Twenty-eight pizzas, gyros, scones, three chocolate cakes, an empanada, chicken salad, garden salad, fruit salad, drinking chocolate, an apple pie, a hundred and six gallons of apple juice, and forty-one people; Marty, Terrie, Whitney, Hannah, Zack, Steve, Brian, Jerry, Louisa, ,Judy, Kaleb, Celia, Seth, Alana, Mack, Stephanie, Seaeh, Eliza, George, Liz, Sawyer, Cole, Jack, Georgia, Dave, Kaelyn, Keely, Kelsi, Melinda, Sara, Max, Jessica, Trevor, Izumi, Kylie, Garrett, Ashlee, Shea, Ricky, and a few unaccounted for. Not all one-hundred and six gallons of apple juice were consumed during the day, perhaps five or six gallons, but every drop was pressed from a truck load of apples gathered as part of the day’s ritual. From a strictly labor point of view, gathering a ton of apples and processing them along with preparing and staging three separate meals for a host of eager and hungry people is an ominous task. By the time my head hit the pillow I felt like I had participated in something grand. Yet the day was as close to a nirvanic joy as I can imagine. Watching the sweet apple nectar ooze between the oak slats of the apple press and slowly fill the catch bowl stirs me. Catching a cupful and drinking it is an experience everyone deserves to have.
I first remember tasting fresh apple juice as a teenager. My father would sometimes bring a gallon or two when it could be found at a local fruit stand. If he brought two home, one got stowed away to age for a few days, until it had a touch of fermented fizz. With fizz or not, I fell in love with the sweet juice.
While in college I had access to a decent wood shop, and with the guidance from a Mother Earth Magazine article, I gathered the materials and put together and apple cider press of my own. For many of the following years, the press would see occasional use, a modest yield of juice accompanied with good doses of fun and companionship.
The first fall after we moved to Cedaredge, over twenty-eight years ago, I saw home apple juice production on a completely different scale. A good friend of mine, Jerry, invited us to join their family for a Saturday of pressing apples. Delighted to relive some earlier memories, we showed up at their house ready to press a few gallons of juice and take a break from our regular house building routines. When we got to their house, there were no apples, just directions to meet them at a local orchard where we proceeded to fill the back of a small pickup truck with apples we gathered off the ground after the orchard had been harvested. Back at their home we spent the afternoon gorging on fresh apple juice, while taking turns turning the screw of the press, nearly identical to the one I had made a decade earlier. I have no idea how many gallon jugs we filled that day. I remember taking a few gallons home with me and drinking their contents over the next few weeks. For many years as fall became established we joined our friends in what became an annual fall apple cider ritual.
Eventually our friend Jerry and his family moved away. We carried on the ritual inviting a few friends and extended family members to join each year. It became a happy celebration of thanksgiving. As our children began moving away from home, it also became a time of reunion. The last several years our children have begun to bring their friends and cousins, and to our great joy the family that originally include us in their juicing party has moved back close enough to make an annual pilgrimage to press cider. Their children and their children’s children have become part of this tradition and celebration.
Early Saturday morning I recruited Hannah and the friends she had brought from Salt Lake City to split enough firewood to keep the pizza oven burning for the evenings feast. Then off to the orchard to pick up windfall and dropped apples. Hannah and her friends projected joy and anticipation as they filled the bed of the truck to overflowing in less than two hours. The gathering ending by making a dance video in the orchard rows. Once home, the apples were dumped on the grass. I showed everyone the various steps of pressing, including washing and cutting bad sections out of the apples, loading and finessing the grinder, pressing the apples, and then finally straining and filling the jugs. At this point the crew numbered in the teens. Sitting on chairs and overturned buckets, everyone picked a task suiting them, some retreated to the kitchen to assist Terrie in keeping everyone fed and preparing for the evenings feast. The mountain of apples shrank through the afternoon, while people worked, visited, and listened to music. The pressing site and the kitchen had a non-stop buzz of work for four or five hours. At this point Jerry and his extended family arrived with their loads of apples and stepped into the pressing operation. As the sun dropped behind the horizon and an evening fall chill settled in. the piles of apples had all been transformed into over a hundred gallons of juice.
Everyone retreated into the kitchen and living room, with the small children staking out the playroom. Under Terrie and Whitney’s direction an assembly line of pizza builders assembled exotic pizzas created with smoked salmon, pesto, poblano sauce, chorizo, fresh mozzarella, roasted peppers, roasted eggplant, pears, and fresh basil just to mention the basic ingredients. I slid the pizzas in and out of the oven until we were all too full. Then we ate cake and drank hot chocolate. And of course, throughout the day gallons of fresh delicious apple cider were consumed.