Pressing apple juice, 2021

It seems far longer than three weeks ago that I collected all of the apples from our orchard that could be used for juice, but today I finally managed to get organised to press them. I collected six 20kg feed sacks full, but one of the sacks of Ashmead’s Kernel we’ve kept back to eat so I only pressed five. I wasn’t expecting to need more than one run of the press to get through them, but after building a nice big cheese I did still have a few left over, requiring a second run. At the start of the pressing the cheese was perhaps about 60cm tall.

But after I’d squeezed as much juice out as I thought was possible, it was about half that size.

and all that remained of the five sacks of apples didn’t even fill a wheelbarrow.

That’s going to go on the compost this year, but I have been wondering about soaking the spent pomace in a little water (just enough to turn it back into a “slurry”, basically) for a few hours and then pressing it again to make a sort of “apple juice lite”. Something to try to remember for next year.

In the end I had a shade under eleven and a half gallons, or somewhere around 51 litres of juice. That now needs bottling and pasteurising. The latter is a bit of a faff for the moment. Building a large pasteuriser needs to be on my project list 🙂

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