xxsn0blindxx
Well-Known Member
A few years ago a co-worker of mine brought his scratter and press over to my house to make cider from the 3 apple trees in my yard. Since then I've wanted to have my own press, but at $300-$400 for a press and scratter, I knew I had to go DIY. My vision was to build one of the DIY plans online using an oak frame and bottle jack and a scratter made with a wood cylinder and stainless screws. However, I never got around to building that and the apples are falling off the trees. Then it hit me that I could use my food processor and a much simpler press design and probably get decent results.
Since I am currently unemployed and the holidays are coming up, my budget for this project was $0 so I went out to the garage with a design in my head and looked for materials. Here's what I came up with.
Using a food processor with the shredding blade installed on top and the chopping blade on the bottom, I was able to macerate the apples into a good pulp quite easily.
I used some 5 gallon painter bags for the cheeses and a stock pot with a pasta strainer for straining the juice. I stacked two cheeses on top of each other, a fresh cheese on the bottom and a second press cheese on the top. After each pressing I discarded the pulp from the top cheese and placed the bottom cheese on top of the new one, so that each cheese got pressed twice. A 10 pound weight wrapped in aluminum foil was placed on top to evenly distribute the force of pressing.
I pushed down on the press to get the bulk of the juice and then left it sit with the weights while I shredded the next batch of apples. I was able to get around 5 cups out of each pressing.
Out of roughly 11 gallons of apples I ended up with around 6 gallons of cider, so roughly a 55% yield which isn't far off from the expensive presses. Overall I'm very happy with the results, but I will probably build a scratter for next season. While the food processor did a great job, it's capacity limited how much I was able to process at a time and the apples had to be quartered before running them through, which added a lot of time.
Since I am currently unemployed and the holidays are coming up, my budget for this project was $0 so I went out to the garage with a design in my head and looked for materials. Here's what I came up with.
Using a food processor with the shredding blade installed on top and the chopping blade on the bottom, I was able to macerate the apples into a good pulp quite easily.
I used some 5 gallon painter bags for the cheeses and a stock pot with a pasta strainer for straining the juice. I stacked two cheeses on top of each other, a fresh cheese on the bottom and a second press cheese on the top. After each pressing I discarded the pulp from the top cheese and placed the bottom cheese on top of the new one, so that each cheese got pressed twice. A 10 pound weight wrapped in aluminum foil was placed on top to evenly distribute the force of pressing.
I pushed down on the press to get the bulk of the juice and then left it sit with the weights while I shredded the next batch of apples. I was able to get around 5 cups out of each pressing.
Out of roughly 11 gallons of apples I ended up with around 6 gallons of cider, so roughly a 55% yield which isn't far off from the expensive presses. Overall I'm very happy with the results, but I will probably build a scratter for next season. While the food processor did a great job, it's capacity limited how much I was able to process at a time and the apples had to be quartered before running them through, which added a lot of time.
