The history of the cider press

Nothing can be pressed until the fruit is broken. The oldest widespread solution in the English and Norman cider countries was the circular stone mill: a runner stone rolled around a stone trough by a horse walking a circuit, crushing the fruit into pomace. Many of these survive in yards and gardens and are among the most recognisable objects in the material history of cider.

Worlidge’s Vinetum Britannicum of 1676 describes an alternative he called the ingenio, a roller mill through which fruit was fed and crushed between cylinders. Roller and toothed mills of this general kind became the standard, driven by hand, then by horse gear, then by belt from a stationary engine, and finally by electric motor.

Milling matters more than it appears to. Too coarse and the juice stays in the fruit; too fine and the pomace turns to a paste that will not drain, and the press builds pressure without releasing liquid. The knowledge of how finely to mill a given fruit is one of the things that was held in the hands of the person operating the mill rather than written down.

Pomace was built into a layered stack called a cheese. In the older practice the layers were separated and retained by straw or reed, drawn out at the edges and folded over; later by horsehair cloths, and in the twentieth century by woven synthetic cloths on wooden racks. The layered structure exists to give the juice short drainage paths and to stop the pomace extruding sideways.

The force was applied first by a great beam weighted or levered down, and then by the wooden screw press: a single central or twin screws driven down onto a plate by bar and muscle. Timber screw presses of this type were still working on English farms within living memory, and are the presses most often seen in museum collections.

Iron changed the screw press before it replaced it. Cast and wrought iron frames, iron screws and geared handles allowed much higher pressure from the same human effort. The hydraulic press, adapting a principle developed for industrial pressing generally, arrived through the nineteenth century and separated the force applied from the strength of the person applying it.

Yield is the obvious gain. A cheese pressed under a wooden screw gives up a good deal of its juice, but higher and more sustained pressure recovers more, and modern presses recover more still. Historically the residue was often watered and pressed again to make a weak drink for the field, which is a direct index of how much juice the first pressing left behind.

Labour is the less obvious and probably the more important gain. Building a cheese by hand is heavy, slow and skilled work, and the rack-and-cloth press was designed to make that work faster rather than to change the juice. Belt presses removed the batch structure altogether, running pomace continuously between converging cloths, and pneumatic bladder presses replaced the cheese with a membrane inflating inside a drum.

Juice quality changes too, and not always for the better. Gentler, slower pressing gives cleaner juice with less pomace solid and less extraction of bitter material from skin and pip; very high pressure and very fine milling can extract more of both. Which is preferable depends on what is being made, and it is one of the reasons some producers still use rack and cloth in an era of belt presses.

Press design followed the local availability of timber, stone and iron as much as any theory of extraction. The Asturian llagar took its name from the press house and its great beam press; Norman and Breton farms used screw presses closely comparable to the English; and the details of cloth, rack and stack differ from valley to valley.

A striking amount of this equipment survives, because it was built of oak and stone and because farms rarely threw anything away. Museum collections in the cider counties preserve mills, presses, casks and the small tools of the press house, and they are the principal physical evidence for practices that the written record describes only in outline.

The old presses have also come back into limited use. Small producers working with rack and cloth, and community groups pressing at village events, use essentially nineteenth-century arrangements, though usually with a hydraulic ram rather than a screw.