Plans for Cider Presses and Mills

This document is essentially a collection of plans for mills and presses. Collection is an optimistic word at the moment, the list is very small! Many thanks to those who have contributed, and if you have plans, please, please post them to .

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Disclaimer: These documents are for information only. The information is as accurate as the contributors can reasonably manage, but no contributor accepts any liability.

Mills

Having got your apples or pears you need some way of extracting the juice. The first step it to mill the fruit. Essentially this step consists of reducing the fruit to a pulp so that you can press the juice out of it. There are a number of ways you can do this. Some people freeze the fruit and then allow it to thaw. The freeze/thaw cycle softens the skins and makes it very easy to pulp the fruit. The disadvantage of this method is that it can easily destroy the wild yeasts present on the fruit skin. This is not a problem if you want to ferment with a defined yeast strain, but is a problem if you want to use wild yeasts. The most common way of approaching this step is to liquidise the fruit in some way, usually in a scaled up version of a domestic liquidiser.

Sacks'N'Socks Cider by Ifor Williams. A brief description of a common method of milling contained within a recipe.

Presses

Once the fruit is pulped, the pulp (pomace or pommy) must be pressed so that the juice is separated from the pulp. A surprisingly high pressure is required for this step and so a little care is needed for constructing presses. There is a good description of a cider press in the book "Making Cider" by Jo Deal (ISBN 0 900841 45 1; published by Amateur Winemaking Publications Ltd. in the UK). It is easy to construct a press at home, as the following plans demonstrate.

Jeff Summit's Cider Press.
The Rose Hill Cider Press by Mark Tobin
Jeff Donaghue's Cider Press large gif, but worth every second to download

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Created by Gillian Grafton (last update 14 September 1996) and now edited and maintained by Paul Gunningham.
Original text copyright © Gillian Grafton 1990-1996; revisions copyright © Paul Gunningham 2003.
This page was last updated on 7 June 2003. If you have any comments please contact .
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