Cider

On a jaunt to Issaquah last weekend I noticed a farm store that sold cider pressed on the premises. Given that real apple cider is one of the things I miss the most about upstate New York, I pulled in on the way home. We were treated to a tasting of four different ciders. We bought a half-gallon of one made from a mixture of apple varieties grown on the farm. We also bought some ice cream. Since we were still about 20 minutes away from home, Julian wrapped the ice cream in his fleece jacket to keep it cold. Finding the cider stand was the highlight of the excursion. We’ll go back there.

It’s a mystery to me that, as many apples are grown in Washington, you have to hunt to find fresh pressed, non-alcoholic, unpasteurized cider. My first year here I asked a clerk at a (now defunct) grocery store to show me where I could find the cider. She showed me the shelf-stable, pasteurized product. FEH! You may as well drink water with a little caramel coloring added.

I asked the owner of the cider stand why I couldn’t find unpasteurized cider in grocery stores. He said it was health department regulations. He can only sell his cider on premises, even though a neighboring hotel would love to serve it. This stems from the infamous E. coli incident involving a major organic juice company. They were pressing apples dropped on the ground in a barn open to the elements, flies, and aerosolized bacteria from the nearby cow pasture. My home state of New York passed a law in 2006 mandating pasteurization of cider after an E. coli episode from a producer. This web page explains the law.

Of course, pathogens aren’t the only microbes that can grow in cider. So does yeast, which produces alcohol. The hard cider business is booming in Washington and elsewhere. Some enterprising grad students of my acquaintance pre-pasteurization law would get fresh cider from the grocery store that had passed the sell-by date and run it through the laboratory still. Voilà, apple brandy.