A few years ago Waite and friend of his went 50-50 on a hand-crank cider press. Their first step was to install an old washing machine motor to drive the chopper. The chopper cuts up the apples for more efficient pressing.
The sequence of pictures somehow got reversed when I posted them. The following descriptions apply from the bottom up:
-Apples staged in Waite's garage. All the apples he gathers are free. He exchanges permission to pick the apples for cider and applesauce. (He presses the apples. His wife makes the applesauce.) Strangely enough, most people with apple trees do nothing with the apples and so are happy to make the trade. When making cider, it's a good practice to let the apples sit for a week to 10 tens after picking. This increases the sugar content.
-The set up: This picture shows everything ready to press. The cider press is on the right; you can see the old washing machine motor. The chopper box is on the upper left of the press. A crate of apples sits ready to be processed. To the left is a work table. Each crate of apples will produce approximately 1 gallon of cider.
-Here is a close up of the apples. Waite keeps track of which apples are which so that he can return the proper cider to the people who own the apples.
-This is a picture of the chopper. The motor spins it fairly rapidly and apples are chopped fairly quickly. He has to be careful not to put too many apples at one time. It takes about 5 minutes to feed a crate of apples through. He will usually put two crates through the chopper before pressing.
-This what the apples look like after going through the chopper. The apples here are the result of chopping one crate of apples.
-This picture shows the press plate installed over the chopped apples. In this case he is pressing only one crate of apples. The pressing mechanism is turned by hand. You can see a large threaded rod in the second picture. In this picture if you look closely you can see juice beginning to ooze out.
-Here the juice is flowing out of a hole in the bottom plate and into a collection container. Note the small pieces of chopped apple laying about.
-This is some of the finished product. From the collection pan, the cider is poured through a very fine mesh strainer into a funnel and into the bottles. These are some of the containers that he returns to the owners of the apples, gives to friends, and keeps for his own drinking.
-The final picture shows "cider for the big boys." This is a 6 gallon carboy destined to become hard cider. So far (October 5, 2009) he has three carboys filled and plans on doing at least 3 more, giving him a total of 36 gallons of hard cider for the coming Winter. The final total will be less than 36 gallons after racking over from primary to secondary fermentation.
One part not shown in this sequence is the pumice - what's left over after extraction of the juice. He takes the pumice to his neighbor Clem for feeding to the pigs. The pigs eat exceedingly well this time of year: free pumice, free fresh field corn, free garden residue and purchased grain.
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