I posted a month back that we’d collected apples for pressing, but until today we’d not actually got around to doing the hard work. I estimated that we had 250kg to 300kg of apples ready to be pressed and today we set to work.
The first step was to wash and crush them.
and then build the “cheese” for pressing
The power for the press is provided by a twelve-tonne bottle jack
and after pressing four full cheeses we ended up with what I estimate to be around 110 litres of juice which I’ve collected in five gallon buckets.
Tomorrow I plan to bottle and pasteurise it if everything goes to plan.
And here’s what we’re left with
a pile of “apple cardboard” to go into the compost heap (plus a few apples that had started to rot since we picked them).
I did wonder this evening about the viability of re-loading the press with the apple that has already been pressed once to see if I could get any worthwhile volume of juice out of it a second time. That’s one to try next year, definitely.