Fall’s Sweetest Harvest

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Today, only a handful of apple varieties are sold commercially, but thousands more are available across the country in private orchards, and you can buy grafted seedlings of many varieties from mail-order nurseries. The amazing number of apple types vary in taste from blandly sweet to spicy cinnamon to vinegary tart. There also are a large number of traditional cidermaking varieties from England and the United States, which are especially suited to making hard cider. (See “Best Cider Apple Trees,” below.) With the spirit of adventure as your guide, you can mix different varieties and begin your exploration into cider making. Some of the most interesting tastes can be produced by blending sweet apples with crab apples or other bitter apples that you’d never eat fresh.

But if you want to try mixing these intriguing flavors yourself, you’ll need to find a good apple press. That could be a local cider mill that you pay to press small batches of apples for you, or a small backyard press you purchase yourself or with a few cider-loving friends.

Testing Apples and Presses

Last fall my wife and I tried out two apple varieties and tested two backyard cider presses for this article. We started by visiting an orchard with some overgrown ‘Paula Red’ trees with apples that were too small for retail sale, and we picked several hundred pounds of these very inexpensive apples. ‘Paula Reds’ are a standard sweet apple, so we decided to mix them with ‘Winesap,’ a slightly acidic variety.

When we pressed the apples, we made three different batches of cider, each with a different ratio of ‘Paula Red’ to ‘Winesap.’ We ended up with three unique ciders and a vigorous but friendly debate on which was the best. Next year we plan to enlarge the experiment considerably, and can or freeze the cider so we can drink it year-round.

As we were trying out different flavors of cider, we also tried out the two most widely available backyard cider presses: a single-basket Jaffrey model and a double-basket Correll press.

Both presses work in much the same way: First you put the fruit into the grinder, which minces it into a fine, juicy pulp. The pulp falls into a wooden slat basket lined with a finely woven nylon bag. Next, you cover this basket with a solid wooden disc, and place it beneath the press. You turn a large threaded rod down onto the center of the disc, which slowly compresses the bag of pulp and presses out the liquid.

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