Sometime between the fall of 1958 and the fall of 1962 I learned the lore of hard cider, at least as it applied to Marsh men going back three generations in my family.

We often drank apple cider in my family when it was in season. I don’t know if it was cheaper than milk or not. I’m pretty sure it was not cheaper than Kool-Aid but despite the tight food budget we stayed on for years, cider was still allowed on the grocery list when it was in season. I speculate that it was a rare indulgence of my father’s that the rest of us got to share in.

In the fall of 1958 our house was small. It was the first house my parents owned. It was just a couple of miles outside of town on a divided highway. Since then, the house and in fact, the whole highway are gone. I can point out the approximate location on a drive by, but I’m never exactly certain. Odd to think of having spent  my formative life there and not know today exactly where it was. But I remember some things with clarity.

We rarely used the front entrance to our house. There was no walkway from the dirt and gravel drive to the front porch. Instead, everyone used the back door. The driveway turned into parking places under two spreading black walnut trees where there was a short walkway my mother installed with used red brick. That led to the back door which was on a little enclosed porch. It was very small with space enough to get out of the weather and close one door behind you before you opened the kitchen door to come inside.

The milk company still delivered milk in those days. We had an aluminum-clad box in there for the milkman’s deliveries. It was insulated to keep the milk from freezing on cold winter mornings. But for about 6 weeks in the fall, that was where Dad kept the sweet apple cider too. He rationed it out slowly. His argument was that too much apple cider would give you the runs. That was probably true, but we never got to learn that life lesson on our own. His direct regulation was why.

The thing about apple cider back then was that there were never any preservatives in it. It contained fresh apple juice and that was all. It was pretty usual for cider to begin to “turn” before Dad’s parsimonious distribution ever came close to emptying the jug. Turning involved naturally existing yeasts beginning to ferment the liquid. Most of the time, that meant a little bit of alcohol in the mix, but sometimes it would be bacteria that fed off the alcohol and generated vinegar. The point was to keep the cider long enough for it to ferment a little but not so long that the “mother of vinegar” developed in the bottom of the jug and converted the hard cider to vinegar.

Dad was the one who most liked hard cider. He told me stories how his grandfather, Gary, my great-grandfather, made applejack from the apples he grew in his own small orchard. I can’t tell you how much truth there was to the story, but the way Dad told it, there were always enough details to make it believable.

Generally, to make apple cider into applejack one added brown sugar and raisins to raise the amount of fermentable sugars in the juice and then to keep oxygen and other bacterial contaminants out of the concoction, you stretched a balloon over the neck of the jug. In the morning, Dad would let the night’s build up of CO2 out of the balloon and when he came home from work in the afternoon, he would remove the balloon, take a couple of healthy swigs from the neck of the jug, declare it “not-quite-ready” and return the balloon to the neck and set it carefully on top of the milk box. The fermentation process needed the heat from the sun coming through the little window on the south side of the entryway and the storm door on the west. This was a crudely effective way to keep a ferment alive for many days.

The historical story also included a part where Dad’s grandfather used to sneak my father sips of the applejack. It was a secret he and grandpa shared. Makes a lot of sense to me now, more than 50 years after he told me the story. So I don’t know if my father liked applejack or if he liked the connection to his grandfather from many years before, but there was always a jug growing a balloon in our entryway in the fall.

There were two issues here. I knew about the “purloined sips,” and I knew the recipe. I want you to know I was never caught in this first part of the surreptitious applejack production. A kid could sneak a sip or two of applejack if his timing was right. My timing was thus: Dad got up to go to work. He released the carbon dioxide from the balloon and left. I, however, did not have to go to school until a while after that. The trick was to be the first one or the last one out to the bus stop. I would come through the breezeway, remove the balloon, tip the jug up on one shoulder, take several pulls off the sweet-bitey liquid. Then replace the liquid I drank with fresh cider from the milk box and Dad was none the wiser. The balloon filled all day while Dad was at work, when he came home he took his turn and recycled.

But eventually, he would complain that the recipe didn’t seem to be working right. He made a big production about explaining how the mixture needed more brown sugar and more raisins. He recharged the jug and I watched. That was the most powerful raw hard cider ever. I wonder how many morning classes I slept through in late autumn.

Here is the way it ended. Once, late in the season, it had gotten very cold overnight. The milk and the cider in the milk box were just fine. They were insulated from the cold, but the applejack maker was sitting on top. It froze, all but a couple of big glugs of rather clear-ish liquid in the neck of the jug. What I didn’t understand back then was that certain liquids have different freezing points. What we had in the jug was about 125 ounces of frozen apple juice, raisins and brown sugar and about three ounces of pure-ish ethanol. It is called freeze distilling and it was a technique employed by ethanol lovers for generations.

But what was a young boy to do without that information? Down the hatch! Replace the balloon and go to school. No, I didn’t get sent home from school. I just cruised through. But when I came home, the apple jack generator was gone. Dad said it had produced all it was going to, that when he sampled it when he got home it had hardly any kick to it at all and that’s when he threw it out. I didn’t tell him anything, but obviously I remembered the family recipe.

When we moved into town, we no longer had an entryway nor an aluminum-clad insulated milk box. The world was getting more modern and we didn’t have a milkman at all. I don’t remember much cider in that house, sweet, hard or otherwise.

I still make cider when I can. I have a small press and three apple trees. I also have a wife who puts up with the sticky mess it always becomes. And two grandsons who have declared Pop Pop’s Cider the best in the world, “even better than the Dexter Mill,” according to Teddy.

I made hard cider a couple of years ago, but it never tastes exactly right. I probably need to add some raisins and brown sugar. And maybe I need some kids around here to help me more often. I promise if that happens I won’t let them drink homemade apple moonshine. But if you hear me complaining about the quality of my apple cider, check Teddy. Smell his breath.