What: Public pressing of 8,000 apples at the historic mill. Visitors can take home a jug of cider. $3 donation suggested.
Where: Cedar Creek Grist Mill, 43907 N.E. Grist Mill Road, Woodland.
When: Starts at 9 a.m. and will continue till all the apples are pressed.
Information: cedarcreekgristmill.com/apple_pressing.htm or call 360-225-5832
Asked if he needed help hauling a variety apples to his press to make cider, John Emmett instead reached into a bucket and pulled out a small green variety called a Vilberie.
“No,” Emmett said, handing the fruit to a curious reporter. “What I want you to do is try this.”
What: Public pressing of 8,000 apples at the historic mill. Visitors can take home a jug of cider. $3 donation suggested.
Where: Cedar Creek Grist Mill, 43907 N.E. Grist Mill Road, Woodland.
When: Starts at 9 a.m. and will continue till all the apples are pressed.
Information: <a href="http://cedarcreekgristmill.com/apple_pressing.htm">cedarcreekgristmill.com/apple_pressing.htm</a> or call 360-225-5832
After he walked away, she took a bite, puckered her face at the sheer bitterness, then looked for a place to politely dispose of the evidence.
Emmett returned, grinning.
“Isn’t that awful?” he said with a laugh.
Terrible, in fact. Yet when the variety, known as bittersweet, is mixed with other types of apples in a cider, it creates a concoction that has a perfect, refreshing balance that’s smooth and tasty.
Emmett uses bittersweet apple types much like vintners will use some bitter grapes to make a more complex, flavorful wine, he said.
The retired scientist and his wife grow 75 varieties of apple on their Hockinson property as a hobby. They give the excess to local food banks, and they also hold a few “too many apples” parties every year where neighbors are invited to join them in pressing cider.
It may sound like an involved process — and it can be, if you want to get fancy — but pressing cider is actually something you can even do at home with a food processor or juicer, he said.
The 75-year-old, however, enjoys the complex side.
His carefully selected mix of the day included five types of apples: Vilberie, Jonathan, Wickson crab, Myers royal limbertwig and Maypole crab. You want to use about 20 percent bittersweet apples in the mix to get that balanced flavor, he said.
He also has two presses.
One, which wouldn’t be out of place in the 1850s, is made of wood, with a hand crank to shred the apples and a screw-down press to squeeze the juice out. The other is a slick electric, metal grinder from Italy, a version similar to those used for olives in that country, but tweaked for apples.
You can use the wood one to do everything, he said, “but a few cranks on that, and you’re exhausted.”
So for his process, he washes the apples, chucks them in the Italian grinder and then puts the pulpy mess into a woven nylon bag for pressing in the wooden one.
“When we make cider, we only make cider from apples we pick, and we sort those so they don’t have bird pecks or other things in them,” Emmett said, noting that apples from the ground and those with mysterious holes or cracked skin can easily carry deadly bacteria.
The pulp-filled bag goes into a wooden bucket attached to the press, and another plastic catch bucket goes under a hole at the bottom of the press to catch the juice.
The final step is to attach a wood top to the wood bucket, and then crank down a metal press to squish the smashed apples until all the liquid flows out.
The result is cider, which is not the same thing as apple juice.
Joe Beaudoin, owner of Joe’s Place Farms at 701 NE 112th Ave., who helped Emmett cultivate his wide array of apple trees, said apple juice and apple cider are two very different things.
Anything non-alcoholic that you find in the grocery store labeled “apple cider” is actually apple juice, he said.
“When you press juice and then you pasteurize it, like stores do, it kills all the enzymes,” Beaudoin said. “That’s not cider. Cider has enzymes in it.”
Stores pasteurize their apple juice to prevent illnesses such as E. coli that can spread if apples from the ground or apples that have been partially consumed by animals make their way into the cider mix.
But for marketing purposes, some companies still call that cider, he said.
Beaudoin is the only farmer in Clark County licensed to sell real apple cider. He had to pass state inspections and has to put a warning label on his jugs, but he said it’s generally worth the hassle because his customers love it.
His press is bigger than the one Emmett uses, but like Emmett, he also uses a wide variety of apples in his cider.
“Cider, it’s a unique flavor,” Beaudoin said. “You need to blend tart and sweet to get a good mix. Sometimes I even throw a few pears in there. People tell me it tastes like there are spices in it, but all I use is fruit.”
Pressing your own cider at home isn’t that hard, even if you don’t have a press. All you need is a food processor or juicer to grind your apples, a muslin or other porous bag to hold the pulp and something to squish the material in the bag (like your freshly-washed hands) so the juice flows out into a pot or other receptacle, the two men said.
Another option is to go over to the Cedar Creek Grist Mill at 9 a.m. Saturday morning, when the public can help volunteers press 8,000 pounds of apples. The event is back after a two-year hiatus caused by parking problems and road safety in the rural location.
A uniformed police officer will be on hand, and the road will become one-way during the event to mitigate those problems. And visitors can take a jug of cider home with them, although a $3 donation is suggested.
Another thing you can do with cider — and not with apple juice — is ferment it so it becomes alcoholic. Yeast in the apple skins will start the fermentation process naturally if you just let the cider sit for a few weeks, but cider makers usually speed the process by using some sort of specialized yeast.
“Cider never really goes bad, it just turns into hard cider,” Beaudoin said. “My grandfather, actually, he used to add raisins or beets to his cider to get the sugar content up so it would become more alcoholic.”
Emmett also likes to turn much of his cider into the hard variety each year. He boils it first, to remove contaminants and wild yeast, then lets it cool and adds a yeast called “Lalvin 71b” to get a consistently nice-tasting cider, he said.
He uses about five grams of the yeast per half-gallon jug of cider, he said.
After that, he covers the jug with cheese cloth and lets it sit and ferment.
Another thing he makes with his excess cider is something he calls “cider syrup,” which in the 1800s went by the name “boiled cider,” Emmett said.
He makes it by boiling his cider to let excess water steam off, adding more cider and continuing the boiling process until the remaining thick liquid is about 65 or 66 percent sugar.
“It’s really spectacular stuff,” Emmett said. “People used to mix it with eggs and make a custard. It also makes an amazing apple pie.”