Pressing Matters: Our Apple Juice Adventure

This year, friend and our own appletrees blessud us with an apple overload. Crates full, baskets full — more than enough for our animals to enjoy as snacks. But with so many apples left, we thought: why not try something new and make apple juice in big batches?

Our bright idea was to use a manual juice press — the kind that can hold up to 10+ kilos of apples at once. It felt rustic, traditional, and efficient. So we got to work: cutting the apples, removing the bruised parts, filling up the press… and then the pressing began.

And we pressed.
And pressed.
And pressed some more.

But nothing happened. Not a single drop of juice. At some point, even the press itself refused to budge. Turns out, without a team of bodybuilders, this wasn’t going to work.

So, conclusion: a beautiful idea, but in practice, a failure buy.

Luckily, we had a fallback plan: our good old automatic fruit juicer. Sure, it takes more time, and yes, it means extra cleaning afterwards, but the big difference is — it actually works. Within hours, we were bottling up fresh, golden juice.

In the end, we managed to fill 50 bottles of apple juice. A wonderful reward for our efforts, and a reminder that sometimes “traditional” isn’t always practical.

Was it worth the try? Absolutely. Because every experiment teaches us something — and in this case, it also gave us plenty of apple juice to enjoy.