Equipment

Improvising: what genuinely substitutes and what does not

What can I use instead of proper cider making equipment?

In short

Most of what a cider maker uses is a container, a tube or a lever, and those can be improvised freely as long as the materials are right and the thing can be cleaned.

A smaller set of items is not a shape but a specification: a bottle rated to hold pressure, a plastic certified for food contact, an instrument that has been calibrated. Substituting for those is not thrift, it is a change of outcome.

The three questions to ask of any substitute are whether the material is safe against an acidic alcoholic liquid, whether it can actually be cleaned, and whether it is being asked to hold pressure. Anything that fails the third is dangerous rather than merely unsatisfactory.

The principle behind the list

Cider is mildly acidic and, after fermentation, contains ethanol. Between them those two properties attack a surprising range of materials: acid dissolves zinc from galvanised surfaces, attacks aluminium and mild steel and takes copper into solution; ethanol is a far better solvent than water for the plasticisers, pigments and residues in plastics and coatings that were never intended to meet it. A material that is inert to water is not necessarily inert to cider, which is why the food-contact question is not a formality.

The cleaning question is the second filter and it eliminates more improvisations than the first. Anything with a hidden cavity, a thread, a rough weld, a scratched interior or a shape that cannot be reached will hold soil and organisms below the level any sanitiser will reach. A cheap tap with an internal void will be the dirtiest object in a cider house within a season, and no amount of chemistry will change that.

The pressure question is different in kind, because the failure mode is different in kind. A tainted batch is a disappointment; a glass container failing under internal pressure fragments and the fragments travel, and eye and hand injuries from this in home brewing and cider making are documented and are not rare. There is no version of this where a careful improviser gets away with it, because glass fails from a flaw rather than at a predictable pressure.

What substitutes and what does not

Common improvisations, judged
Instead of	What people use	Verdict
A mill	Freezing and thawing the fruit	Works. Ice crystals rupture the cells and the thawed fruit gives up juice readily; it changes the colour and aroma and it needs freezer space
A mill	A food processor, or a mallet on fruit in a strong bag	Works for a few kilograms and becomes unbearable above that; very fine pulp may need a bag to press at all
A press	Boards, a car jack and a cloth-wrapped parcel of pomace in a crate	Works at small volume. The improvised frame is what fails, so keep loads modest, build for more force than you intend to use, and stand clear
A press cloth	An old cotton sheet or a pillowcase	Fails under load. A woven press cloth is cheap and a burst cloth loses the run and the pomace with it
A fermenting vessel	A food-grade bucket with a sealing lid and a grommet	Works, and is what most people should use in preference to glass
A fermenting vessel	A drum whose previous contents are unknown	Does not work. Solvents and aromatics partition into polyethylene and leach back into an alcoholic liquid for years
An airlock	A length of tubing from the bung into a jar of water	Works, and handles a vigorous ferment better than an airlock because it passes foam without blocking
An airlock	A cloth over the neck	Works for a vigorous primary only. Once the gas stops it admits air and flies, which is exactly when protection is needed
A trial jar	A tall straight-sided glass or a measuring cylinder	Works if the hydrometer floats free and does not touch the sides
A hydrometer	Nothing	There is no substitute. Guessing the gravity is guessing whether fermentation has finished, which is the decision that breaks bottles
A thermometer	A cooking probe thermometer with a stainless tip	Works, if it is checked in an ice bath and the probe is sanitised
A racking cane	A rigid tube with the intake held clear of the lees	Works. The standoff is the only clever part of a racking cane
A sanitiser	Boiling water, on glass and stainless	Works on things that can be filled or immersed; useless on a vessel too large to fill and damaging to most plastics
A sanitiser	Household bleach	Poor choice. It pits stainless steel and chlorine is a documented route to musty haloanisole taint in a cellar
Temperature control	A cold shed, a north wall, a tub of water around the vessel	Works, and is what temperature control amounts to at small scale
A pressure-rated bottle	A still-wine bottle, a jam jar, a screw-cap bottle, a plastic milk bottle	Does not work and is dangerous. Nothing in this table matters as much as this row

What is never worth improvising

Pressure containment, for the reason above. If a cider is to be sparkling it goes into a bottle made and tested for sparkling wine or into a beer bottle at beer-range carbonation, closed with the closure that finish was designed for. If neither is available, the honest answer is to make the cider still.

Food-contact materials, because the failure is invisible and slow. A drum, a hose, a tap or a liner whose provenance cannot be established should not carry cider, and the money saved is trivially small against a batch.

Anything that produces a number destined for a label, a customer or a revenue authority. Alcoholic strength, sulphite declarations and volume statements are legal claims with tolerances behind them, and they are established by a method that will stand up rather than by arithmetic on a hydrometer reading.

And, less obviously, the cleaning and sanitising chemicals themselves. Substituting one product for another because it looks similar, or mixing two because one seemed weak, is how people are injured — an acid product and a chlorine product together release chlorine gas, and that has killed people in food premises.

Improvisation is the tradition, not a departure from it

Almost every piece of historic cider equipment was made locally from what was available: presses built by the estate carpenter, screws cut from apple wood, cloths woven from horsehair, casks bought second-hand from a trade that had finished with them. The idea that proper equipment is bought is recent and is largely a consequence of there being an industry to buy it from.

The other traditional answer to the capital problem is still the best one, and it is not improvisation but sharing. A community press, a mobile press that visits for a day, a neighbour’s mill, a group of people who between them own one of everything — all of these solve the problem that a press is a large object used one weekend a year. Borrowing capacity is almost always a better answer than owning a machine that will stand idle.

The last observation is about progression. Most people improvise at the start because they do not yet know which parts of the process they care about, which is exactly the right reason. What is worth buying properly reveals itself after a season or two, and it is rarely the press.

The one rule that admits no improvisation

Any container holding a cider that is carbonated, or that still contains fermentable sugar and live yeast, must be made for pressure. Glass fails from a scratch or a chip rather than at a predictable pressure, and when it fails it fragments. Use bottles sold for sparkling wine or for beer, matched to the carbonation intended and to the closure the finish takes; inspect every bottle and reject any that is chipped at the rim or scuffed; store bottle-conditioned cider cool and boxed, out of living space; and never bottle a cider whose gravity has not been stable for several days. If the right bottle is not available, make the cider still.

Also answered on this page

Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.

Can I make cider without a press?
What can I use instead of an airlock?
Is it safe to bottle cider in wine bottles?

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.

Can i ferment cider in a plastic barrel, and how do i know it is safe — Plastic fermenters are usually high-density polyethylene, polypropylene or, for carboys, polyethylene terephthalate. All three are used throughout the food industry and none of them are a problem in themselves.
What equipment do i actually need to make cider at home — At kitchen scale, most people start with bought juice and a demijohn, because that removes the two hardest problems — milling and pressing — and leaves the fermentation to be learned on its own.
Which bottles are safe for sparkling cider — A bottle intended for sparkling wine is a different object from a still-wine bottle. It is heavier, thicker, has a deep punt to distribute stress, a reinforced neck and finish designed for a crown cap or a mushroom cork, and it is manufactured and tested against a design pressure.
Why did my cider bottles explode — Because fermentable sugar was still present, or too much priming sugar was used, and the pressure exceeded what the bottle could hold. Never bottle a cider whose gravity is still falling, and never use bottles not designed for pressure.
How do i sterilise cider bottles — Wash them clean first, then sanitise with a no-rinse sanitiser or a sulphite solution, and fill while still wet with it. Bottles that look clean but have dried deposits inside are the usual source of bottle spoilage.
How much pressure builds up in a bottle of cider — Enough to matter. Every gram of sugar fermented in a sealed bottle produces gas, and a bottle not rated for it can fail. The French cider appellations require a minimum of 1.0 to 1.5 bar at 20 °C, and a bottle-conditioned cider can go well beyond that if it was filled with more sugar than intended.

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.

The New Cider Maker’s Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide for Craft Producers
Claude Jolicoeur, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. ISBN 9781603584739 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against the Open Library union catalogue: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013, ISBN 9781603584739, one edition recorded. That establishes the citation points at a real book in a stated edition, which is what a citation needs and is all it establishes. No copy was opened and nothing is quoted from it. The book itself is in print and not digitised in any open collection; where CiderHQ needs a figure from this territory it uses an accessible research source instead and says so.
Cider: Making, Using and Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cider
Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols, Storey Communications, 1997; first published as Sweet & Hard Cider by Garden Way, 1980 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library, and the verification changed what CiderHQ knows about it. The work first appeared in 1980 as Sweet & Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, & Enjoying It (Garden Way, Charlotte, Vermont) and was retitled for the 1997 Storey edition the site had registered; nine editions are recorded in total. That matters for a source cited on North American practice, because a passage in the 1980 text and a passage in the 1997 one are not interchangeable and neither is the 2003 revision. Two scans exist in the Internet Archive — sweethardciderma0000prou for the 1980 edition and cidermakingusing0000prou for the 1997 — both access-restricted to the lending library and the print-disabled collection, so neither is openable by retrieval.
The Science of Cidermaking and associated technical writing
Andrew Lea · reference work · passage verified 2026-08-24
Written by a food chemist who worked at Long Ashton on apple phenolics. Unusual among specialist cider writing in that it is primary-research-adjacent: the author is describing work he did, and cites the literature. This is why it is registered at tier 1 for chemistry while a general cider book is not.

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.