I absolutely love fall.

Since the Wife and I are (at heart) dirty-dirty hippies, we have a Community Supported Agriculture share. That means that every other week, we get fresh produce from a local farm. It's great. If you live in a city of any moderate size, there's probably a CSA near you. You should check it out! You'll get veggies you probably wouldn't have eaten otherwise, and you'll be supporting local agri-business.

Anyhow, our CSA hosted a cider pressing event a few weeks ago at the farm, and since we'd never pressed cider before, we couldn't resist - especially because our farmer had built all of the equipment involved himself, modeled after something called the Wizbang Cider Press.

It was awesome! Somewhat intensive, but fun nonetheless. I took lots of pictures.

Behold!

First, we soaked the apples (bushel by bushel) in a tub-o-water.

Then we sliced. There were at least 15 bushels.

 

The apple-quarters were then dumped into the Apple Grinder.

The Apple Grinder is an over-grown garbage disposal. (If you look closely, you can see the In-Sink-Erator label.)

Apples are shoved into the disposal with the weird cross-looking implement.  It saves fingers!

What comes out it a very thick, mushy Apple Gook.

It's collected in a gauze-lined bowl...

...then wrapped up into an apple-mush filled package of gloop.

The Apple-Gloop packages are kept in a bucket until...

...they're layered into the Cider Press. One packet, one wooden lid, one packet, one lid, etc., until the press is full.

Then the press is lowered...

...and a car-jack applies up to 6 tons of pressure to the packaged Apple Gloop.

Out comes the cider!

It's collected, then poured into a bucket with a tap!

 

What was Apple-Gloop has become Dried Apple Cake, great for compost.

At last, the cider is portioned out and consumed! Sometimes with rum.