Cinnamon Apple Water Kefir

Description

Growing up as a little kid in Massachusetts, we would often gather with family for holidays or long weekends to visit my grandparents where they lived in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. My grandfather had a number of apple trees, and he would relish the arrival of the apple harvest season.

Ugly, bruised, or traditionally imperfect, all shapes and sizes of unique and beautiful apples were welcome to the apple cider making party that was hosted by this forty-year-old, vinegar-scented apple cider press he kept in his garage and would clean before packing up his apple boxes and making the cider.

This mechanism included a hand-cranked, absolutely vicious-looking, metal-toothed apple grinding mechanism that would pulverize the apples between these two metal-studded spinning pieces of wood, after which the contents were funneled into mesh bags that sat in a slotted container covered with a snug wooden lid.

When mashing the apples, you could really get this thing going fast, and throw twenty apples in at a time and watch them turn into mush.

After grinding the apples, we would insert this long metal bar across the top of the press, which was attached to a gear mechanism that was designed to press the liquid out from the pulverized apples as you physically walked this metal bar in a circle around the cider press. You would continue to walk around the cider press, pushing this metal rod around the press until the wooden lid covering the mash was about two feet lower in height, where the apple mash had arrived at this dry, sloppy texture.

The unfiltered raw apple cider that came from this mash was absolutely incredible, and purely delicious. It tasted like…real apples—with their most pure, ripe, sweet, and tangy flavors extracted and reduced to a dark amber elixir that would be given out by the gallon to all who cared to drink it.

As a little kid, and as an adult, it remains a foundational food memory for me.