Equipment

Kitchen and garage scale: what the setup actually is

What equipment do I actually need to make cider at home?

In short

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.

At garage scale the fruit comes in whole and the mill and press appear, along with buckets, a bigger vessel, and the realisation that pressing day needs help and a floor that can be hosed.

The equipment list is short in both cases. What expands is the cleaning, the storage and the space.

The kitchen setup

Juice at this scale comes from a shop, from a local press that sells juice in autumn, or from a few kilograms of fruit reduced by hand. Bought juice must be free of preservative — sorbate or benzoate will prevent fermentation — and pasteurised juice is entirely usable and in fact removes a variable, since the wild population has already been dealt with.

A fermentation vessel: a demijohn of five to twenty-five litres, or a food-grade bucket with a sealing lid.
A bored bung and an airlock, or a grommet in a bucket lid.
A siphon with a racking cane, and a length of food-grade tubing.
A hydrometer and a trial jar.
A cleaner and a sanitiser, used as separate steps.
A second, smaller vessel to rack into, so the cider can be kept full after the lees are left behind.
Bottles appropriate to whether the cider will be still or carbonated, and the matching closure and tool.
Something to write on. The single most useful piece of home cider equipment is a notebook with dates, gravities and temperatures in it.

The garage setup

The garage step is defined by taking in whole fruit, and the two pieces of equipment that follow are a mill and a press. In practice this is a hand or drill-driven scratter and a basket press, or a shared community press used for a day. Everything downstream is the kitchen list in bigger units: food-grade fermenting vessels of twenty-five to two hundred litres, more tubing, a larger siphon, and enough spare vessels to rack between.

The problems that appear at this scale are physical rather than technical. Fruit arrives all at once and must be dealt with in days. Pressing produces pomace in quantity, which must go somewhere. Everything is wet, sticky and attractive to wasps and vinegar flies. A hundred litres of fermenting cider is a weight that cannot be moved, so vessel placement is decided before filling, not after.

The other thing that appears is temperature. A garage in October is a reasonable fermentation space; a garage in July is not, and cider that will sit through a summer needs somewhere cool and dark. This is where a great many otherwise sound home batches are lost.

What is worth buying early and what is not

Where money makes a difference at small scale
Item	Worth spending on early	Why
Cleaning and sanitising products	Yes	The single largest determinant of whether the batch survives
Extra vessels in a range of sizes	Yes	Solves the headspace problem, which is the second largest
A hydrometer and trial jar	Yes	Cheap, and the only way to know what is happening
A pH meter	Once decisions depend on it	Needed for any sulphite decision; useless without calibration discipline
A press	Only when fruit volume justifies it	Community and shared presses exist; a press used one weekend a year is a large idle object
A powered mill	When hand milling becomes the limiting step	Match it to the press, not to the fruit
Temperature control	When batches sit through warm weather	A cool, stable place is worth more than any equipment
Filtration equipment	Rarely	Time and cold do most of it; filtration at this scale strips more than it gains

The two mistakes that dominate

The first is leaving air above the cider after racking, which produces oxidation and volatile acidity over months and accounts for most disappointing home batches. The second is bottling cider that has not finished fermenting, or back-sweetening a cider that still contains live yeast, into bottles that are not rated for pressure. The first spoils a batch; the second breaks glass. Neither needs any equipment to avoid — only a hydrometer reading that has been stable for several days, and the right bottle.

Also answered on this page

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

What do I need to start making cider?
Can I make cider from shop juice?
How much equipment does home cider making need?

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.

How do i know when my cider has finished fermenting — Take two hydrometer readings several days apart: if the gravity has not moved, the ferment is over. Airlock activity is not a reliable test, because a slow ferment can produce gas too slowly to see.
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.
Can you fix a cider that has gone vinegary — Not really. Volatile acidity cannot be removed at small scale, and blending it away only dilutes it. The realistic options are to accept it, to blend a lightly affected batch into a much larger sound one, or to let it finish becoming vinegar.
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.
Is a basket press good enough for making cider
Is a glass demijohn a good vessel for making cider

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.
National Association of Cider Makers
NACM · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
The UK trade association. Useful for industry-agreed definitions and for the voluntary labelling standards its members work to. A trade body has an interest in how its product is described, so CiderHQ cites it for what the industry says about itself rather than for neutral scientific claims.
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.