By Anais Wheeler, Wcities Boston Contributor
What could be more quintessential in autumn in New England than picking apples and pressing cider? Escaping from the bustle of Boston, we drove north on an early October weekend, through New Hampshire and into Vermont on 89, that hilly, winding highway that is one of the only ways to get (still north but) west at over 40 miles per hour in northern New England.
During my childhood, my family had a plethora of back-to-the-lander friends, and my memories of pressing apples took place at Wayback Farm, where the cider press was building-sized and used conveyor belts to sort the apples before they were crushed and squeezed. While collecting apples was fairly hard work for a nine-year-old, the actual pressing was effortless and not a little fascinating.
This trip, too, involved friends who have embraced farm life. We arrived at their farm on a beautiful Saturday morning. The leaves were peaking, and the hills were mottled with those autumn reds and yellows that make this area a favorite weekend destination at this time of year.
Image courtesy of Christopher Read.
Apple mush makes good pig feed. Beer not so much. Image and happy drunk pigs courtesy of Benjamin Polloni.
In no time at all, we had grabbed cement buckets and set to work on a few trees. The trees hadn’t been pruned in years, and picking from them proved difficult and occasionally painful. (I came home with an especially attractive scratch under my eye in addition to the many on my hands and arms.) Our efforts were augmented by a friend who had spent a season picking olives in Italy; he suggested shaking the trees over tarps, but our tarps were too small, and the ground too uneven, so we settled for using a rake to shake the small apples free from the branches. This resulted in cascades of hard little crab apples landing on our backs and heads, as well as winding up in impenetrable undergrowth. Not only did we pick our own apples, but we helped the deer with their share.
I have no yard in the city, let alone an apple tree, and it’s easy to forget what wild apples can really look like. Many of our specimens were a mottled brownish red, and with the random lumpiness, they looked more like little roasting potatoes than the platonic ideal of an apple we’re used to at Whole Foods or Generic City Co-op.
Someone had heard that a truck-bed full of apples would make 10 gallons of cider, so we stopped when it looked like ten gallons worth, and set about setting up our borrowed hand-crank cider press.
There she is: our spectacularly high-tech apple press (and our first five gallons of cider). Image courtesy of Benjamin Polloni, 2008.
This apple press was probably made from a kit, like this one, but the terribly enterprising of you, dear readers, could probably design your own. It’s a simple hand crank, with a slatted round receptacle. Insert a porous bag in the slatted receptacle, crush the apples into the bag through the hand crank (harder than it sounds). When the bag is full, attach the disc-shaped press to the drill-like thingie (technical apple-pressing term, obviously). Spin to press and squeeze the juice from the porous bag. It drips through a hole on one side of the base, and into a small pot. It would probably be a good idea to have some cheesecloth to filter out seeds and skin before you pour into your storage container (we used several 5-gallon glass carboys, but you could also use a bunch of gallon jugs).
Hand-cranking is hard work. Image courtesy of Christopher Read.
Mmm…apple mush ready to be squeezed into cider. Image courtesy of Benjamin Polloni.
That Saturday, we pressed almost ten gallons, but found that the truck bed still looked much the same (that is to say, full of apples), so the Boston portion of our crew vowed to come back in the light of the next day to finish the job. We did, and pressed a total of 15 gallons by Sunday afternoon.
The Boston crew sticks with it: Chris Read, Ira Gooch and me, giving those apples what-for. Image courtesy of Chris Read.
…while everyone else gets distracted…building barns and such. Image courtesy of Benjamin Polloni.
We took a couple of gallons to drink fresh, but the rest of our cider is still sitting in its carboy, bubbling away. In a few months, it will be delicious and alcoholic. For more information about how to ferment cider, check out Leeners, which has information about pressing cider as well as fermenting it.
If you aren’t so lucky to have friends with unkempt trees that need picking, there are lots of orchards around that you can pick at for a fee, and some with presses that won’t give you nearly the workout that ours did.
Russell Orchards in Ipswich, MA, offers apple picking all season, as well as delicious apple products – try the Apple Cider Donuts – and occasional entertainment.
Also, try The Big Apple Farm in Wrentham, although pick-your-own for 2008 is finished. You can still buy apples and apple products in the store there. During the summer months, they also have pick-your-own blueberries and raspberries.
Or, check out Red Fire Farm in Granby, MA, where you can press your own cider each year at their Fall Feast. This farm also offers a CSA for pick-up in Boston locations, which offers a nice infusion of locally-grown veggies all summer and fall for what turns out to be a very reasonable price.
Driving back to Boston with our cider securely buckled into the back seat, we knew that in a few weeks, the trees would be brown and the wind would be howling. Our cider will be even better then, hot and with a cinnamon stick.
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