How to Build a Cider Press

Follow these step-by-step instructions to make this easy-to-build cider press, and start enjoying homemade apple cider and apple jack.

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by Adobestock/Anthony Hall

Before the advent of the pop bottle and urban sprawl, just about every farm had a cider press. These machines were lovingly built by highly skilled craftsmen called coopers, who also constructed the casks and barrels in which families stored flour, sugar, corn, water, beer, pickles, nails and many other commodities.

Nowadays, it’s well nigh impossible to come by an old-fashioned barrel press. The very few that still exist are either quietly handed down from one generation to another within families or sold at outrageous prices in antique shops. Which means that if there’s an apple orchard in your back pasture and you’d rather high-grade all that fallen fruit into cider than let the cows eat it, you’ll have to break out the carpentry tools.

Now, I’m not a cooper (heaven forbid!) and wouldn’t know where to begin when it comes to bending barrel staves into compound curves, but I have built a cider press that–while not the world’s prettiest or most sophisticated–gets the job done, and cost me only about $30 (1976 prices) to assemble. Besides that, the unit is so stout that I’ll betcha someday a father will point his finger at the machine and proudly tell his son, “My grandpappy built that press.”

You Can Build a Cider Press

My little cidermaker’s not at all difficult to build. Take a look at the accompanying diagrams and photographs to get a general idea of how the press is put together. There are essentially just four components: [Fig. 1] A supporting frame made of 2 x 4’s and 4 x 4’s, nailed and bolted together, [Fig. 2] an open-ended “basket”–in which the apples are crushed (made of vertical wooden slats held in place by two horizontal metal hoops), [Fig. 3] a screw to deliver the squeezing force, and [Fig. 4] a trough to collect the drippings. Since the basket is probably the most demanding of the four sub-assemblies to construct, I’ll start the instructions with that item.

  • Updated on Jan 10, 2022
  • Originally Published on Sep 1, 1976
Tagged with: apple cider, cider, cider press, frame, press
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