Our orchard was primarily used to grow apples for cider. My mother had Kate’s Sweet Cider as a business when I was in high school. We still own the crusher and press, and I’d hoped to get it all running. This year, we had a huge crop of apples. We couldn’t get pickers, so most of the apples are feeding the sheep, but our neighbors from Stone Cottage Winery came over. With their help, we made one press load of cider from the remnant apples.
The Hellecksons used the low-effort picking method. Ken and I walked on the ground and picked what we could reach. The apples had frozen, and most had fallen already, so it was not easy to find good ones. Any that looked too questionable we left for the sheep to eat later.
The wine press was brought over. Ken did a lot of work on the apple crusher to get it ready to run, so we used our crusher in addition to the Hellecksons’ wine press.
Our first discovery was that the angle was wrong for the entry funnel – the crusher tossed the apples right back at us! We put the table up on blocks and built a makeshift shield. Finally, the apples were crushed.
It was dark before we finished and finally moved on to the cleaning process.
We picked about 3/4 of a bin of apples, and we got about 30 gallons of juice. Ken and I kept about five gallons, which we have frozen. It was really nice to finally have real cider again.