Homemade Apple Juice

Hello, everyone! 📷🍏

Autumn is the time for apple juice. We make our apple juice by grinding the apples and then pressing them. That's a traditional process here, and we have had a grinding mill and press for many years, operated by my late father when he was still able.
For the last ten years, I have been having fun with it.

We haven't done this for three seasons or three years. The reason is simple: There was so little fruit in the orchard that it didn't make sense. This year's harvest was not very good either, like four years ago when the branches of the apple trees were breaking under the fruit, and there were so many apples that I was cooking brandy, too.

The grinding mill and press must be washed in running water before use.

We pressed the apples in an old garage in my grandmother's house, which we use more as a storage room. The press and grinding mill still need to be assembled.

The apples are stacked in crates. We picked between 250 and 300 kilos of apples, which were not very juicy because it was a dry summer.

The apples must be ground using a particular mill, and I place a large plastic barrel underneath where the ground mass falls.
Everything here is over 50 years old and has worked for a long time.

Now, these minced apples have to be put into the press. This press, made in Bosanska Kostajnica, Bosnia, is from the Yugoslav era.

Once we have loaded the press almost to the top, we close it with two wooden semicircles and place the wooden plates on top.

As you can see, this is a manual press.
And the squeezing begins. We can't wait for the first apple juice!

The juice is sweet and delicious.

Keep pressing until some juice is still flowing.

When there is no more juice, and it is no longer possible to squeeze, the press is dismantled.
The pressed pulp is collected and piled in one heap in the orchard. Next year, it will be suitable for fertilization.

This compressed pulp still contains some sugar. In the old days (and some still do), this pulp (we call it 'dropi') was used to make apple brandy. Pulp was put into a special barrel, fermented for a while, and then the brandy was boiled.
In our house, I remember my father only did this once and, because the brandy sucked, never again.
It would be best to use fermented minced apples or squeezed apple juice for delicious apple brandy.

And then we repeated everything until we had pressed all the apples.
We poured all the juice into one large barrel and filled it less than half full, between 50 and 60 liters. That is very little for such a large orchard, but, as I mentioned, the harvest could have been better, and there was a drought in between, so the apples were not the juiciest.

What now with this juice?
About 20 liters of it are drunk fresh, and some more are given to neighbors and friends.
It could be pasteurized and kept for a year, but we use it for cider vinegar, so we let it ferment, and next year, we will have good vinegar.

Thank you for your attention.

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