A reasonable homemade cider takes about nine kilos of apples for five litres. Three mature trees on a decent year will do that comfortably, which puts a press within reach of an ordinary garden.
Pick varieties that do the work for you
A cider apple is not a dessert apple with ambition. Bittersweets like Dabinett and Yarlington Mill bring the tannin that stops homemade cider tasting like sharp juice; Kingston Black is the rare one that does the whole job alone. Plant one sharp, such as Browns, against two bittersweets and you have a blend without blending.
Rootstock decides your ladder
MM106 gives you a tree you can pick standing up. M25 gives you a proper orchard tree, thirty years of fruit and a ladder you will come to resent. For a garden, MM106 every time.
You do not need to buy a press
Plenty of orchards on this map run community pressing days in October, where you bring your fruit and leave with your juice. It costs less than a press, and you learn more in an afternoon than in a season of reading.
Leave the windfalls a week
Cider apples are picked off the ground on purpose, and they want to be sweating and slightly soft before they go in. A rock-hard apple gives you juice; a mellowed one gives you cider.
A Herefordshire press that has kept old perry pear varieties going, and will talk trees all afternoon.
Worth visiting before you plant anything, to taste what single varieties actually do.
