Pressing weekend
The pressing weekend with the neighbours, hour by hour
The last weekend of September is the pressing weekend, unless the weather or the apples say otherwise. This is the 2025 weekend written up from the log, mostly so that next year somebody other than me can find the cloths.
- Written
- 26 October 2025
- Re-read and corrected
- 11 January 2026
- Reading
- 8 minutes
- Orchard
- north of Vilnius
i.
The week before: sweating, sorting and borrowing
Pressing starts about ten days before anyone turns a handle. The Antonovkas are picked in the middle of September and left in open crates in the shed to sweat, which softens them slightly, lets some of the starch turn to sugar and makes them give up their juice more willingly. In 2025 the crates sat for eleven days at somewhere between eight and fourteen degrees, depending on whether it was night. The Pepins and the striped apple were picked only three days before the weekend, because they were already ready and would not have improved.
The press is not mine. It belongs to a relative on the other side of the city who built it years ago from an oak frame, a steel plate and a bottle jack, and who lends it on the condition that it comes back clean and with a bottle of whatever it made. It travels in the back of an estate car with the seats down, in three pieces, and takes about an hour to reassemble on the concrete apron in front of the shed. The racks and cloths are mine. I made the racks in 2021 from untreated beech slats and have replaced four slats since, all of which cracked on the same side for reasons I do not understand.
ii.
Saturday: washing, milling and the first cheeses
The neighbours arrive from about nine. In 2025 there were six of us for most of Saturday: me, my brother, the couple from the plot opposite, the neighbour two plots down and her teenage son, who was promised a share of the juice and a turn with the jack. The work divides itself without anybody organising it. Two people wash and sort at the water butt, cutting out bruises and throwing anything with rot into a bucket for the compost. One feeds the mill. Everyone else stands at the press, building cheeses and arguing about whether the last one was too thick.
A cheese is a layer of milled apple folded into a square of cloth and laid on a rack, with the next rack on top of it. Our press takes seven cheeses to a stack. The mill is a converted garden shredder with a stainless drum, which is noisy and fast and turns a crate of apples into pulp in about a minute. The first stack of 2025 went into the press at twenty past eleven and gave twenty-two litres, which is about right for a stack of Antonovka and about ten percent below what the Pepins give for the same weight.
iii.
Pressing slowly and knowing when to stop
The temptation with a bottle jack is to pump it hard and watch the juice pour, and the first year I did exactly that and burst a cloth. The juice comes out fastest in the first few minutes whatever you do. After that it comes in proportion to patience. We now take the jack up a few strokes, wait until the flow slows to a trickle, take it up a few more, and repeat. A full stack takes forty minutes. The pomace that comes out should be dry enough to crumble in your hand. If it holds together like wet sawdust there is still juice in it, and the stack has been rushed.
Across the whole weekend we pressed two hundred and seven kilos of fruit and took off a hundred and twenty-six litres of juice, which is a yield of a little over sixty percent by weight. The log shows that figure has hardly changed since 2022, which suggests the limit is the press and the mill rather than the people. The pomace went to the neighbour with the goat and into two compost bays, and the wasps followed it there, which was the best outcome of the whole afternoon.
iv.
Sunday: dividing the juice and cleaning up
Sunday is shorter and quieter. The juice from Saturday has sat overnight in covered buckets in the cold shed, and by morning a layer of brown sediment has settled at the bottom of each one. I siphon the clearer juice off the top into the fermenting vessels for the cellar and leave the sediment for the compost. The neighbours' share goes into jars, which are heated in a large pot to about seventy-five degrees for twenty minutes and sealed, so that it stays juice rather than turning into something else in their kitchens. In 2025 that was forty-one litres in jars, handed out by Sunday lunchtime.
Everything else is washing. The press is scrubbed and dried in the sun, the racks are scrubbed and stood on end, and the cloths are rinsed, washed and hung on the fence. The press goes back across the city on Monday evening with a bottle of the previous year's cider on the passenger seat. The last thing I do is write up the weekend in the log while the numbers are still in my head, including who came, what the weather did and what we ran out of. In 2025 it was clean buckets, which is now at the top of next year's list.
Figures on this page were copied out of the paper log, where they were written with the hydrometer still floating in the jar. Nothing here is advice for anyone else's cellar. Last amended 11 Jan 2026.