More Than a Story of an Apple Press

This apple press has a story to tell. It’s a story of failed dreams brought back to life. It’s a story of faith in others. It’s a story of serendipity, patience, persistence, and resourcefulness. It’s a story of pulling through at the last minute to get the cider we needed during an otherwise terrible apple season.

The story starts back in the summer of 2016. Marie and I were dreaming up our cider business, putting together a business plan and pricing out equipment. The prices of cider presses were looking prohibitive, but we stumbled upon a used apple pressing setup being sold by an orchard in Eau Claire. The price was reasonable, so we jumped on it, even though we were far from ready to connect the dots for how it would fit into our nascent business.

Above: Offloading part of the apple press to live in the shed at our old house when we bought it in 2016

We put all the pressing equipment in the shed at our old house with the intent of setting it up somewhere when we got our business up and running. We planned it into the floor plan of some of the buildings we looked at during the The Real Estate Odyssey of Brix Cider, but we always worried a bit about it. It was old equipment that would require a really handy person to work with and troubleshoot. We’re reasonably capable people, but neither of us truly excel at handy work to the level of getting this equipment operational.

When our real business plan finally took shape, this press really didn’t have a place in it. Our cider production space was too small for it, and we ended up partnering with other orchards for pressing. As a result, nearly five years later, when we decided to move closer to Mount Horeb, the pressing equipment was still in our shed gathering dust. We often lamented the poor investment in pressing equipment, driven by our blind enthusiasm as we were first getting started.

At about the same time that we were thinking about how to move the pressing equipment to our new house or sell it we received a few phone calls and a meeting from folks from St Francis Hermitage in Gays Mills. They described how they had a large orchard and a lot of imperfect apples that needed a market. Of course we were interested. Working with them seemed like a great way to expand our apple supply.

It was clear from the first meeting, that the mothers, sisters, fathers, and brothers of St Francis Hermitage were earnest, hard working, and good-hearted people. They live off the land, and with the abundance that they grow, they do admirable, charitable work.

A lightbulb came on, and we thought that maybe they would want to use our old apple press. They seemed pretty handy, so I pitched the idea to them. They were indeed interested, and we decided to simply give the press to them at no cost in the good faith agreement that they would use it to press apples and then sell their juice to us to ferment. We gave them the press this spring.

Above: Loading apple pressing equipment to move to Saint Francis Hermitage this past spring

Apple season came this year, and most of the orchards that we normally source from had little to nothing for us. Late frosts in spring killed apple blossoms so that no fruit formed on most of the trees in many of the orchards around us. Overall we picked about 10% of the apples that we hoped to pick this year, and we were feeling very stressed about getting the apples we needed to make all of our cider to get through till next apple season.

Throughout the fall I regularly called St Francis Hermitage, asking about their apple crop, their progress with the pressing equipment, and what we could hope for from them in terms of apples or juice. They were often a little guarded in their responses, I assume because they didn’t know for sure how things would turn out. There were also language, cultural, and organizational barriers that made communication challenging. I worried and worried and worried all fall about whether they would be able to come through for us. Every time I called it seemed that they had a new issue they were trying to solve as they worked to get a pressing space and this old equipment up to code for food processing. They assured me that they had picked a lot of apples, but as we got into November, I started to worry about how long the apples could last before they started to go bad. We were still pretty well short of our production goals for the fall.

Finally this week I received a phone call saying that the press was up and running and that they would have juice for us. Today I went up there to see for myself, and sure enough, they had 1,000 gallons of juice pressed for us. They’re planning to do 1,000 more. I barely recognized the press when I saw it. They had covered it in a fresh coat of food grade paint and cleaned and polished everything. These are some truly impressive people.

Above: The apple pressing equipment at Saint Francis Hermitage

Between the 2,000 gallons from the Hermitage, the apples we picked, a lot of juice we got from Door County this year, and apples we bought from a couple other local orchards (especially Munchkey Apples) we were still able to get the juice we needed in this otherwise crappy apple year.

I am sure we could have bought in some apples from out of state if we were desperate, but to us the big commodity supply chains just don’t have the same richness of soul that local food does. In this case, an uncommon partnership breathed new life into underutilized resources so that we could make the most out of a lean apple year.

We can now rest easy knowing that our cider will still have soul.