in the grinder and filling a basket while the other was cranking down the screw, pressing out the cider.
We ended up with about 25 gallons of cider. I’ve got around 17 of those gallons in carboys, ready to become hard cider. We’re cooking down some for apple syrup, and the rest is for drinking fresh.
And we have a big pile of pressed apples to feed to the cows and horses and chickens.
Leave a Reply