PRESSING APPLE ISSUE
The golden rod is yellow, the leaves are falling, and the cider presses are hard at work.
At Harvest View Farm, 143 Eagle Mill Road, Connoquenessing Township, the 1880s vintage Boomer & Boschert No. 2 screw press is busy squeezing apples and the fruit brought in by customers for hours every Saturday at Ken Metrick's farm.
And outside Harmony in Lancaster Township, Tom and Sally Davis, owners of Sally's Cider Press, 465 Perry Highway, have their 125-year-old Mt. Gilead press turning apples into sweet seasonal cider in a tradition as old as the state itself.
In the past, farms across Western Pennsylvania counted cider presses as a vital piece of farm equipment. Apples were a staple crop, and families produced their own apple cider, vinegar and apple butter for their own use or for sale.
This fall as the apples ripen, Metrick and the Davises run the presses for themselves and for customers bringing their own fruit for pressing.
It's their busy season, they all said.
Metrick said, “We'll be busy now through the middle of October. The apples are ready.”
He said on Saturdays, “We start at 6:30 or 7 (a.m.); 7 to 8 we make our own cider. Then we start pressing for others. It can go to 10 a.m. to noon to 2 p.m.
Tom Davis said, “We started Sept. 7, and we probably will close around Nov. 12. In the past we pressed cider for a lot of people in the Wexford and the North Hills areas. Now all those farms are houses.”
“Most of our customers have access to an apple tree or two,” he said.
Sally's Cider Press does some large-scale pressing for Kretschmann Family Organic Farm, an 80-acre organic farm near Zelienople.
Pressing hours are 8 to 4:30 p.m. Thursdays and 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Saturdays.
Davis said it takes a four- person crew of mostly relatives and friends to work the cider press. He estimated they produce 3,000 gallons of cider a season for sale.
The Davises have run the cider business for 42 years buying it from former owner Dorothy Young when it was known as Young's Cider Press.
“We'll start around Labor Day and go until sometimes the second week in December,” Metrick said.Of this year's fruit, Metrick said, “The (apple) crop is average, not exceptional, not poor. There was no frost in the spring, and we had ample rain in the summer.”Which is good, because Metrick estimates that apples and cider accounts for 40 percent of his sales in September and October.Both cider presses work in a similar manner.Metrick, who bought the press 15 years ago, said apples are washed as they travel up a conveyor.“There's a hammer mill that chops the apples and makes a real chunky applesauce,” said Metrick. “It falls down a chute into a frame.”The chopped apples land in an nylon material blanket enclosed in a frame. The blanket is folded up around the apple mash, the frame is lifted, a plastic divider is placed on top of the blanket and the frame is lowered.Metrick said the operation is repeated until six blankets are stacked together.Then the stack is moved under the press powered by a 10-horsepower electric motor which slowly lowers, squeezing out the cider. The cider passes through a filter into a tank and then into a separate cooled tank.Metrick said one tank is set aside for client apple growers and a second tank is for cider he sells at the farm store.“A 20-bushel bin of apples yields about 40 gallons of cider,” he said. “From start to finish, we can do a stack in 20 minutes.”Metrick said he can run the cider press with three people but four is better.He charges private clients by the gallon for his cider-pressing services.“It's all people who have a small orchard in the backyard,” Metrick said of his customers.Some apples are from the 600 to 700 trees Metrick grows; some are bought from other orchards.The cider he sells is always a blend of five different apple types.The cider at Harvest View makes has no additives or preservatives, and it's not pasteurized.
Metrick said in the future he may invest in an ultraviolet light to kill microorganisms in the cider.Davis has an ultraviolet light machine. He said, “The apples go up a conveyor, go through a hammer mill that makes a mash. We collect that in cloth, that gets pushed under the press that crushes the mash.”“And then the cider goes in the Cider Sure machine that has a an ultraviolet light that is an alternative to pasteurization,” Davis said.Heat pasteurization changes the flavor of cider, while the UV light produces no heat and the light does not alter the flavor of the cider.“If you heat cider, you just turn it into apple juice. You change the texture and the taste,” said Davis.The cider goes to two tanks upstairs, Davis added, “And people outside can jug their own cider.”People pay $2.25 a gallon to have their apples converted to cider, $2.75 if they don't bring their own containers.Davis said depending on the apple variety and the size of the fruit, an 18-bushel bin will yield 60 gallons of cider. The cider is made up of a variety of apples mixed together.Not all of the apple mash goes to the production of cider.Davis said, “Some of the mash we put in five-gallon buckets. We take about 25 buckets downstairs and run the mash through a strainer that separates out the seeds and skins.”Then the strained mash is cooked in a heated vat until it turns to apple sauce.John Eberle of Connoquenessing, who has been making apple butter at Sally's Cider Press for 10 years, said the apple sauce is stored in a cooler then is reheated, stirred and cooked down to apple butter.Eberle said heating the apple sauce down to apple butter can take 11 hours.During the cook-down, sugar, cinnamon and what Eberle called secret spices are added to the mixture.
Eberle said, “When you are getting to the end of the year and it's getting pretty cold, it's still a warm place to be.”Davis said they make about 65 gallons of apple butter a year.He said the squeezed-dry apple mash is dumped in an old orchard where area farmers scoop it up for cattle and pig feed.Metrick spreads his used apple mash over his fields as fertilizer.In both places, the cider presses look to be operating for many more autumns.Metrick has run the farm for the last 26 years with his wife, Cathy.Their daughters, Amy and Laura Metrick also are involved. Amy Metrick is employed by the Penn State Extension Service, and Laura is an agricultural teacher.Davis said in two years he plans to turn it over to his son, Don, a full-time carpenter.
