Anybody juicing apples?

[Bill in Oregon]

About 10 years ago, in Southern Oregon, we lived on a place with a bunch of golden delicious trees, and I built this bottle-jack cider press. It worked well, but would have worked better if I had had a decent apple grinder. All I had was a potato frencher and then I chopped up the "fries."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gohmxEF2k1c

[gamekeeper]

Ingenious use of the bottle Jack.. when I lived in Herefordshire I was surrounded by cider makers and orchards.

[Bill in Oregon]

Not my design, but I liked it. I dumped the pulp out under the apple trees that gave us the fruit, and the deer loved it -- but so did the neighborhood black bear, with whom I had a bone to pick after he completely stripped my favorite plum tree the very night before I had planned to pick it.

[Ray]

Way back in the day I found an easy homemade wine recipe in backwoods home magazine. welches'/wiler's wine made from frozen concord grape concentrate and common baking yeast. It was a great hit at the textile manufactory where I was employed. Never charged a penny for obvious reasons but the winos would contribute cans of grape concentrate. That experiment led to tree fruit ciders and ultimately fortifying the same by frost distillation. cidre ciruela was easy to make with ripe plums in an old crock churn covered with cheesecloth and rendering it ardiente, that is to say, fortifying by systematically partially freezing and skimming the ice was not too onerous but it was "mean" and I mean "mean" ! in the moonshining sense of the word (acetones, ketones, methanol, etc.) A co-worker went bonkers on it and never quite recovered but he came from a long line of lunatics to begin with and was wont to use drugs. Keep the tendency towards volatile solvents in mind if you try to fortify that cider harder.