DRINK
fresh PRESSED Millstone Creek Orchards puts a cool spin on apple cider by DEBBIE MOOSE photography by BERT VANDERVEEN
M
aking good apple cider isn’t just a matter of tossing a bunch of fruit together in a press. Like blending a fine wine, the process starts with knowing your apples—which ones are sweet, which are tart, which have body—and combining them in the right balance. The folks at Millstone Creek Orchards have mastered this art, and their apple cider draws folks from all over the state. “The type of apples we use will change, 40 | WALTER
but the recipe is the same. Three kinds of apples: the sweetest available, the sourest available and a hearty apple with a thicker skin to give balance to the texture and flavor,” says Beverly Mooney. She owns the orchards, which are in Ramseur, N.C., just outside of Asheboro, about an hour from downtown Raleigh. Her favorite cider combo blends Golden Delicious for sweetness, Granny Smith for tartness and the medium-sweet Fuji for body. In the fall at Mooney’s 84-acre farm,
100 bushels of apples might go into the hydraulic press each day, becoming about 250 gallons of cider in roughly three hours. It sounds like a lot of cider, but it goes fast—to cider fans and inside the farm’s popular apple cider slushies. Mooney’s late father, Byrd Isom, started the orchard in 2001 and opened it to the public in 2004. He’d go cider-tasting in the mountains, gleaning knowledge to develop his version, including the idea to use a slushie machine to turn cider into a frozen treat. When most people
