Equipment

Maintenance and the off-season

What needs doing to cider equipment between one harvest and the next?

In short

Very little in a cider house wears out from use. It corrodes, seizes, perishes, dries out, goes mouldy or is chewed, during the long idle period between one season and the next.

The work that prevents that is done at the end of the season, when there is time and the equipment is in front of you, rather than at the start of the next one, when the fruit is already in the yard.

One case runs the opposite way to everything else, and it is the one people get wrong. Timber is damaged by drying out, so the correct storage for a wooden press or vat is the reverse of the correct storage for a pump, a hose or a filter.

What seizes and what perishes

Hydraulic rams left extended. Exposed chrome corrodes over a winter and then destroys its own seals on the next stroke; rams are retracted before the press is left.
Pumps left with product in them. Whatever is inside ferments, then goes acetic, then dries into the seals; pumps are flushed, stripped where the design allows, dried and left open.
Flexible impellers left compressed in the housing. They take a permanent set and pump poorly ever after; they are removed and stored flat.
Gaskets and O-rings under compression. Manway seals, clamp seals and lid gaskets all take a set and perish, so manways are left cracked open with the seal relaxed and spares are ordered before the season, not during it.
Hoses coiled wet. They hold pockets of liquid indefinitely and grow whatever they last carried; hoses are flushed, sanitised, drained and hung vertically with the ends open.
Valves left closed with residue in the seat, and taps left assembled. Both are stripped, cleaned and reassembled loose or left apart.
The pH probe left dry, which is usually terminal, and any instrument left with batteries in it, which is usually messy.
Filter housings left with wet media in them, which grow a population and then dry to a solid mass.
Belts left tensioned, bearings without their season’s grease, and a gas regulator left pressurised against its seat.
The building itself: wasps’ nests, rodents in the roof void chewing cable, a drain that has silted and a gutter discharging over the vessels.

The wooden press and the wooden vat

A staved vessel is watertight because the staves are swollen against each other, not because of any sealant, and a timber press frame carries its load partly through joints whose tightness depends on the same moisture. Let either dry out and the wood shrinks: joints open, hoops go slack and drop, staves check along the grain, and a head that fitted its croze no longer does. Refilling a dried vat with water will swell it back to a workable state in days, and that is a repair of the leak rather than of the underlying damage — a stave that has split does not unsplit.

The traditional practices exist to prevent that state rather than to recover from it. Vats are kept full of water, or of water with a preservative addition, through the idle months. Casks are kept full of cider, or emptied, cleaned, dried enough not to mould, sulphured and bunged tight — the two extremes, because the dangerous condition is a cask that is neither full nor properly dry. Where a cask is stored on a holding solution, the solution and its handling are the supplier’s specification and are not something to improvise.

A press frame is different because it is not meant to hold liquid. What it needs is stable humidity, no direct heat, no sun through a window, and no draught blowing across one face — all of which cause differential drying and warping. Off the floor, under cover, and left alone. The screw and its nut are cleaned of pomace, dried, and lightly protected with a lubricant suitable for food-contact machinery, which is a specified class of product and not whatever grease is on the shelf.

Press cloths, racks and blocks go with the press. Cloths are washed hot, dried completely and stored out of sunlight because ultraviolet degrades polypropylene; racks are scrubbed and dried; hardwood pressing blocks are inspected for splits, because a block that cracks under load is how a press fails suddenly.

Where each thing should be stored, and in what state

Close-season storage
Item	Stored	Why
Wooden vat	Full of water or a holding solution	The staves must stay swollen; a dry vat opens and cannot be closed again
Cask	Full of cider, or cleaned, dried, sulphured and bunged	The dangerous state is part-full and damp: acetic bacteria and mould both want it
Timber press frame and screw	Under cover, off the floor, stable humidity, out of sun and draught	Differential drying warps and splits; the load path depends on tight joints
Press cloths	Washed hot, bone dry, out of sunlight	Damp cloths mould and taint; ultraviolet embrittles synthetic weaves
Hoses and tubing	Flushed, sanitised, drained, hung vertically, ends open	Coiled wet tubing holds liquid and grows a population out of sight
Pumps	Flushed, stripped where possible, dried, impeller relaxed	Residue in seals and a set impeller are the two commonest failures
Hydraulic pack	Ram retracted, oil clean and to level, hoses inspected	Exposed rams corrode; contaminated oil kills pumps and valves
Stainless tanks	Cleaned, dried and closed, or full of water, with the manway seal relaxed	Either is fine; a damp closed tank with a compressed gasket is not
pH probe	In the manufacturer’s storage solution	A dry bulb loses response and often does not recover
Filter housings and media	Emptied, cleaned, dried, media discarded or stored as the supplier directs	Wet media are a growth medium and then a solid blockage
Gas cylinders	Secured upright, valve closed, cap fitted, regulator removed	Cylinder handling rules apply whether or not the cylinder is in use

Starting again in the new season

Recommissioning is a task in its own right and it starts weeks before the fruit does. Wooden vessels are filled with water and given days to swell and to reveal their leaks, because finding a leak on the day of pressing is finding it too late. Every water-carrying route is run with water before anything else goes near it, which flushes out dust and finds the joints that have relaxed.

Then everything is cleaned and sanitised regardless of the state it was left in, because a season of dust, insects and mice has passed. A tank that was left immaculate in November is not clean in September. This is not distrust of the person who put it away; it is an acknowledgement that a building is not a sealed box.

Instruments are calibrated before the first measurement rather than after the first surprising one, and any instrument that has been standing dry, flat or without its consumables is checked with particular suspicion. Pressure equipment — receivers, relief valves, gauges, kegs and any vessel that will be carbonated — comes due for whatever inspection the manufacturer and the jurisdiction require, and that is arranged in the quiet months rather than in the week before pressing.

The last part is consumables. Whatever was used up last year is replaced before it is needed: gaskets, filter media, hoses that were marginal, cloths that were retired, the cleaning chemicals whose shelf life has passed. Nothing else in the cider house causes as much avoidable delay in a pressing week as a missing gasket.

Prove it before you load it

Equipment that has stood idle is not equipment that is fit for use. A wooden press that has dried for years may have lost strength in a way that is not visible, and press frames and screws are assessed before they are loaded rather than tested by loading them. Hydraulic hoses, gauges and relief valves have finite lives and are replaced on age and condition, not on whether they have failed yet — a gauge that reads wrongly removes the only warning an operator has. Rodent-chewed cable, corroded earth connections and damp electrical enclosures are checked by someone competent before power is applied. Pressure vessels and gas systems come with their own inspection regime and it is not optional.

Also answered on this page

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

How do you store a cider press over winter?
What happens if a cider barrel dries out?
What should I check before pressing season?

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 are apples pressed for cider — The fruit is first milled to a pulp, then that pulp is squeezed — traditionally in cloth-wrapped layers under a screw or hydraulic ram, and industrially in a belt or bladder press. Whole apples cannot be pressed usefully; they must be broken first.
Why does everyone say cleaning matters more than anything else — Cleaning removes soil — pomace, lees, tartrate, protein and the biofilm growing in it. Sanitising reduces the number of viable organisms on a surface that is already clean. They are two separate operations and the second does not work without the first.
Why does my cider taste like vinegar — Acetic acid bacteria have reached the cider and, given air, are converting its alcohol into acetic acid. The cause is almost always oxygen — an unfilled vessel, a leaking bung, or a slow transfer.
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 did old cider presses work before hydraulics
How do i know my hydrometer, refractometer and meters are still telling the truth

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.

Somerset Rural Life Museum — cider collections
South West Heritage Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24
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.
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.

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.