Sippin' Cider

Spirited email exchange with my mom, and some apple rancher's in Oak Glen. Her Aunt and Uncle used to own an apple ranch, and when she was a little girl she lived there awhile, her mom and dad working on the ranch.

She tells some great stories about the one-room school house she attended (I have seen it, but I remembered that it looked a lot like the classic little red school house in all the free Word graphics, -- only weathered gray. Turns out it was gray because it was built of local river rock. Hmmpf. ) The old school house has been made into a museum.) And of course the story of riding in an apple crate on the rollers in the packing shed is a classic, which I must have tried a dozen non-farm ways to duplicate.

A one-time family cider pressing when I was young, just after her Aunt sold the place, made a deep impression on me. I have eight apple trees on my city lot here in Pasadena, and after decades of lusting after it, a few years ago bought myself a double-tub cider press.

We don't produce enough apples for cider, we got about a bushel this year, which is great considering four of the trees were just planted this year after several years elsewhere stunted in pots (not my fault). They only produced a half dozen cider quality apples between 'em. And one of the remaining four trees either has bad grafts that have kept it stunted, or is affected by the oak tree litter from the street tree near it, and any apples that do grow on it are swiped by passers by while green anyway, 'cause the poor little tree is the one next to the street.

So we decided to go up to Oak Glen to get some apples, go crazy pressing cider, and put down five gallons for hard cider if we get that much, or just drink it ourselves for months. (For larger views, click on any picture.)

There is nothing more satisfying than raw, hand pressed cider. Whether caught in a cup straight from the prss, or mellowed a few weeks later. Mmmmmm.

Apple Picken'

The apples in our yard start and finish early, and we don't have enough trees for a good cider making quantity. So, and to get special apples for my mom, we made the trek to Oak Glen, California. An online acquaintance of nearly 15 years now has a ranch up there, and although the "u-pick" apples are all-picked for now, there are still apples to be had.

We tried to make arrangements to meet at the back of the Riley ranch to glean the last of the crop and pick up several bushels of windfalls -- generally sound apples that have dropped off the tree. Alas, we came up the dusty back road, as did a van full of another family, but no farmer. The pickers in the field didn't know about the arrangements we'd made, so we drove back down the back road, and came around into the main part of Oak Glen.

Apples can be had several ways, here. In small fractional bushels, that wind up being $30-40 a bushel -- considerably more than the retail cost at our local produce market. Or you can go to a "u-pick" orchard, where, as the name implies, you pick the apples off the trees yourself. Unfortunately, pretty much all the "u-pick" sites were "u-picked" out. So we resorted to the third way, which was stopping and asking the price for several bushels of cider apples, what some people called seconds.

Now, cider can be pressed from ugly apples just fine. Even ones with a little rot or spot can be cut apart and the good part pressed. Hand or eating or table apples (depending on who's namin' them) are essentially perfect, and often sorted by size, so they cost a bit more.

But by asking for cider apples or seconds, we got the ugly apples at a one-half to one-quarter of the price of the pretty ones. So, we now have four bushels of apples sitting in the back yard, waiting for all the kids to be home to press cider Tuesday night.

Meanwhile, Back at the Apple Ranch

We drove the Oak Glen loop, from Riley's to Law's, with stops along the way at the Los Rios Rancho (now called Riley's Los Rios Rancho, as the Riley family has leased the place. All the apple production on the Rios Ranch is organic, which is good news. We stopped too at Snow-Line, which is where we got our good deal on seconds.

Our bushels contain local organic Fuji's, Granny Smith, Pink Lady, Rome and Jonathan. Those happen to be the varieties that "the ladies" were sorting that day, and so a box of mixed seconds was available.

We stopped in to have lunch at Law's Coffee Shop, and to my great wonderment, an old packing label was up on the wall from the ranch run by my Great-Grand Uncle Mills B. Clapp, and his wife, Lila McConnell Clapp. I asked if anyone knew where the old Clapp ranch used to be, and the ladies at the counter ran back and dragged a gray-haired but not old looking fellow in an apron covered in cooking debris. Mustard was prominently visible on the front.

Turns out, this ol' boy is Kent Colby, step-son of the founder of the ranch, and current proprietor of the coffee shop. The shop was started in about 1953, while my Gr-Gr-Aunt and Uncle were still operating. Kent, and his wife, took over the coffee shop in about 1974, and he's been at it ever since. Seem that he is the local historian too.

Kent said the ol' Clapp place was just off the Harris road, the first road on the right past the bend. The old Clapp house could be seen in the woods, he said. The property had been sold a couple of times since Lila Clapp sold it in the late 1960s or so.

Now the last time I recall going to Law's had to have been 30 or more years ago -- probably about the time Kent was taking over. Great Aunt Lila used to come up pretty much weekly for a few years. She had no children, and her only sister had one surviving son, my grandfather. He used to drive Lila up to the Glen from Riverside, in her '51 Cadillac, for lunch at Law's every week.

"Oh yes, I remember Mrs. Clapp," Kent told me. "Used to come up here every week for awhile for lunch with her chauffeur or something." Ooooboy. Granddad would have laughed to hear himself described as the chauffeur. 'Course that's what he was, for the day. But still, its quite an image of ancient Mrs. Clapp, dressed to the nines, driven up by my 6'4" construction-worker-physique grandfather.

So we chatted awhile, and he didn't have a firm grip on my mother "little Lila", but had a sort of vague recollection. Frankly, I couldn't tell if he was being polite or if he was a heck of a lot older than he looked, and he might actually have had a faint recollection of my mom's family. Hardly matters; we remember Law's, and its right where we left it.

The apple pie was of course quite tasty -- although there was a moment of surprise to be gotten over when it dawned on us that this was fresh apple pie, from apples picked a 100 yards up the hill. There was no corn-syrup sugar goo -- just sweet, good apples and a flaky crust.

Having taken Hannah Lila up to see the apple groves where Grandma Lila and Great-Great Aunt Lila pressed cider, I think we'll have to go back to Law's in the future, for no particular reason.

Meantime, I need to finish getting the cider press oiled up and cleaned off, replace the drip pan that was shipped to me in February, and get ready to squeeze off 10 or 12 gallons of cider!