It all started at the Garin Apple Festival. I'd been recruited to work the apple-pressing demo. It's probably one of the more popular things for kids to do at all the fall harvest festivals all over the place. The kids toss an apple into a hand-cranked grinder, and then they help turn the giant screw that presses the juice out from the pulp. It's satisfying to see the grins as they taste the fruit of their labor. Of course with all the germ-o-phobic idiocy these days, back East the kids weren't allowed to drink the stuff they pressed. We had to give them pasteurized crud from the grocery store. Blech! On the good side though we got to keep what they pressed. Yay cheap child labor! Last year I used my share to make some very tasty adult beverages.While it was satisfying this year to have the kids be allowed to taste the apple juice they made, I felt a little jipped. It just wasn't right that I didn't get to take any home this time. I mean really, which is more important? Making a kid smile as he/she has a memorable experience realizing the connection between themselves and the earth, or making yourself some damn good booze?
In either case- that got me thinking... and you know when I think, it is just the very short first step towards doing something...
It started with a quick search on Craigslist. I found an old cider press for $150. Not bad considering most go for 500+. At the very least I could use it once or twice and turn around and resell it for a decent profit. And that's just what I did. Just look at this beauty (right)! It worked great, but I had bigger plans, and it deserved a better life... It's now in the window of some liquor store in San Francisco being pampered and loved as a regularly dusted antique. My 300% markup gave it value and a new lease on life! And it gave me some cash for building my own...I wanted a more utilitarian press, and while I got a few ideas from the older one I'd flipped on Craigslist, a few searches on the interwebs gave me some big ideas (check this out). Most simpler versions involved some form of a car jack for the pressing mechanism, but the thing I hadn't thought of was how to grind the apples into a pulp! Thus began my project.
Old-fashioned grinders are hard to recreate without good woodworking equipment. I opted to use PVC pipe instead... It works pretty well too (as demonstrated here by our neighbor, Ruben). But on the first run we only got about two gallons from a bushel, which should have been closer to three gallons (the chunks were too big and retained the juice).Luckily we got those first apples in Chinatown for 5 bucks a bushel! Yay Chinatown!
Next time around we decided to use the food processor to REALLY grind the apples- and it worked so well that the juice just started flowing even before we could press! It takes more time, but brings the yield up to about three-and-a-half gallons per bushel!
We were stoked! We made plans with a bunch of friends to head to an orchard the next weekend. The orchard was given to the Park District by an arborist who collected antique apple trees. There are 175 types of organic antique apples, and they open it once a year to let people pick for $5 for a 5-gallon bucket. It became an all-day cider pressing party!In all we got over 12 gallons of cider. 10 gallons are fermenting, and will be ready just in time for our very own "Novemberfest." Meanwhile we're collecting and cleaning beer bottles (which is a fun process in and of itself considering that they need to be emptied first)... I think I'll go get another bottle ready right now!
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