After long careers in food service, Mary, and business technology consulting, Tom, we decided on an unusual retirement: An apple orchard. We love to garden and grow trees and plants, and Northern Michigan is an ideal location for apples.
We also love cider, and what started as the notion “we should grow a few apple trees for cider” became 1200 bittersweet apple trees on a third of our 11 acres homestead. We grow, pick, shred and press the apples from our trees, and sell the resulting bittersweet apple juice to those who already have the necessary license to ferment the raw juice into delicious, crisp, refreshing hard cider. Let us know if this includes you!
We deliver our bittersweet apple juice to your location within 24 hours of pressing; ready to be pumped into your tank and pitched with yeast.
What’s the difference between our juice and the normal apple juice available on the market? Our juice is from trees that were cultivated over many centuries to produce an apple high in tannin and sugar, like a great wine grape, but low in acidity. Our juice can be fermented dry, yet it drinks with full bodied apple fruit aromas and flavors.
You can ferment hard cider from the same juice they sell at the cider and donut mill every fall throughout Michigan, but if we didn’t tell you it was hard cider, you might not be able to guess it was made from apples. The finish of fermented hand fruit apples is never noteworthy and often a little harsh. Bittersweet apple juice on the other hand produces a long, delicious apple finish, like biting into a tart, sweet apple fresh off the tree.