Pressing, Canning & Drinking Apple Cider

    Here we are! 

    Before now, we have always pressed our own cider in our little press at home, but after doing some calculations we realized that my taking our apples to the press in the next town over, we actually save money because we get more juice out of our apples. Hence: Here We Are!

    We buy our apples from a local orchard by the bin because our own trees aren't baring enough to press. We used a mixture of golden-delicious and red-delicious and the cider it produced was yum-delicious :)

Before heading out to the press, I made apple muffins for us to munch on. 

They kept our hands warm too, which was nice because the apples were wet with cold dew.

I can't think of a place i would rather be than in a truck bed with hundreds of apples and my family.

    Once we get the cider home, it's a journey to get it all in jars. We've collected a lot of half gallon jars over the years and I think we now have over one hundred of them -- and we need it because we drink that much juice in a year.

    First we strain the cider and then warm it on the stove before pouring it into jars.

 See? What did I tell you? Over 100 half gallon jars!

    We can't leave the cider sitting in drums for very long because it starts to ferment really fast. So the canning often goes late into the night. It's a fun couple hours where it's just Mom and me in the kitchen after everyone else has gone to bed.

    The last step is dating all of the jars and carrying the boxes to the basement. I think carrying down the stairs is the hardest part of the whole process. Maybe it's because we're pretty tired by then. 

    In any case! Good-bye to one of my favorite events of the year.