Then, last fall, I perfected a cider press design to squeeze the juice out of the ground-up apples. The press is so easy to make, so easy to use, and so effective that it too was awarded the Whizbang prefix.
Soon thereafter, I published the book, Anyone Can Build A Whizbang Apple Grinder & Cider Press.
I could leave well enough alone, but I’m inclined to innovate and improve—even on well enough. And if, in so doing, I discover better techniques beyond what is in my book, I’m going to tell you about them. That’s what this essay is about.
If you own a copy of the book, it behooves you to read the following information. And if you don’t yet have a copy, but you are interested in making apple cider, I welcome you to read this... then buy a copy of the book.
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Before reading this essay, you should know that last month I pressed some apple cider and it was the worst cidermaking experience I ever had. You can read the essay here: March Tribulations: Further Insights Into Homemade Cider. That bad experience is what led me to make cider again yesterday, and to discover New Improved cidermaking techniques.
Now, here's my latest Whizbang cidermaking story (with lots of pictures)...
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It is April here in New York and the apple trees don’t even have blossoms yet so I had to go to the grocery store for apples. The last time I bought apples (the bad experience time last month) I got them from a nearby Mennonite market. They were a mix of unknown varieties.
I suspect that one or more of those varieties were “dessert apples” and not well suited to making cider. I would never have thought that some apples just don’t press very well, especially after being reduced to a mash in the Whizbang apple grinder. But that’s what happened. The mash was more gloppy than juicy and it plugged my filter fabric. It was very discouraging.
So this time I made sure to buy apple varieties that are known to press well for making cider.
According to This Article from the University of Tennessee, the following apple varieties are typically used to make cider: Red Delicious, Rome, Grimes Golden, Cortland, Fuji, Jonagold, Empire, McIntosh, Gala, Winesap, Jonathan, & Granny Smith.
Specifically, I bought seven 3-pound bags of apples for $3.49 a bag. That translates to half a bushel for $24.43. This would be expensive cider! I ended up getting nine pounds of Granny Smith, six pounds of Fuji, three pounds of Gala, and three pounds of Red Delicious.
Aside from the high price, the drawback to store-bought apples is that they are “mystery apples,” which means we have no idea where they really come from and how they were grown. But the bags assured me that they were a product of the U.S. That’s better than China. I also noticed a statement on the bags explaining that the apples were ”coated with food grade vegetable and/or shellac based wax to maintain freshness.” Did you know shellac is made from the excretion of a bug? But I digress....
The Lovely Marlene and I washed the waxy mystery apples and quartered them before feeding them into the the Whizbang apple grinder. As usual, the machine did an incredible job of mashing the fruit. I’ll bet she had the half bushed ground in less than three minutes. Here’s a picture.
I noticed right away that the mash in the bucket was much juicier than the gloppy mash I made the last time I made cider (the disappointing time). That was a good sign.
Instead of lining my Whizbang pressing tub with a nylon pressing bag from Lehman’s ($12.95, plus shipping), I did something very different. I decided to use inexpensive nylon sheer-curtain fabric for the filtering material.
The picture above shows the Lehman’s pressing bag fabric on the bottom. The pink colored fabric above it is nylon sheer-curtain fabric that I paid two dollars a yard for at a local fabric store. Above the pink material is a piece of white sheer-curtain fabric that Marlene bought at a yard sale years ago for next to nothing. You can use this material in place of cheesecloth for various homestead projects. It is very strong and washes out so you can reuse it.
Instead of lining the pressing tub with the fabric, I opted to wrap bundles of apple mash with pieces of the curtain fabric and layer these bundles up inside the wood-slat pressing tub, with each layer separated by a round HDPE plastic “pressing disc.” If you are not familiar with pressing discs, take a look through this Whizbang Cider Photo Gallery for details.
This type of rack-and-cloth arrangement is what’s known as a “cheese” and it is an old approach to pressing cider. The beauty of the rack-and-cloth method is that each of the several cloth-wrapped layers of mash is pressurized within its cloth instead of as a part of a whole mass of mash within the tub. This is bound to be more efficient.
But the disadvantage to the rack-and-cloth setup is that the layers are unstable; if not made just so. the edifice of mash and racks tends to tip and collapse when pressure is applied. Besides that, a cheese is typically something of a bother to make.
As I thought about this matter I realized the Whizbang press design can accommodate and stabilize a cheese very nicely. When the cheese is built up within the confines of a wood-slat pressing tub, like on the Whizbang, the stack is absolutely not going to tip out of alignment. That being the case, the cheese needn’t be so carefully layered up and balanced.
Another advantage to the rack-and-cloth layers being inside the tub is that FAR LESS pressure is directed outward, against the sides of the tub. The pressure is downward, and outward only as far as the confines of the cloth-wrapped “bags” allow.
Less pressure on the tub is a real plus if you use inexpensive HDPE tub hoops, as I recommend in my plan book. The HDPE hoops are remarkably strong and will not break. But, as I discovered during my bad experience last month, if extreme pressure is put to a recalcitrant tub of mash, the HDPE hoops will stretch a bit.
My approach to making the cloth-wrapped layers of the cheese was to lay a 30” by 30” piece of nylon curtain fabric (costing all of a dollar) over a form, pour the apple mash into the form, and simply tie it together with a piece of string. I will show you lots of pictures of this shortly, but first I’ll tell you how to make the form out of a common 5-gallon plastic pail.
The picture above shows how I marked the pail for cutting. The Sharpie marker is resting on two pieces of scrap 2x4 lumber, which are resting on my workbench. Simply bring the pail up to the marker and spin it around. The line will be a touch over 3” high. Cut on the line with a jigsaw. Sand away any roughness. The resulting form is perfectly sized for making “apple mash bags” for the Whizbang cheese.
This next picture shows the mash form inside a large bowl.
In this next picture I have placed the filter cloth over the form and am pouring apple mash in.
Now I have gathered the fabric together and am tying it with a piece of string.
The first bag of mash goes into the bottom of the tub, as shown in this next photo.
Please note that this first bag of mash (the bottom of the cheese stack) is placed directly on the bottom of the bottom pan—I have not used a drain rack, as shown in the book and other Whizbang cidermaking essays on the internet. I see no need for the rack with the cheese. When pressing a tub full of mash, the rack helps the juice drain out of the large mass, but it isn’t necessary with individual bags of mash.
A round HDPE pressing plate is placed on the bag of mash. This plate is now a Whizbang rack plate in the rack-and-cloth structure.
Then I made another bag of mash, this time using a piece of the yard-sale sheer curtain material.
In the above picture I filled the form right to the rim and weighed the it. I found the form holds about nine pounds of ground apples. Again, I gathered the material and tied it off with a piece of string. Notice in this next picture how juicy the mash is in the form. It’s a beautiful thing.
Another round rack plate was placed on top of the bag. I had enough mash left to make a smaller third bag. After that was in place I put the Whizbang pressure plate on top.
The 2-1/3 bags of mash did not fill up the Whizbang tub. I believe the tub with four pressing plates (the number I recommend in the book) will accommodate five mash bags, amounting to a bushel of apples. Here's a picture of the sweet cider flowing under hydraulic pressure.
The cider ran out of the mash bags very quickly. In no time flat the cheese was pressurized to the point that very little cider flowed any more. As for the wood-slat tub, it had so little pressure on it that I could spin it around with the cheese fully pressurized. Then I released pressure and removed the tub.
As you can see in the above picture, the two mash bags flattened right out. The fabric suffered no harm. The string tie held nicely. I removed the string and opened up the bag.
That “pomace” (the proper term for squeezed out mash) is really dry, and that is the desired goal. Here is another picture of the pomace cake in the bottom bag and some of the crumbly-textured pomace.
As for yield, the half bushel of apples produced 1-1/2 gallons of sweet cider. The flavor was pretty good, but not great. For great cider, we’ll have to wait for next fall when fresh, ripe, local apples are available.
Conclusions
The homemade Whizbang apple grinder proved once again that it is an undeniably awesome tool. Ditto for the Whizbang cider press with its pressing discs. But I’m now persuaded that a Lehman’s pressing bag is not necessary because the sheer nylon fabric will do the job just fine.
More cheese pressing experience will be needed to make a final evaluation. But, based on this one experience, I believe the cider presses out of a cheese easier, faster, and more completely than than when pressing a whole tub of mash.
It was my original intention to sell pressing bags to readers of my Whizbang cider plan book, but that idea is now on hold. If the bags are not needed, I’m not going to try to sell them to you.
Furthermore, there is no need for a latticework drain rack when pressing a Whizbang cheese. Once again, it was my intention to make and sell ready-to-assemble drain rack kits to Whizbang cidermakers. In fact, I even started milling the parts for these kits and bought boxes to ship them in. But I will not be selling these kits now. They are simply not needed.
If you make the form-from-a-plastic-pail that I showed in this essay, you can make mash bags very easily and lay up a cheese very quickly. No real skill is required. Is it as quick as just pouring a mass of apple mash into the tub? No. It might take you ten minutes to build a cheese, but the results are worth the effort.
If you were pressing a lot of cider and had lots of help, you could have a person making mash bags ahead so they were all ready. Then, as soon as one cheese is pressed, it would take no time at all to build the next one.
Another plus to this system is that the sheer-curtain material does not hold on to mash particles like the Lehman’s pressing bag does. In fact, the cloths rinsed out quickly and easily and I hung them on the clothesline to dry.
All in all, it was a great day of innovation and experimentation. If you have questions or comments about this essay or Whizbang cidermaking in general, I encourage you to go to the Yahoo discussion group, Whizbang Cider Makers. And, of course, you can get to everything related to Whizbang Cidermaking by going to www.WhizbangCider.com.
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