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.
Also called Beam press, Twin-screw farm press, Wooden screw press.
- Stage
- Pressing
- Traditional in
- Herefordshire, Somerset, Devon, Normandy
- What it most changes
- Oxidative character up, astringency down
- Safety
- Carries a safety consideration — see below
The bar of a screw press stores energy in the frame and the compressed cheese: a screw that jumps its thread, or a beam that fails under load, releases it as a swinging bar. Keep hands and body out of the arc of the bar, never leave it seated in a socket unattended, and stop pressing rather than forcing a screw that has begun to bind.
What it is
A screw press applies force by turning a threaded shaft, so that the mechanical advantage of the thread converts a modest push on a lever bar into a heavy load on the pomace beneath. In its older English form a single great screw bore down through a fixed beam onto a follower board; later farm presses carried two screws, one at each corner of a cast or timber frame, turned alternately to keep the follower level. The pomace itself is stacked underneath in a squared block — the cheese — and the whole assembly stands over a shallow tray that runs juice off to a channel and a receiving vessel.
Described in full
- Shape
- A two-axis plot. The horizontal axis runs from little air contact on the left to a great deal on the right; the vertical axis runs from slow at the bottom to fast at the top. Five presses are plotted as marks: circles for batch presses, a circle in a different fill for the closed bladder press, and a diamond for the continuous belt press.
- Rack and cloth
- Low on both axes. The pomace is built into cloth-wrapped layers by hand and pressed slowly; the cheese is a largely sealed stack, so the juice inside meets little air. It gives clean juice and it is the slowest thing in the building.
- Basket and hydraulic
- Both batch methods, both slow, both with the pomace surface exposed while pressure is applied. The hydraulic press is the faster of the two because the pressure is applied mechanically rather than by a screw.
- Bladder
- The lowest air contact of all, because the press is a closed vessel and can be flushed or filled without the juice seeing much oxygen at all. Faster than the batch presses and slower than a belt.
- Belt
- The fastest and the most exposed. Pomace runs continuously between two moving belts through a series of rollers, in the open, in a thin layer with a large surface area. That is the trade: the juice is out quickly and it has met a great deal of air on the way.
- Why there are no numbers
- Throughput and yield figures for presses circulate widely and come almost entirely from manufacturers. CiderHQ has verified none of them and does not reproduce them. What can be defended without a number is the ordering, and the ordering is the useful part: the trade between speed and oxidation is the decision a maker is actually taking.
Why it is used
- It needs no power beyond a person and a bar, which is why it was the standard press on farms long before hydraulic or electric equipment reached them.
- The rate of loading is entirely under the operator’s hand, so pressure can be built as slowly as the pomace will accept it.
- A well-built cheese presses without cloths tearing or the stack slumping, and the same frame serves for decades with only the screws and follower needing attention.
- It remains a working choice at heritage sites and small producers who want the method itself to be visible and repairable.
How it works
- The thread of the screw is an inclined plane wrapped round a cylinder: a long turn of the bar produces a very short vertical travel of the follower, and the ratio between them is the force multiplication.
- Load transmitted through the follower compresses the pomace bed, closing the void spaces between fruit particles until the juice held in ruptured cells has nowhere to sit but the drainage channels.
- Juice leaves along the faces of the cheese rather than through it, so the layered construction — thin beds separated by straw, reed or cloth — matters more to flow rate than the total force applied.
- Because pomace is a compressible solid saturated with liquid, load applied at once simply seals the outer surface; load applied in stages lets the bed drain, settle and accept the next increment.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Oxidative character | Raises | Juice runs across open trays and channels over a long pressing, so polyphenol oxidase acts on hydroxycinnamic acids and flavanols in air for an extended period before the juice ever reaches a vessel. |
| Astringency | Lowers | Gradual loading extracts less skin and cell-wall material than a rapid squeeze, so fewer of the higher-molecular-weight procyanidins that bind salivary protein are carried across into the juice. |
| Body | Preserves | Moderate final pressures leave much of the pectin and colloidal solids in the pomace rather than driving them into the juice, giving a texture set by the fruit rather than by press severity. |
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 beam press, the screw press and the twin screw
Timber-framed presses that applied force by a weighted lever beam or by one or two hand-turned wooden or iron screws, the standard farm press in England and France for centuries and still in use.
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.
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.
Pectin haze
A persistent, slightly viscous haze that will not settle, caused by pectin from the fruit remaining in solution as a colloid.
Metal haze
A haze or dark cast caused by dissolved iron or copper picked up from equipment, forming insoluble complexes with phosphate or with the cider’s phenolics.
Metallic taint
A metallic, inky or blood-like taste from dissolved iron, copper or zinc picked up from equipment, usually accompanied by accelerated oxidation.
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.
More on traditional screw pressing
Before hair cloths were common, the cheese was built with layers of straw or reed drawn out at the corners and folded back over each bed, a construction that gave the stack lateral strength and left open channels for juice to escape. Woven hair cloths and later synthetic press cloths replaced the straw on most farms, but the geometry survived: a series of shallow beds is pressed far more effectively than one deep one, because the distance any drop of juice must travel to reach a free face stays small. Historic descriptions of English press design, including Vinetum Britannicum of 1676, treat the building of the cheese as the skilled part of the operation and the turning of the screw as the labour.
The characteristic rhythm of a screw press is tighten, wait, tighten again. The wait is not politeness towards the timber. A saturated pomace bed under load behaves as a consolidating medium: the applied force is initially carried partly by the liquid, and only as that liquid drains does the solid skeleton take up the load and permit further compaction. Tighten again too soon and the operator is pushing against trapped juice rather than compressing pomace, which forces fines through the cloth faces and produces a cloudy, solids-laden run. Left to drain between tightenings, the same cheese yields juice that arrives visibly clearer and carries less pulp into the vat.
The slow build also limits how much of the fruit’s cell debris and skin fragment is torn into the juice, and shortens the practical difference between the first run and the last. Against that, a screw press is slow, it is limited in the total load a wooden or cast frame will bear, and its juice sits exposed to air on the tray and in the channel for as long as the pressing takes — so oxidative colour development is part of its normal character rather than a fault. Where a maker wants that, as much English and Normandy farmhouse practice historically did, it is not a compromise; where a bright, pale, aromatic juice is the aim, a screw press is the wrong tool.
Related processes
Steps that sit alongside this one, replace it, or depend on it having been done.
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.
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
Pomace conditioning
Letting milled pomace stand before it goes to the press so that it drains better, presses faster and gives more juice.
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.
Juice treatment
Juice oxidation
The enzymic browning that begins the moment apple juice meets air, which some traditions deliberately allow and others suppress.
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 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.
- 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.
- How do i clear a cloudy cider
- What does pectin do in cider — Pectin is the structural polysaccharide that holds fruit cells together. In juice it holds haze in suspension, and it is the molecule keeving depends on: strip its methyl groups and it will gel with calcium and float the nutrients out of the juice.
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.
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.
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
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.