Equipment
The continuous screw press
What is a continuous screw press and when is it used for cider?
In short
A continuous screw press has a helical screw turning inside a perforated barrel. As mash is conveyed along the screw the pitch narrows or the shaft thickens, so the free volume falls and the mash is compressed against a restriction at the discharge end.
It runs continuously, needs no cloths or racks, and takes up little floor area for its throughput. What it does not do is treat the mash gently.
In cider it is more often found doing rough work — recovering juice from pressed cake, handling large volumes of low-value fruit, dewatering pomace — than producing juice for a quality-driven ferment.
How it develops pressure
The pressure in a screw press is generated by resistance, not by a ram. Mash is pushed towards a cone, a spring-loaded plate or an adjustable gate at the outlet; the tighter that restriction, the higher the pressure in the compression zone and the drier the cake, but also the greater the torque, the heat and the shear. Operators trade cake dryness against juice quality directly, by turning a handwheel.
The screen is a perforated or slotted barrel, sometimes in sections of decreasing aperture. Blinding is the main operational problem: fines pack into the perforations and reduce drainage until the machine is stripped and cleaned.
Shear, solids and character
The screw grinds as well as squeezes. Skin, core, pip fragments and stalk are all worked hard, and the juice picks up a heavy load of fine solids along with material that a gentler press would have left in the cake. That includes phenolic compounds from skin and pips, and it can include the bitter and astringent fractions that a maker would rather not have.
The temperature also rises, because mechanical work goes somewhere. Warm, aerated, high-solids juice is the least favourable starting point for a controlled ferment, and it is why screw press juice is typically clarified aggressively before use or blended into a much larger volume.
Pips are worth a specific mention: crushing them releases amygdalin-derived compounds and a distinctly bitter character, and any press that mills the seed rather than passing it whole risks this. Screw presses are the most likely of the common types to do it.
Where it earns its place
- Second-stage juice recovery from cake produced by another press, where the juice is destined for concentrate or for blending.
- Dewatering pomace before disposal, digestion or pectin extraction, where the cake is the product and the juice is a by-product.
- Very large-volume operations where floor space and labour dominate the economics.
- It is essentially never the right choice for a small producer, and never the right choice where the aromatic and phenolic character of the juice is the point.
Also answered on this page
Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.
- What is an auger press?
- Is a screw press good for cider?
Related
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- Which type of cider press should i use — No press is best. Each one sits at a different point on four trade-offs: how much juice it recovers, how much air the juice meets, how hard it works the solids, and how much labour and capital it needs.
- What is pressing yield — Pressing yield is the proportion of fruit weight recovered as juice. It varies from under half on a poorly loaded basket press to around seventy per cent on a well-run rack-and-cloth or belt press.
- Do cider makers add water — Traditionally yes, in the form of a second pressing where the spent pomace is wetted and pressed again to make a weak cider. Large-scale production also dilutes strong fermented stock down to selling strength, which is why juice content is regulated.
- Does cider contain antioxidants — Cider carries apple polyphenols, and tannic bittersweet ciders carry considerably more than pale ones made from dessert fruit. What that means for health is a clinical question this site does not adjudicate.
- What do you do with apple pomace — Most pomace goes to livestock feed, composting or anaerobic digestion; some is dried for pectin extraction. Fresh heaps ferment and attract vinegar flies, so it is a hygiene problem as much as a by-product.
- Why does my cider dry my mouth out — Astringency is tannin binding the proteins in saliva, which is felt as roughness rather than tasted. Too much comes from heavy pressing, long maceration, or fruit far higher in tannin than the blend can carry.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Hochschule Geisenheim University — beverage technology
Hochschule Geisenheim · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
German beverage-technology research covering apple wine and fruit juice processing, including the enzymology of clarification.
Cider and perry production technical training material
Peter Mitchell / Cider and Perry Academy · reference work · registered as competent for this subject
Searched again on 2026-08-25 and it remains the one printed source here that a bibliographic check cannot fix, because it is not a published work with an edition. It is course material issued to participants of a training programme, so there is no catalogue record to verify, no ISBN, and no lawful public copy. Its state stays `registered` for that reason rather than through inattention.
Where to go next
- Cider making equipment — The rest of the equipment material, grouped by what each piece is for.
- How cider is made — The methods this equipment exists to carry out.
- Troubleshooting — The faults that are traced back to equipment and to cleaning.