Glossary · Equipment
Stone mill
Also written chase and stone, horse mill, circular mill. Each is a name for the same thing, which is why none of them has an entry of its own.
Definition
The pre-industrial cider mill: a circular stone trough, the chase, in which an upright stone wheel was drawn round by a horse to crush fruit against the trough.
- Subject
- Equipment
- Also written
- chase and stone, horse mill, circular mill
In more detail
Stone mills crushed slowly and thoroughly, breaking pips and skins and giving a long incidental maceration — which produced a tannic, well-extracted must, and which is one reason old cider was more phenolic than a fast-milled modern equivalent. Surviving chases are common in West Country farmyards, often reused as planters.
Where this is covered properly
The glossary defines; these pages explain. Each is described in its own words.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Equipment
Apple mill
The machine that reduces whole fruit to pomace. Modern forms include scratter, hammer, centrifugal and roller mills; the word also historically named the whole cider-making premises.
Milling and pressing
Pounding
The old West Country word for milling fruit, from the days when apples were beaten or ground to pulp rather than torn by a scratter. It survives in the name of the building where it happened, the pound house.
History
Pound house
The farm building in which apples were pounded, pressed and fermented — the West Country name for the cider house, from the old verb to pound, meaning to mill.
Milling and pressing
Maceration
Holding milled pomace before pressing so that enzymes soften it and phenolic and aromatic material moves from the skins into the juice. Times range from an hour to a full day.
Milling and pressing
Scratter
A mill that tears apples apart between a rotating toothed or studded drum and a fixed plate, producing the coarse pomace that a press can work with.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
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.
Hereford Museum of Cider collections and interpretation
Hereford Cider Museum Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24
Somerset Rural Life Museum — cider collections
South West Heritage Trust · museum · retrieved 2026-08-24
Vinetum Britannicum, or a Treatise of Cider
John Worlidge · historical source · passage verified 2026-08-24 · covers 1676
Identified on 2026-08-24 from the 1678 edition held by the Internet Archive. John Worlidge, active 1669–1698; the work ran to further editions including 1691, so a citation to it should say which. The full title is broader than the short one CiderHQ uses and matters for what the book can be cited for: it covers other fruit wines and drinks alongside cider, so it is evidence about seventeenth-century English fruit fermentation generally rather than about cider alone.