How to Make Homemade Apple Cider

Apple Cider made from apples with our rotten apple trees. So, so good! We like using recycled bottles for our homemade apple cider.

This past week was another "rotten apple tree" week, but this time, I'm pretty sure most of America felt like those rotten, ugly apple trees that I wrote about in last week's post, Apple Picking on the Chicken Farm. There are no words that can be used to take the edge off of any tragedy or to make any sense of it. I've seen so many words on social media to talk about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, many of them unkind by both political parties. Words that probably wouldn't been used if it wasn't behind the mask of the Internet. Words that should have been said face to face and eye to eye so we could see how they impact other people.

It doesn't matter what side of the coin you belong to, we all can listen to each other's pain without causing more pain. It's just a way of loving your neighbor as yourself, which is the second of God's commandments.

I believe the only way to push through pain and mourning is ACTION. Take a walk, go outside, join a Bible Study, give a tired mom a break by taking her energetic kids to the park, join a peaceful debate group, punch a bag at a kickboxing class...do something to work through this difficult, painful moment in history. Go to church so God can give a peace that surpasses all understanding, which is what I did this past Sunday. God calmed my troubled heart through worship, fellowship, and prayer.

The expression "When Life Gives You Lemons...Make Lemonade" is quite appropriate for this week moving forward. But in this case, when life gives you big, red apples, you make apple cider...so I'm going to step off my soap box and grind some apples into sweet submission.

Our apple cider making "assistants", haha

After picking two bushels of apples, my husband and I went to work prepping to make our homemade apple cider. Our working area always take place in the barn where we can use a hose to spray all the sticky apple juice off the floor, so you might see go carts and tractors in the background of the pictures.

We started the prepping by rinsing off all the apples in a huge bucket. In order to make apple cider, apples do not have to look perfect. They can have bug bites and look deformed, because they are only being used for their juice, not for the fleshy parts of the fruit.

My "hired hand" husband paid with lots of love.

The apples were thrown in the apple grinder where my strong husband, Mike, used the hand crank to grind the apples into small pieces. This is the longest and hardest part of making apple cider, and it does take a lot of muscle to complete. While Mike was grinding, I kept my hands on the top part of the grinder to stabilize it while he turned the crank. The apple chunks were collected in a pot underneath the grinder.

Once the pot was filled with apple pieces, we dumped everything into the apple press. The apple press was lined with a cloth similar to cheese cloth to collect the flesh, seeds, stems, all the solid pieces. The apple cider juice flowed through the cloth and poured out of the bottom of the press.

Apple Press

We collected the apple cider with a bowl at the bottom. Once the bowl was filled with apple cider, we poured the liquid into pitchers to put inside our frig.

Mike placed wooden blocks on top of the press to squish the apple pieces even more tightly, ensuring that most of the juice leaves the apple and gets filtered through the cloth. We repeated the process about 10 times to crunch up the two bushels of apples and squeeze them inside the press. The entire process took one hour and at the end of the hour, we had three pitchers (about three gallons) of apple cider which we enjoyed for the rest of the week.

Wooden blocks are used inside the press to squeeze the remaining apple cider through the cloth.

Of course, we would have had more cider if a couple greedy kids didn't come to drink "fresh from the press" apple cider while their mom and dad did all the work, haha.

I hope your week isn't another "rotten apple tree week" but a week filled with hope and love.

Thanks for reading my Country Squawk,

Kelly