Well with Fall in full swing here, I once again cleaned up the old apple press. Went searching for cheap apples on Craigslist, and found a guy with 7 acres of Rome Beauties, a variety from Ohio that was used for cooking and cider making. I finally found a excellent book on hard cider, that goes into what blends of what varieties, to get a good balanced hard cider. Turns out Rome Beauties are great for the bulk of the juice.
The guy with the orchard was super nice, he said nobody wanted his apples any more, but at one time the orchard was pulling in around 180,00.00 dollars a year!
He let me pick as many apples as I wanted for 10 bucks, invited me back to get more for free. Even said to come back next year. I ended up getting around 270 lbs of apples from him, and spent two full days between harvesting and processing into juice, and came up with about 12 gallons of juice.