Pressing
Second pressing and watering
Re-wetting spent pomace and pressing it again to recover a weak second juice — historically the drink of the farm household, and the practice that minimum-juice-content rules now constrain.
Known as Petit cidre where it originates. Also called Ciderkin, Water cider, Small cider, Second run.
- Stage
- Pressing
- Traditional in
- Herefordshire, Somerset, Normandy, New England
- What it most changes
- Alcohol down, body down
- Safety
- None recorded
What it is
After a press has taken what it can, the cake still holds liquid and a good deal of soluble material bound in tissue that pressure alone will not release. Watering is the practice of breaking that cake up, wetting it — with water, and in some traditions with weak juice or cider — letting it stand so the added water can equilibrate with what remains in the tissue, and pressing it a second time. The resulting liquid is not juice diluted in a simple sense; it is a leachate, weaker in sugar than the first run and different in composition, and it was historically fermented into a low-strength drink for the household and the farm workforce rather than sold.
Why it is used
- It recovers usable liquid from a cake that would otherwise be fed out or spread, which mattered a great deal when the fruit was the household’s own and no more of it was coming.
- It produced a deliberately low-alcohol everyday drink at a time when weak fermented beverages, rather than water, were what a farm household drank through the working day.
- At industrial scale the same principle underlies extraction of residual solids from pomace, though the product there is a process stream rather than a drink.
- In small-scale practice it lets a maker use a batch of pomace fully within the same pressing session rather than handling it twice.
How it works
- The pressed cake retains liquid held by capillary and cell-wall forces plus solutes still inside unruptured or partly ruptured cells; adding water creates a concentration gradient and dissolved material diffuses out into it.
- Standing time is doing the work, not the pressing: extraction is diffusion-limited, so a cake wetted and pressed immediately yields little more than dilute washings.
- Sugars are freely soluble and largely came out with the first pressing, so relatively little sugar is left to recover; phenolics bound to skin and cell-wall material are far less completely extracted the first time and continue to leach.
- The result is a liquid whose phenolic-to-sugar ratio is much higher than the original juice, which is why it ferments to low alcohol yet still tastes gripping.
- The wetted cake is warm, wet and open to the air with a resident microflora already active, so the second juice is microbiologically far more exposed than the first run and acetifies readily if left standing.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Alcohol | Lowers | Most fermentable sugar left with the first pressing, so the leachate carries only what remained in the cake and there is correspondingly little substrate for the yeast to convert. |
| Body | Lowers | Low sugar and therefore low residual extract and glycerol leave nothing to give the finished drink weight, which is why it registers as watery on the palate. |
| Astringency | Raises | Skin- and wall-bound procyanidins leach far less completely on the first pressing than sugars do, so the second liquid carries a higher phenolic load relative to everything else in it. |
| Phenolic character | Raises | Extended contact between added water and macerated skin and core tissue continues to dissolve flavanols and hydroxycinnamic acids that compressive pressing alone did not remove. |
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
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.
Procyanidins
The condensed tannins of cider fruit, whose chain length — not their quantity — decides whether the mouth registers bitterness or astringency.
Glucose
The sugar yeast takes first and the smallest of the three in apple juice, which is why the last sugar left in a slow ferment is almost never glucose.
Fructose
The dominant sugar of apple juice and the sweetest of the common sugars, which is why apple juice tastes sweeter than its total sugar figure implies and why a stuck ferment leaves sweetness behind.
Malic acid
The acid of apples, which supplies almost all the sharpness a cider has and, through pH, decides how vulnerable that cider is to everything that could spoil it.
Galacturonic acid
The sugar acid that pectin chains are built from, released as they break down, and a significant part of why juice from rotten fruit binds so much of the sulphite added to it.
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
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.
The pomace belt, and what becomes of pomace
Pressed cake leaves a modern press on a belt or an auger and goes to stock feed, to land, to anaerobic digestion or to pectin extraction; on a farm it usually goes to cattle or back on the orchard, and neither is as simple as it is usually described.
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.
Thin body
A cider with no weight or texture in the mouth, most often from over-watered pomace, low-gravity juice or a blend with nothing to give it substance.
Excessive astringency
A drying, roughening, mouth-puckering sensation that outstays its welcome, produced by larger phenolic polymers precipitating salivary proteins.
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.
Volatile acidity
The measurable fraction of acidity that can be steam-distilled off, dominated by acetic acid and read as vinegar sharpness in the nose and a hard, hot finish.
Vinegar fly contamination
Small flies carrying acetic acid bacteria and spoilage yeasts directly into juice and cider, and depositing them wherever they land.
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.
Low-alcohol cider
Cider at a reduced strength, reached either by removing alcohol from a finished cider or by arranging for less to be produced, with different consequences for flavour.
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.
Viez
The cider of the Moselle and Saarland, dry and still in the local manner, drunk from a distinctive lidded pot and named from a word for the second pressing.
More on second pressing and watering
This was, for centuries, the ordinary drink of the cider farm rather than a curiosity. In England the second-pressing product was ciderkin or water-cider, made after the strong cider had been drawn off and given to the household and the labour force; seventeenth-century English writing on cider, Vinetum Britannicum among it, treats it as a normal part of the year’s work rather than a means of adulteration. North American colonial practice kept the same habit and much of the same vocabulary, and small cider of this kind persisted on farms long after commercial cider had moved on. The equivalent survives in French as petit cidre, the weak cidre made after the gros cidre, and German-speaking practice has its own family of low-strength apple drinks made and drunk young, of which the seasonal part-fermented Rauscher is the nearest visible relative.
What changed is regulation, not chemistry. Because a second pressing dilutes juice with water, it collides directly with the minimum-juice-content rules that define what may be sold as cider. The UK definition sets a minimum apple juice content for a product sold as cider, and dilution below it puts the drink outside the legal category whatever it is called domestically; the French cidre decree likewise requires the product to be made from apple juice or from must obtained by re-wetting pomace only within defined limits, which is precisely the practice being constrained. These figures and limits change, and differ between jurisdictions, so anyone selling a second-pressing product needs the current national rule rather than a remembered one. Nothing in any of this restricts a household making small cider for itself.
The sensory point is the one most often got wrong. Second-pressing juice is not first juice with water in it. Sugar, which is highly soluble, came out with the first run and only a little remains; phenolics bound in skin and cell wall came out incompletely and go on leaching into the added water. The second liquid therefore has proportionally more phenolic material per unit of sugar than the fruit ever presented in its free juice, and it ferments to a low alcohol that gives it no weight to carry that phenolic load. The result reads as thin and rough rather than simply weak — astringent and slightly bitter over a body that is not there — and that, rather than dilution as such, is what a taster is describing when they call small cider harsh.
Related processes
Steps that sit alongside this one, replace it, or depend on it having been done.
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
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
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.
Fermentation
Wild fermentation
Letting the microflora already present on the fruit and in the press house carry the ferment, in a succession rather than as a single organism.
Juice treatment
Sanitation
The cleaning and sanitising discipline that underlies every other process, and why removing soil must come before any attempt to kill organisms.
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.
- How does cider ferment — Yeast consumes the sugar in apple juice and produces roughly equal masses of ethanol and carbon dioxide, along with the esters and higher alcohols that give cider much of its aroma. In a wild ferment several yeast species take turns before *Saccharomyces* finishes the job.
- 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.
- 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.
- What is malic acid and why does it matter in cider — Malic acid is the acid of apples and supplies almost all the sharpness a cider has. It also sets pH, which decides how well sulphite works and how exposed the cider is to spoilage, so it does far more work than its taste suggests.
- 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.
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.
Alcoholic Products Technical Guide, section 2 — alcoholic products (formerly Excise Notice 162)
HM Revenue & Customs · regulator · passage verified 2026-08-24
What may be called cider or perry for UK duty purposes. The substantive text now lives in section 2 of the Alcoholic Products Technical Guide rather than in the notice itself, and the passages below were read there. The widely repeated "35% juice" figure checks out — but note two things the figure alone hides: it is a tax threshold rather than a quality standard, and concentrate and dilution both count towards it.
Légifrance, JORF texte n° JORFTEXT000051223792 · legislation · retrieved 2026-08-24 · covers In force from 1 July 2025; “artisanal” and “rosé” from 1 January 2026
Opened on 2026-08-24, and it turned out that the entry CiderHQ had was describing a repealed instrument. The décret of 20 February 2025 replaces the 1953 décret and the 1987 one that amended it, and it changes the thing this site had been repeating: the doux, demi-sec and brut categories are no longer residual-sugar bands. They are now defined on acquired alcoholic strength together with density at 20 °C, an extra-brut tier has been added, and the four bands deliberately overlap so that a producer can place a product with a hydrometer rather than a sugar analysis. The pages that said otherwise have been corrected. What could not be done is a verbatim read: legifrance.gouv.fr returns HTTP 403 to retrieval, so the text was read through a summarising fetch and every operative figure was then checked independently against the UNICID interbranch briefing, which reproduces the table. The two agree.
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.
Cider: Making, Using and Enjoying Sweet and Hard Cider
Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols, Storey Communications, 1997; first published as Sweet & Hard Cider by Garden Way, 1980 · reference work · bibliographic record verified, not opened 2026-08-25
Bibliographic record verified on 2026-08-25 against Open Library, and the verification changed what CiderHQ knows about it. The work first appeared in 1980 as Sweet & Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, & Enjoying It (Garden Way, Charlotte, Vermont) and was retitled for the 1997 Storey edition the site had registered; nine editions are recorded in total. That matters for a source cited on North American practice, because a passage in the 1980 text and a passage in the 1997 one are not interchangeable and neither is the 2003 revision. Two scans exist in the Internet Archive — sweethardciderma0000prou for the 1980 edition and cidermakingusing0000prou for the 1997 — both access-restricted to the lending library and the print-disabled collection, so neither is openable by retrieval.