>> 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.
[laughter]
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.
[motor whines]
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, Dierdre,
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.