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…

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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%