Free Republic

There's never been a better time to eat — and cook with — American apple varieties.One day in 2004, Brooke Hazen noticed something unusual about one of his Golden Delicious apple trees. “Some people are lucky enough in their career to have their own bud mutation variety that they get to name,” says Hazen. “Out of the thousands of trees I have, one branch on one tree decided to do its own thing.” What it did was yield an apple with the typical green-yellow skin but an unusual pink patch where it faced the sun and a sweetness and fragrance...

Regional cider makers across the country are reinventing the comforting fall classic. As the director of innovation and quality for Denver's Stem Ciders, Patrick Combs prefers to think like a painter. And artists require the right medium. Every five days, the urban cidery sends a truck driver to southern Washington to retrieve freshly pressed culinary and dessert apples that will then be fermented with white wine yeast, creating what Combs calls a "blank canvas." He then fills his culinary palette with lemongrass, oolong tea, turmeric, and grapes, creating ciders evocative of rosé wine or a salted-cucumber snack. "One of our...

A Portland activist died after being hit by an SUV early Saturday near a Northeast Portland cidery and left-wing hangout, according to multiple people who knew him. Police identified Sean D. Kealiher, a 23-year-old Portland resident, as the man who was hit after leaving Cider Riot, a Couch Street gathering place for antifascists, anarchists and other leftists. Shots were fired at the car after it hit Kealiher, and the vehicle crashed into a building.

The Columbia Gorge is now home to an estimated 45 wineries, 14 breweries, 13 cideries and two distilleries — not counting dozens, probably hundreds, of home brewers. #All those brewers represent different applications of “fermentation science,” the topic of a six-part instructional series starting next month through Columbia Gorge Community College. #Local industry leaders in such disparate fields as beer, cider, wine, spirits, baking and fermented foods will describe the commonalities uniting their work, facilitated by Dr. Kevin McCabe, lab supervisor at Full Sail Brewing Co. and former microbiology professor at the college. Students will learn the principles of fermentation...

A fun thing to do for the Holidays, especially with kids, is to make paper snowflakes. I once decorated the picture windows in my office building with these, and everybody wanted to know how to make them – I guess they hadn't learned this important skill in school ;-) Searching around the web, you can find many patterns; but I like doing them free-hand, and being surprised by what comes out. Here is a ‘refresher course in paper snowflakes’, but there are many other instruction pages on the Web. Once you've got the folding of the paper down, it's all...

It's getting to be Apple Time here in the Mid-Atlantic; and the P&G email newsletter recently had a clever way of serving things in apple cups: https://www.pgeveryday.com/home-garden/crafts/article/how-to-make-apple-cupsFor the see-and-do folks, here's a video of how it's done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kke5d7qNCgMAnd to go in them, from the great 'Pick Your Own' site - Cider, which I've never made, but it doesn't look more difficult than any other simple canning; and there's also a link in the article for making fermented and hard cider ;-): http://www.pickyourown.org/applecider.htmAnd last, a very simple recipe for Apple Fritters, from Allrecipes: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/90295/moms-apple-fritters-JT

Beer is without question, like Pizza, Madonna, and fast cars, an icon of modern American culture. That the white working class American male is stereotypically referred to as "Joe Six-pack" is but one example of the dominance of beer as lower and middle- class America's preferred alcoholic beverage. But this was not always the case. 150 years ago, in the 1840s, hard cider held the position now held by beer as the preferred alcoholic beverage of the working class. But somehow, by the end of the 19th century and well before Prohibition, Cider all but disappeared in the United States....

Megan Riesz Ross Brockman and Tyler Mosher used to wake up at 7 AM to study for the GMATs. But one morning, Mosher turned to Brockman and admitted he hadn’t looked at the test materials for two weeks. “I was like, ‘me neither,’” Brockman said in a phone interview. “This was a turning point for us.” Instead of pouring their efforts into getting into business school, the two former Bates College graduates – along with another former classmate, Ben Manter – were in the midst of building Downeast Cider House, a hard cider company currently based in Waterville, ME, but...

A Maryland couple claims their orchard is now the first to sell hard cider in the state. The Frederick News-Post reports Patty Power and Robin Miller are first in Maryland to have a license to produce and sell the beverage with 5 percent to 7 percent fermented alcohol content. The couple’s Distillery Lane Ciderworks had its grand opening Saturday in Jefferson. The husband and wife planted the first apple trees on their farm in the spring of 2001. Now, they have more than 2,000 trees. For more information, visit ciderapples.com.