2018 Fall Apple Harvest & Hard Cider Pressing

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here on the farm! Apple harvest is in full swing. We’ve hand picked our “early arrival” apple trees. We’re pressing those apples into apple cider right now. In a few weeks we’ll press the late arrival trees. I put a few pictures together on the process for your enjoyment! I will add more as the process continues….

Most of the trees in our orchard were planted in the early 1900s. I only know this because I was able to read the journal of the original homesteaders on our property.

We have planted some new trees in the orchard. A 10 year old Gravenstein is pictured in the foreground of the grain silo.

Beauty is all around you if you know where to look for it.

One of our late harvest trees is close to ripe.

Apple Harvesting our .5 acre apple orchard yields 4-5 thousand apples.

After picking, the apples will “sweat” for about a week in their boxes. Then we wash them in large stock tanks.

This is what we use for a cider house. It’s basically an enclosed, food grade commercial canopy tent with mosquito netting to keep out the wasps and flies.

After washing the apples they are quartered and put through a grinder to create the apple mash.

The apple mash is placed in a press where we manually press the cider out. The cider then goes into carboys (see the lower left glass jar). Each carboy holds about 50 bottles of cider.

Close up on that beautiful cider coming out of the press!

I will update this post with more photos as we go through the process. I hope you enjoyed this post…leave me a comment if you have any questions about the cider making process!

Cheers!

Lisa