It’s Cider Season

It’s that time of year again here in Kentucky: cider squeezing. And happily for the Pastry family, this past Saturday we were again invited to the hilltop home of my good friend Mose for his annual cider making party. He has a cider press that’s been in his family for maybe 100 years, and every year it gets a workout. This year was a bit different, since in addition to the cider press, Mose made the mistake of putting out a keg of good beer. The predictable happened. Everyone stood around and drank the beer instead of juicing the apples. So the sun went down on Saturday to the sound of the fiddle and the banjo, with very little cider having been pressed. But the sun has a way of coming back up again, and Sunday afternoon I found myself standing back up on Mose’s hill — sober — next to a pile of apples as big as a car. But hey, once you’re in you’re in.

Here I should insert that everyone who lives in Kentucky should have a friend named Mose. Better still that he should own such an historic (and useful) piece of Americana, for there truly is nothing like the taste of fresh-squeezed apple juice right off the press. But then fresh apple squeezings really aren’t the point of a cider press…just a fringe benefit. What Mose had in mind, just like his ancestors before him, was something a bit more adult. A bit more Kentucky. But more on that as we move along…