Star-Journbal Editor
The entire student body of Hillsboro Elementary School learned the secret of making great apple cider this past Friday, as children from kindergarten through fifth grade witnessed the old-time cider-making process, and were treated to an early taste of autumn.
It was a day filled with firsts. It was the first day of September, and the first varsity football game of the season.
And for most students, it was the first time they'd ever sipped real sweet cider or watched it being made (by school counselor and "He-man Apple-Masher" Mike Moran).
To make sure every student, teacher, and media representative could have a cup of his hard-pressed brew, Moran knew he would need lots of apples.
Moran and two eager elementary-aged volunteers, brothers Michael and Joseph Williams, traveled after school on Thursday to an orchard near Marion, where in about an hour they picked 60 gallons of early-season red and golden delicious apples.
The fast-paced pickers packed their smallish red and yellow apples into a dozen five-gallon plastic pails, and put them in the back of Moran's blue beater pickup, along with a couple of wash tubs and two machines that looked kind of strange and were probably very old.
Moran had borrowed an antique cider press and an apple grinder from his neighbor, just like he did the last time he treated the school to a cider-making demonstration a dozen years ago.
On Friday morning, Moran drove his truck onto the practice field east of the school and unloaded everything he needed for a cider mill.
As soon as he was ready, the school children came, grade by grade, to see how cider was made.
The third graders from Lenna Knoll and Rachael Winter's classes gathered around the wash basin filled with floating apples.
"First you have to soak the apples and you have to take out all the leaves," said Moran's helper, Michael Williams, 10, a fifth-grader in Mrs. Overstake's class.
"You have to take out the leaves and twigs because, well, would you like to eat some twigs in your apple cider?"
After the apples were washed in the tub with fresh water from a garden hose, they were put back into a plastic bucket and carried over for the next step — to be ground to a pulp in a scary-looking grinder machine.
Moran made everybody stand way back from the machine, made years ago in Vermont by grown-ups who never dreamed that one day its unprotected belt-and-pulley would be whirring and wobbling so close to this many curious pairs of eyes and precious fingers.
The grinder was made of cast iron and covered with a makeshift lid made from a plastic milk carton. Moran made everyone step back before he flipped the switch that made it start whirring again.
The grinder had rows of sharp blades inside that ate apples, cores and all, two or three at a time. The apple bits fell from a hole at the bottom of the machine and landed in the same plastic pail, filling it only partially full this time.
"You have to grind the apples before you press them," Moran explained. "If you just take an apple and tried to press it without breaking it up, you're not going to get that much juice."
The next step in the cider making process was the most interesting of all. Moran poured the apple bits into a sack about as big as a pillowcase, made of loosely woven cloth, like mesh. The bag looked like it had been made with white material, but something had happened to stain it brown.
"Anything that gets through the holes in this cloth, you'll be drinking soon," Moran said, as he put the bag into an old wooden bucket; which had a hollow tube, like a big fat drinking straw, sticking out the side.
Moran took two circles of wood and laid them inside the bucket on top of the apple sack, hiding it from view. At the top of the apple press was a big screw, which Michael and his brother began to turn. And as they did, a flat piece of metal attached to the bottom of the screw began to move downward, toward the bucket, until it touched the topmost wooden circle.
As the boys turned the screw around and around, the wood circles were pushed down harder and harder, crushing the apple bits.
A golden brown liquid began to drip from the hollow tube onto to the playground grass.
"I see cider!" someone yelled.
"Oh! Where's the bucket!" Moran exclaimed, putting it under the flow.
"Thanks you guys. We would have had cider all over the ground."
When the Williams brothers had twisted the screw as far down as they could, it was time for the "He-man Apple Masher" to go to work.
Moran took a big piece of copper pipe, wedged it to the top of the press and turned it mightily, a dozen more times around. As he twisted, cider gushed out like it was coming from a water fountain inside the school.
"Go, Mr. Moran!" someone yelled. And everybody cheered.
When Moran couldn't turn the screw any tighter and the cider ceased to flow, there was about a gallon of brown-colored cider in the bucket, which had been filled with apples minutes before.
After unscrewing the press and pulling out the wood circles, Moran pulled out the sack and opened it. The apple bits didn't look any different than before, but instead of being juicy, they were dry!
The third graders hurried but didn't push or shove, as they lined up at the cardboard table, where Mrs. Knoll was pouring the freshly-made cider into McDonald's courtesy cups. Mrs. Winter, the other teacher, was taking photographs.
The boys and girls learned that fresh apple cider was darker and cloudier than the apple juice-like cider sold at the grocery store.
"What you're getting now is like drinking milk straight from the cow, which you don't do very often anymore," Moran said.
Everybody seemed to like real apple cider, even better than apple juice, and most everybody asked if they could please have some more.
But Mr. Moran shook his head and told them he needed to make sure there were enough apples for the cider mill so the rest of the students could learn the secret for themselves:
That the secret to making great apple cider is that it always tastes better when you make it yourself
