Tag: cider

Got Apples?

MORP Seeks Apples to Buy

Do you have ripe apples that meet the criteria below? If so, please let Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project know! We are using the apples for pasteurized juice boxes so health regulations apply.

For Apples that YOU pick:
  • Harvest from tree or shake onto clean tarp. No ground falls allowed.
  •  Apples must be clean – free of dirt, manure, leaves, twigs, or rot, and harvested into clean boxes or crates (see our Harvest Lending Supplies). Do not harvest where there is fresh manure and livestock. Follow GAP practices.
  • We will pay $10/bushel for quantities of 20 bushels or more that you pick and deliver to the Orchard Hub (see directions below) per season. For quantities less than 20 bushels we will gratefully accept donations.
For Apples that WE Pick:
  • Reach out to us if you have an estimated crop of 20 bushels or more and have an orchard that is free from livestock and fresh manure. Please rotate livestock out of orchard well ahead of harvest season.
  • MORP will pay $4/bushel for apples that we pick that meet the health regulations described in the YOU pick section above. We are limited on the number of orchards that we can pick per season so reach out to us as soon as you know you have a crop for an increased opportunity to schedule your orchard in.
Community Juicing Day

Bring your apples and let us turn them into juice on Community Juicing Day! Or do you simply want to purchase juice and do not necessarily have apples to bring? Either way, please join us at the Orchard Hub! 

Mobile Juicing Service

Have 20 bushels of apples or more? Consider scheduling our mobile juicing service.

Harvest Lending Supplies

Do you need crates or bins to more easily participate in any of the above activities? Please go here to reserve supplies. Our harvest lending supplies program is made possible with support from the LOR Foundation.

Directions to Orchard Hub

Directions to Orchard Hub:  13729 Road 29, Dolores, Colorado : THIRD and FOURTH DRIVEWAYs ON THE WEST SIDE OF ROAD NORTH OF SOUTHWEST SEED. Please schedule in advance or visit during scheduled event.

Contact

morp@montezumaorchard.org

Burn Them! A Myth of Cider, Orchards, and Prohibition

BY ADALYN SCHUENEMEYER

This article was first published in Issue 11 / 2020 of Malus, a quarterly print journal featuring bittersharp criticism and commentary by America’s great cider thinkers. Subscribe today.

Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project (MORP) has worked for over a decade to document and map the apple and orchard history in Colorado, to identify and propagate unique heritage apple varieties and to help farmers in southwest Colorado care for and benefit from their existing historic apple trees. We have been searching to find original sources that document orchards being destroyed or replaced due to local or national prohibition laws or the temperance movement, a myth often repeated in respected publications. To date, we have not found any direct accounts. Yet, the recounting of this urban legend has risen in popularity over the past several decades, even here in Colorado where orchards never were planted specifically for cider in the first place. There are many reasons for the loss of orchards, decline in diversity, and cider’s fall from popularity, but national Prohibition and the events leading up to it are not one of them.

As part of our research, we contacted a handful of well known cider and apple historians to get their input including Ben Watson, author of Cider Sweet and Hard, (1999), Dan Bussey, author of The Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada, (2016), Tom Brown (applesearch.org), David Benscoter of The Lost Apple Project, and Professor William Kerrigan, author of Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History (2012).

“The oft-repeated example of the unnamed orchardist who took an axe to his trees in a fit of Temperance fervor is, even if true, an isolated example,” wrote Mr. Watson. “And the fact that cider, like wine, doesn’t require boiling like beer (or moonshine) made it very easy for people in rural areas to keep making cider under the radar; unless your neighbors dropped a dime on you, no one was going around trying to eradicate cider.”

When asking writers that have contributed to this urban legend about their sources we are invariably lead back to Michael Pollan and his book Botany of Desire (2001) where he writes “Just about the only reason to plant an orchard of the sort of seedling apples John Chapman [Johnny Appleseed] had for sale would have been for its intoxicating harvest of drink. . . . . Eventually they [temperance advocates] would attack cider directly and launch their campaign to chop down apple trees.”

William Kerrigan wrote about this myth back in 2014 on his blog American Orchard in a post titled “The Fall and Rise of Hard Cider”. In another post “The War On the Cider Apple”, he notes, “By 1829, at least a few farmers had taken the advice of “burn them” to heart. One report in several journals told of a New Haven, CT gentleman who “ordered a fine apple orchard to be cut down” because the fruit may be converted into an article to promote intemperance”. When we contacted Prof. Kerrigan about his sources he replied,

“Perhaps there was one crazy guy out there in the pre-tractor age who expended the extraordinary energy to pull up/destroy/burn an orchard full of live trees because they believed alcohol was evil, or perhaps the story was made up entirely by someone who wanted to characterize Temperance advocates as fanatics. In either case, it is exactly the kind of story people repeat, so it is quite possible that one example of this was retold until folks thought it was widespread. I think even Thoreau mentions it in his essay Wild Apples, but again it is quite non-specific. I think the “Burn Them” article [originally in The Religious Intelligencer, Oct. 1827] is a good example of how these stories spread, as it was reprinted in numerous journals.“
PHENIX GAZETTE, JULY 10, 1829
Another part of this myth includes the narrative that the temperance movement led to the conversion of cider orchards to fresh eating varieties and to the destruction of supposedly cider-specific orchards planted by Johnny Appleseed. The primary reason most orchards were planted in the first place was for multi-purpose homestead use (including cider) or for the fancy fruit commodity market, but not solely for cider. “In his effort to subvert the popular, wholesome image of John “Appleseed” Chapman and portray him as a corrupter, he [Michael Pollan] essentially declared that the seedlings he planted had no other use than production of alcohol. It was an appealingly amusing story. It just was such an oversimplification,” added Prof. Kerrigan.

We at MORP recognize that prohibition laws, put in place in Colorado in 1916 and nationally in 1920, did effect all alcohol production. However, a major reason that commercial production of hard cider was not part of Colorado’s founding history was due to the development of the grain-based beer brewing industry. German immigrants were transforming America into a beer-drinking nation years before Colorado became a territory. As Mr. Brown shared with us, “Hard cider is something people are reviving now. Of all the thousands of older people I talked to [in the South] not a single one mentioned hard cider.” Agreeing, Mr. Bussey wrote, “I’d like to concur that hard cider just wasn’t a “thing” commercially, and though it existed on a very small scale, it wasn’t a driving force as to the varieties grown. Beer and spirits were king as grain cultivation [in the Midwest and West] began early after settlement.”

What About Them Apples?

As to particular apple varieties falling in or out of favor, the people we’ve consulted support our conclusions that apple diversity declined for many reasons other than the temperance movement. One driving force was the recommendation by experts for farmers to turn to monocultural practices. According to Mr. Benscoter, “I have looked at a lot of newspapers from the early 1900s in eastern Washington State, and I have yet to find one that mentions hard cider, [although t]here is documentation right now for over 250 apple varieties [non-cider specific] in eastern Washington and northern Idaho in the late 1800s and 1900s.” Dan Bussey added, “The list of the apples to discard from cultivation was part of a concerted effort in many states, generally for the purposes of having as few as seven mainstay varieties to offer to the public as a larger number was thought to be confusing. It was all about marketing. Sad to think that many of the varieties are better than most of the apples you find today.” To which Mr. Benscoter replied, “It’s not surprising; quite a few lost [and documented from the period] varieties are on the list.” MORP’s own list of apples grown historically in Colorado includes over 400 varieties, 50% of which are considered lost.

In America, fermented cider was a micro-industry, primarily in the east, using available orchard apples. By the 1880s, most apples in the United States were grown for eating, whether baked, dried, sauced, or fresh. Any excess crop was used for livestock feed, cider (soft and hard), or vinegar. Most of these were multi purpose apples, though a few, such as Harrison and Hewe’s Crab, developed reputations for making great cider. Vinegar was a particularly valuable product. “Cider vinegar (an indispensable product for preserving, cleaning, etc.),” wrote Mr. Watson, “requires that one ferment apple juice as the precursor to vinegar, and it makes even less sense to think that [hard] cider could disappear entirely as a homestead product. Much less that orchardists as a whole would actually chop down their trees. More common was the population shift to the new lands of the West. In Nelson, NH (a town of 500-600 people near where I live), the population in the 1860s was twice what it is today. That’s because farmers moved to less stony and more fertile lands in the Midwest and West after the Civil War.”

Disappearing Orchards

So, if not temperance beliefs or prohibition laws, what were the causes of orchards being razed to the ground, in other words, completely destroyed? A search of the digitized newspapers available at the US Library of Congress website showed that by far the number one reason orchards were razed, destroyed, or “grubbed out” was tornados, followed in no particular order, by wind storms in general, accidental fire, flood, development, cyclones, hurricanes, hail, war, dust storms, codling moth control (kill the orchard to kill the moth), fruit inspector orders, pests, and general spite or vandalism. Also, low productivity, disease, pest damage, or old age of orchard causing the owner to pick up an axe or torch.

With the rise of industrialized agriculture, most of Colorado’s fruit industry was unable to compete on economy of scale. Despite the genetic diversity of our area’s first orchards, within 20 years, by 1910, local orchardists were turning to commodity crops realizing that a boxcar of shiny red apples sold better than one of mixed varieties. Prohibition and the temperance movement in general did not effect Colorado’s fruit industry in regards to either varieties selected or eliminated, or to its rise or decline. We invite you to do similar research where you live. If you find differently, please let us know!

We must, we conclude, respectfully disagree with Michael Pollan’s belief that, “Carry Nation’s hatchet, it seems, was meant not just for saloon doors but for chopping down the very apple trees John Chapman had planted by the millions.” Instead, please raise a glass of your favorite cider and give “cheers” to all the women who today are playing a leading role in the resurgence of hard cider.

Mobile Cider Press Pilot

For the first time since Mountain Sun Juice closed its Dolores doors 14 years ago, local apple juice shipped out of Montezuma County in October, 2016. Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project produced and sold 2,200 gallons of Montezuma Valley Heritage Blend raw apple juice to hard cider makers in Denver, Boulder and Cortez. MORP used proceeds to purchase local heirloom apples, engage Montana’s NW Mobile Juicing, lease cold storage and processing facilities, ship juice and coordinate the project. Funded in part by a recently awarded USDA Local Food Promotion Program grant, MORP undertook this project to evaluate whether mobile juicing can help fruit growers reach juice markets. With the preponderance of juice apples in our orchards, market opportunity exists not only for hard cider, but for our fresh juice as well. Wouldn’t it be great if local apple juice could again be available in our own community?

In order for Ryal Schallenberger of Montana’s Northwest Mobile Juicing to bring his mobile juice press to Montezuma County, MORP needed to guarantee we would have 800 bushels of apples to press. Knowing there was a bumper crop on the trees, and that one orchard alone could produce 800 bushels, we said sure; and when Ryal set a date in mid-October, a 12-day crash-course on juice manufacturing ensued.

MORP set a goal to pick 100 bushels a day. After our first day yielded 20 bushels, albeit with only three pickers, we got nervous. MORP put out a call to pay fruit-growers for picked and delivered apples, volunteer picking crews were organized and seven orchard owners opened their gates to mostly complete strangers. Over the course of eight days, 32 volunteers and four orchard owners picked, shook, and packed 32,000 pounds of apples. Over and over we heard old-timers recount, “on a good day, so-and-so could hand-pick 100 bushels”. We were humbled by our fruit-growing pioneers.

Picking apples was one thing. What about selling juice? How would we price juice in a market ranging from $1.50 to $9.00/gallon? Where exactly does one put 800 bushels of apples and how do they get there? Furthermore, how do we move a tote of juice weighing 2,600 pounds, and how do we get six of them to Denver? Thanks to years of getting to know old orchards, their people, and folks in the cider business, we knew who to ask. The juice sold out, and box-by-box, MORP purchased and borrowed wooden fruit crates, 20-bushel bins and milk crates. We borrowed trucks, trailers, barns, rented a loader and leased a forklift, tractor, warehouse and cold storage from Russell Vineyards to finish the job. Well, almost. There was still that question of getting 10,400 pounds of juice to Denver, after numerous unsuccessful attempts at sourcing a refrigerated truck. But as luck would have it, Lang Livestock had just purchased a truck from our friends at Geisinger Feed. They shipped the juice on an open-air flatbed at night to keep it cool. How happy we were envisioning a 75’ Kenworth semi delivering Montezuma Valley Heritage Blend apple juice in downtown Denver early the next morning. Next time, we envision the truck being full.

MORP is grateful for everyone’s generosity and confidence, and the true community effort it took to accomplish this project. Let us do it again!

Completed Needs Assessment to study feasibility of MORP purchasing a mobile press for use in our heritage orchards:

CapLog - MORP - Needs Assessment - Final - Updated Jan 17 http://montezumaorchard.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CapLog-MORP-Needs-Assessment-Final-Updated-Jan-17.pdf

 

 

mobile press

MORP Old-Fashioned Newsletter, Fall 2016

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Harvest Fest & Orchard Social, Oct 8, 2016

JOIN US on October 8 from 10 to 4! Sign up to attend one of the hard cider tastings (1 or 2 p) at the FREE Orchard Social by pre paying at our Paypal Button at our website – with cider tasting and time – in the memo line, $15 members, $20 non-members; or send us an email to get on the list: morp@montezumaorchard.org 

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