Cider Weekend!

I marked my calendar for the annual cider weekend hosted by the head cool guy of Pika Energy Ben Polito. Cider weekend is just what it sounds like, a weekend of cider making with employees of Pika, friends and family members. This event has been going on for a number of years now and I will say they've got it down to a pretty good process that makes it fun for everyone. Ben and some of the other guys built human powered Cider making equipment that encourages everyone to have a role in the cider making process. They bought about 2000lbs of apples from nearby orchards and got to work.

The process starts with washing the apples and sorting out the rotten ones, some of them are salvageable and get the nasty bits cut off of them before they're thrown in the apple grinder. The apple grinder is powered by two bicyclists that spin a cutting wheel. One person chucks apples into this hopper and other person forces the apples down into the cutting wheel where they are basically turned into mush and spat into a bucket. I grabbed a video of this process in action. I found the bicycling surprisingly leisurely, especially with two people pedaling. The cutting wheel can get going pretty fast (almost too fast) but it makes you feel like you're doing something physical and making delicious cider at the same time.

After the bucket is filled with obliterated apple mush, it is brought to the human powered cider press. They take huge scoops of the apple mush and wrap it in fabric (bedsheets basically) and use a wooden form to get it all square. Stacking many of these sheets and putting wooden grates between them allows you to press a whole bunch of apple mush at one time. Of course then you need a sizable press to get the juice out. Someone did some math or something and figured out that a bicycle with a flywheel could spin up a hydraulic pump enough to create sufficient pressure to support this kind of activity. It looks something like this.

10 Year old kids love manual labor!

Note the stream of cider gushing out of the press and into a metal pot. We had a small crew of folks collecting cider in pots and funneling it into smaller containers. You can actually drink the cider right out of the press which is pretty badass. They keep a good portion of the cider for fermenting into hard cider for next year. All said and down we produced about 187 gallons of cider and were struggling to find containers to it all in. Here is a picture of the small containers, this doesn't include the 6 carboys and maybe 5 plastic equally sized containers. This is a lot of liquid!

One of these was an empty Moxie bottle... how much more Maine can you get?!

Bottled hard cider, not all is pictured here. Total of about 6 dozen bottles.

Folks brought potluck food which was amazing and paled in comparison to my crackers and cheese, hey I'm a college kid. After the cider making we paddled around on the ocean in some kayaks and canoes for a little while. Met a bunch of MIT alum and one current student who is going to work at Makani power after he graduates this year. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about and got along very well. He actually interned at Pika the summer before I did, which was cool. We had a strong connection for being hardcore about windmills. 

Also met a couple of folks who work at Keystone Tower Systems which sounds awesome. They essentially are building equipment to manufacture huge wind turbine tower (larger than 14 ft in diameter at the base) on site so they do not have to be shipped. Moving tower components is a huge problem and is limited by how wide the roads are, typically anything over 14 feet wide can't be transported on the road for any appreciable distance. We're talking spirally welded humungous towers. These guys are eventually going to be building manufacturing equipment that will weld three inch thick steel piece by piece into an enormous structure. Pretty mind blowing stuff really. All of these guys work out of  Greentown Labs which seems to be where a bunch of the cool kids in Boston hang around. One of Pika's employees has a desk there too. 

Anyways, I got a couple jugs of cider (both hard and not so hard) to take up to Milford with me. Got some words of wisdom on my senior project from a co-worker too. Also, stole my mothers car and left the two-door caddy home because the ABS light is on and the engine is skipping and has been for several weeks. I have convinced my folks that it is time for a new ride, so we started car shopping a bit today. Checked out a 2005 subaru forester with 105k miles for $6500, pretty clean car too. Loads of room in those things but they aren't the most stylish car ever built, definitely practical though. Let the car shopping begin! 

I leave you with a scene of myself in 30 years....