Get Ready for Cider Pressin'!

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

You may need to drive out into the backwoods and ask around in order to find one of the mills you're looking for ... they probably won't be listed in the Yellow Pages. Even if you have to travel some distance, though, it's worth the trip just to be able to watch the goings-on and breathe the heady aroma of all that crushed fruit. I'd probably go each year even if I had no apples to press!

We take our fruit to a mill owned by our neighbor, Bradley Culler (who, incidentally, largely built his "cider works" himself using recycled car engines, grain hoppers, and other items). During his busy season, Brad often doesn't go home from the mill until 2:00 a.m. Because of the long hours of hard work that get packed into a relatively short period of time—and because of the high cost of owning and maintaining the machinery — cider mills like Brad's have been closing down across the country in recent years. Brad guesses there may be about 300 still in operation, concentrated mostly in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, and Washington.

We may build or buy our own small hand-operated press and make small batches of cider at home, someday ... but for now, it's a great relief at harvest time — when everything in the garden seems to demand our immediate attention — for us to be able to cart our apples over to Brad's mill ... watch the lovely red-splotched fruit bobble up the conveyor belt ... wait as our pickin's are ground into pulp, pressed with a force of 76,000 pounds to the square inch, strained, and bottled ... and drive home a half hour later with our jugs of sweet, delicious brown cider.

The cost of this service? It'll vary, of course, from mill to mill, but last fall Brad charged $2.25 for up to 15 gallons, 15¢ per gallon beyond that quantity, and 5 cents per container to fill jugs. By anyone's standards, this has got to be one of the last real bargains around.

How to Preserve Your Cider...

Once you have that dusky liquid safely in your containers, you'd best be prepared to keep it cold or else drink it within a few days. For without the addition of preservatives to retard the growth of micro-organisms, pure apple cider will begin to ferment in about a week if refrigerated ... and much sooner if not kept cold. Provided the juice is stored in an airtight container (aerobic — or "exposed to air — fermentation will produce vinegar), its sugars will gradually be converted into alcohol, and the sweet will then become hard cider ... a favorite drink of our forefathers, and — in fact — the national beverage up to about 1850.

You may like hard cider. We don't, so we can or freeze all but a few gallons of the juice (which we set aside for making cider jelly or vinegar) within three days of bringing it home from the mill.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print