First Cider from fresh picked Apples

[Phage-cage]

I've brewed about a half dozen beers and am looking to do my first cider. I have access to about a half dozen apple trees, although I don't know the style, so I'd love to extract the juice from the apples and make a cider.

I don't have any way to press the apples that I know of and I've read in a few places that I can get the juice out by essentially making apple sauce (cooking method) and straining out the pulp. Has anyone done it this way before? My quick search of the forum didn't show anything.

I was thinking of using my big boil kettle to process the apples down into the apple sauce on a very low heat until tender and then use a fine mesh colander with cheese cloth to filter out the pulp. I assume that with the slow simmer (no boiling) i'll kill off most nasties so I won't need camden tablets?

Thoughts? and thanks in advance

 

[FermentusMaximus]

I've heard just using a food processor to cut them up and then straining through cheesecloth.

 

[Phage-cage]

I also have a KitchenAide with a meat grinder attachment, thought about using that as well

 

[FermentusMaximus]

Yeah that works just leave the skin on, chop or grind them up in to fine pulp and squeeze through a cheesecloth. I've never done it, but I was just looking in a cookbook the other day and they listed that process.

 

[JRiggs2k]

I went out and got myself a juicer. For small scale stuff i figured this is worth a shot. I am about to process a bunch right now

 

[Phage-cage]

Well I just finished processing a metric crap ton of apples through my meat grinder and it worked like a charm! I ended up using my old BIAB mesh bag to collect the ground up apple pulp which I just manually squeezed. I left 1 gal of juice to ferment naturally on its own and another 5 gal I simply pasteurized by slowly heating to 170• F. I suppose time will only tell at this point.