Pressing
Rack-and-cloth pressing
Building pomace into thin cloth-wrapped layers separated by racks, so that juice has a short path out and the stack can carry the pressure needed to force it.
Also called Cheese pressing, Pack pressing, Building a cheese.
- Stage
- Pressing
- Traditional in
- Somerset, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Devon and 2 more
- What it most changes
- Phenolic character up, oxidative character up
- Safety
- Carries a safety consideration — see below
A press cheese under load stores a great deal of energy in a stack that can burst sideways without warning if a layer slumps or a cloth fails. Operators keep clear of the sides of a loaded press, and a hydraulic circuit is depressurised before any part of the stack is disturbed.
What it is
Rack-and-cloth pressing builds the pomace into a stack — the cheese — of thin layers, each wrapped in a square of cloth folded into a parcel and separated from its neighbours by a slatted rack. Pressure is applied to the top of the stack, usually now by a hydraulic ram, and juice escapes sideways out of each layer, runs down the rack faces and off the press bed. It is the dominant press form in traditional West Country, Three Counties and Norman cider making, and it survives in commercial use because it does something a continuous press cannot: it applies very high pressure to a bed that stays permeable, and it does so in a form the operator can watch and adjust.
Described in full
- The frame
- Two uprights carry a beam at the top. A moving head, driven hydraulically or by screw, pushes down from the beam onto the stack below.
- The cheese
- A layer of milled pomace folded inside a square of open-weave cloth. The cloth holds the pomace in a slab and lets juice out through every face, which is what makes the stack self-supporting under load.
- The racks
- Slatted wooden or plastic frames between each cheese. They keep the layers apart, spread the load evenly, and give the escaping juice channels to run along instead of forcing it sideways through neighbouring pomace.
- Why the stack is built in layers
- Juice has to travel only the half-thickness of one cheese to reach a free surface. A single deep mass of pomace of the same volume would seal itself and yield far less.
- The juice path
- Juice runs down the faces of each cheese, along the racks, down the outside of the stack and onto the tray, which is set with a fall towards a spout at one corner.
- The tray
- A shallow bed with a raised lip that catches everything and delivers it to one point. From the spout the juice goes to a vat, and from the first minute it is exposed to air, which is where enzymatic browning starts.
- What is left behind
- The pressed cake still holds a fifth or more of its weight as liquid. Pressure alone will not recover it, which is why yield is a design problem rather than a matter of squeezing harder.
Why it is used
- Splitting the pomace into thin layers shortens the distance juice has to travel to escape, which is the limiting factor in any press.
- The cloths retain fine solids, so the juice that runs off is comparatively clean without any filtration step.
- A racked stack can take far higher pressure than a bulk mass of pomace, which is what allows the last and most phenolic fraction of juice to be recovered.
- It is the only common press form that a small producer can build, strip and rebuild by hand, which is why it persists at farm scale.
How it works
- Each layer of pomace is enclosed in cloth, which acts as a filter medium: liquid passes, particles above the weave size do not.
- The racks hold open vertical drainage channels between layers, so juice released under pressure has a continuous escape path rather than being trapped by the layer above.
- Pressure is raised in stages. Each increment consolidates the bed and closes some of its porosity, so the operator waits for flow to fall away before tightening again — pressing faster simply compacts the surface and seals the juice in.
- The final, hardest fraction of the press run is compositionally different from the free run: proportionally higher in phenolics, potassium and suspended solids, and lower in sugar.
What it changes
The direction this step pushes the finished drink in, dimension by dimension. A direction, not a measurement: how far it moves depends on the juice, the temperature and how the step is carried out.
| Dimension | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Phenolic character | Raises | The high pressures a racked stack can carry recover the later press fractions, which carry proportionally more phenolic material than the free-run juice. |
| Oxidative character | Raises | A built cheese exposes a very large surface of pomace to air throughout the build and the run, so polyphenol oxidase acts on the juice as it emerges. |
| Body | Raises | Pressed hard, the run carries more colloidal and phenolic material into the juice, which reads on the palate as weight. |
The chemistry and the organisms
What is actually being changed, and by what. Each entry says what that compound or organism does in cider generally; this page is one place it does it.
Compounds involved
Procyanidins
The condensed tannins of cider fruit, whose chain length — not their quantity — decides whether the mouth registers bitterness or astringency.
Total phenolics
The single number used to summarise everything phenolic in a juice, useful for comparing fruit and misleading whenever it is used to predict how a cider will taste.
Polyphenol oxidase
The copper enzyme that turns cut apple brown within seconds, and the reason a cidermaker has to decide, at the press, whether to let the juice oxidise or to stop it.
Chlorogenic acid
The most abundant single phenolic in apple juice, the preferred substrate of the enzyme that browns it, and the precursor of one of the volatile phenols behind farmyard character.
Pectin
The structural polysaccharide of fruit cell walls, which decides how much juice a press releases, whether a cider ever clears, and whether keeving is possible at all.
Dissolved oxygen
Essential to a healthy yeast population at the start of fermentation and the principal enemy of a cider from the moment fermentation ends.
Where it is traditional
The places this step belongs to as a matter of practice. It is not a claim of exclusivity — a method can be traditional in one region and perfectly ordinary in another.
What it is done with
The rack and cloth press
A press in which pomace is built into a stack of thin cloth-wrapped layers separated by rigid racks, so that juice has a short path to a free edge at every level — the highest-yielding batch press for traditional coarse pomace.
Press cloths, from hair cloth to synthetics
The cloth that wraps each layer of pomace has to pass juice, hold back solids and survive repeated full pressure; horsehair and coarse hemp gave way to woven polypropylene and nylon, which are stronger, cleaner and easier to sanitise.
Hydraulic packs and rams
The pump, reservoir, valves, hoses and ram that turn a small electric or hand effort into tonnes of force at a press platen — the component that made high-yield batch pressing practical, and the one that stores the most energy.
Press types compared
A side-by-side account of how the common press types differ in yield, in oxygen exposure, in the phenolic load they put into the juice, in labour and in what they demand of the mill.
What can go wrong
Faults that begin at this step, or that this step makes more likely. Each one is set out with its causes and whether it can be put right.
Oxidation
The cumulative effect of oxygen on finished cider: fruit aroma flattens, colour deepens towards amber, and a bruised-apple or sherry-like character replaces the fresh one.
Enzymatic browning
The rapid darkening of milled fruit and fresh juice as polyphenol oxidase converts phenolics to quinones, taking colour and some tannin structure with it.
Acetification
The active conversion of a cider’s ethanol into acetic acid by acetic acid bacteria at an air interface — the process, running in the vessel, that produces volatile acidity.
Vinegar fly contamination
Small flies carrying acetic acid bacteria and spoilage yeasts directly into juice and cider, and depositing them wherever they land.
Excessive astringency
A drying, roughening, mouth-puckering sensation that outstays its welcome, produced by larger phenolic polymers precipitating salivary proteins.
Styles it produces
Categories in which this step is characteristic or required. Some name it in their definition; for others it is simply how they have always been made.
West Country farmhouse cider
Cider made on the farm from tannic bittersweet fruit, wild-fermented in wood and sold still and unfiltered, in a tradition whose variability is one of its defining features.
Somerset cider
Cider from the Somerset levels and the surrounding hills, built on a locally selected bittersweet fruit population and a tradition of full-bodied, tannic, still cider.
Herefordshire cider
Cider from the county with England’s largest cider orchard area, protected as a geographical indication and spanning farmhouse practice, bottle-fermented cider and industrial-scale production.
Three Counties cider
The shared cider and perry tradition of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, defined by a common fruit inventory and by the perry pear orchards that survive nowhere else in comparable numbers.
Cidre de Normandie
Protected Normandy cider made from the region’s bitter and bittersweet fruit, characteristically low in alcohol, sweet-edged and lightly sparkling.
Scrumpy
A colloquial West Country word for rough farm cider that has never had a fixed definition and now carries as much marketing weight as descriptive meaning.
Perry
The fermented drink of pears, a tradition parallel to cider rather than derived from it, in which unfermentable sorbitol leaves a sweetness the maker never chose.
American heritage cider
Cider made from the North American heirloom cultivars that survived the collapse of the country’s cider industry, and presented as an expression of that recovered fruit.
Single-varietal cider
Cider made wholly or overwhelmingly from one apple cultivar, presented so that the fruit’s own character is the subject of the drink.
Welsh cider
Cider from Wales, rebuilt over recent decades from a nearly lost tradition, with protected names for traditional Welsh cider and perry and a fruit inventory shared with the English border counties.
More on rack-and-cloth pressing
The physics of pressing is a drainage problem before it is a force problem. Juice leaving pomace has to travel through the pomace, and wet apple pulp is a poor conduit: raise the pressure on a bulk mass and the outer layer consolidates into something close to a seal, after which additional force does nothing except deform the mass. The rack-and-cloth stack solves this geometrically. By dividing the pomace into layers a few centimetres thick and putting an open drainage face on each one, it makes the escape path short and keeps it open under load. That is why a cheese can accept pressures that would simply extrude a bulk bed, and why the technique long outlived the screw presses it was first built for.
The cloth is not incidental. Straw was the original layer material in English practice, and reed in some districts — the pomace was built up in a lattice of straw whose stems both retained the pulp and formed drainage channels, and the whole assembly was trimmed square with a knife. Horsehair cloths replaced straw where they could be afforded, and woven synthetics replaced hair. Each change altered the balance between retention and flow: a tight modern cloth gives a cleaner juice and a slower run, an open weave the reverse. Worlidge’s 1676 account of English press practice describes a recognisable version of the same problem being solved with the materials then to hand.
What the operator actually does is manage the rate. Pressure is brought up in steps, and between steps the press is left alone while the run falls from a stream to a trickle. Each consolidation makes the bed less permeable, so the next increment has to be given time to work through it. Hurrying this is the commonest error, and it costs yield twice over: the surface seals, and the compacted layers cannot then be opened by further force. It also matters what fraction is being collected. The free run and the first pressure fraction are sweeter and cleaner; the hard-pressed final fraction carries more phenolic material, more potassium and more fine solids, and some makers keep it separate and blend it back deliberately rather than letting it into the main lot by default.
The characteristic drawback is exposure. Building a cheese means holding a large area of milled pomace open to the air for as long as the build takes, and then running juice down open rack faces into an open trough. In traditional practice this was accepted and even used — the juice browns, quinones polymerise and drop out with some of the harshest phenolic material, and the resulting cider is softer than the fruit suggests. In a press house working for aromatic single-varietal juice it is a straightforward loss, which is why that work has largely moved to bladder presses that can be closed and gassed. The other standing risk is biological: a warm press floor with pomace on it, juice in the trough and fruit waiting outside is exactly the environment acetic acid bacteria and vinegar flies need, and press-house hygiene is the difference between a clean run and one that is already forming ethyl acetate before it reaches a vat.
Related processes
Steps that sit alongside this one, replace it, or depend on it having been done.
Fruit preparation
Milling
Reducing whole fruit to a pulp so that the press has cell walls it can drain, rather than intact apples it can only bruise.
Fruit preparation
Maceration
Holding milled pomace before pressing so that phenolics, aroma precursors and pectin have time to move out of the solid tissue and into the juice.
Pressing
Hydraulic pressing
Pressing in which a pump drives fluid against a ram, so that a small pumped pressure becomes a large, controllable and repeatable load on the pomace.
Pressing
Pressing yield
The proportion of a fruit charge recovered as juice, and why a single headline figure for it is not a meaningful number.
Pressing
Pomace handling
What is done with the pressed cake once the juice is off it — feed, pectin extraction, composting, digestion or orchard spreading — and why a wet acidic heap beside the press is a problem.
Pressing
Traditional screw pressing
The wooden farm press in which one or two hand-turned screws drive a follower down onto a built cheese of pomace, tightened by degrees over hours.
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 milled for cider
- What is pressing yield — Pressing yield is the proportion of fruit weight recovered as juice. It varies from under half on a poorly loaded basket press to around seventy per cent on a well-run rack-and-cloth or belt press.
- 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.
- What is a rack and cloth press and why is the pomace built in layers — The pomace is spread on a square cloth laid in a shallow forming frame, the cloth corners are folded over to make a flat parcel, a slatted rack is laid on top, and the process repeats until a stack — the *cheese* — is built. The whole stack is then compressed, usually by a hydraulic ram.
- Which type of cider press should i use — No press is best. Each one sits at a different point on four trade-offs: how much juice it recovers, how much air the juice meets, how hard it works the solids, and how much labour and capital it needs.
- What are procyanidins in cider — They are the condensed tannins of apples: chains of catechin-type units whose length decides how much of the phenolic load reads as bitterness and how much as astringency. Two ciders with identical total tannin can taste nothing alike.
Where to go next
- How cider is made — The whole sequence, stage by stage, with the choices open at each one.
- Cider science — The chemistry and microbiology the methods on this page rest on.
- Troubleshooting — What goes wrong, how to recognise it, and whether it can be reversed.
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 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.
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.