Wisconsin Life

>> One tree at a time. Planting a field for the future, yeah, yeah. They just got to get in there right, you know. Gotta get the right start. Thank you. My masters in agronomy is in soil fertility. It's that lovely limestone soil. We met when I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. >> Ready to go? >> Yup. John asked if I'd ever thought about having a farm. >> I didn't grow up on a farm, but I grew up around my grandfather's farm a little bit, and for some reason I just always thought it'd be a fun thing to have a farm. >> It's all right. We'll fix it, John. >> We bought this land because we loved it, not knowing what we would do with it. >> Nobody had lived on this land for 50-plus years, and there was wild apple trees everywhere, so we just thought, well, let's just go with that. >> We have about our 3,500 trees planted probably on about eight acres. This tree's got to go there. 2003 was when we got around to the notion of, well, we would like to grow apples and make real cider. We're almost out here. So, we're just waitin' for more trees. >> If we would have known any less about cider or about raising apples, we really couldn't have been considered adults. >> We wanted to do true cider apples, but you can't go buy those.

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So that meant we would need to learn to graft, to make our own, our own apples. >> We've picked a niche. We've chosen to kind of do these true cider apples as opposed to making a product out of table apples. And it's been fun, but it's been the hard road, there's no question about it. >> This is obviously a fantastic time of the year. Yeah, let's see how the little guys are doin'. I don't want this tree to worry about giving us apples this year. I focus more on the biology, and John will work more on some of the repair issues, the engineering, you might say. So I break the tractor and he fixes it. >> I've always worked in technology projects. And this is a start-up project. >> We never talked about it as a retirement project. It was always, we wanted to do a farm-based business together and the sooner we can get to that, the better. >> So this is something that you should start as a young person, not later in life. >> When we got our first small crop in 2011 I'm literally walking around the orchard in July looking at what's on the trees and having to guesstimate how many bushels is this going to be. Our first product has actually been an apple brandy. We choose to age it for two years in charred bourbon barrels with wild apple wood from our farm. >> These are apples that have been bred to make alcoholic beverages out of. >> Tremlets Bitter, it's known as an English bittersweet, and it is known for its tannins. >> These apples that have acids and tannins and complexity to them in order to survive fermentation, add complexity to the finished product. >> So then it is very exciting to finally have something come into production and start giving you its bounty, which you went through all that trouble for. But they're very ripe so they're just coming right off. Ripe is what we want. We want full sugar, full flavors. >> It's been rewarding to see this kind of evolve over the ten years that we've been here. >> The fall, September, October are my favorite months, 'cause it's literally the fruits of your labors. And then when the apples come off the trees I kind of miss them. Because it was so pretty seeing all those little red orbs on the trees. We have a bumper crop of our Priscilla apples so we've been grabbing every container we can find. They go up the elevator and keep getting rinsed as they go and then into the hammermill. It's quite a mill. You can see it really pulverizes them to almost a fine applesauce. That's the secret to getting a lot of juice. You really want that finely pulverized apple. Then it gets pumped into the squeezebox press. All right. I think she's full-up. When you press apples you get apple juice, just like when you press oranges you get orange juice, but when you ferment it with wine yeast, you get cider. So it's more like a beer in terms of its alcohol content. But it's made like a wine. Since at prohibition they started calling apple juice cider, so then they had to come up with a term for cider so that started calling it hard cider.

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Pump in into our tanks. Tomorrow I'll be hauling it off to a freezer in Madison. Then it will be moved frozen to a winery in Illinois that will be producing our cider. Some of it will also go to our distiller to be blended with our other juices and made into our brandy. Picking every apple and hand labeling our bottles of brandy. It's a very truly hand crafted product. >> When we started this, we had the sense that cider was going to expand in this country. We really had no idea it would expand as dramatically as it has. >> The crop farmer that rents some ground from us he has said to me over the years, oh, Deirdre, you keep planting apple trees. How are you every going to harvest all these? And I just said, I just can't wait to have that problem. It's just been a long time coming.