Autumn is its own bundle of joyful activities. Yes, there’s the inevitable, annual decay and dying, the flight of sun and warmth as we bolster and brace ourselves for the coming winter. But with it is the parallel joy of harvest, gathering ourselves and the literal fruits of the summer’s labors. Cooler space literally overflowing with potatoes, apples, pears. Bonfires, in the wake of the first rains, now that the dangers have passed (would those be ‘malfires’?) Pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins everywhere. Stacks of firewood. And cidering parties.

We Washingtonians are into our ciders – I’m just going to leave it at that. Never mind the uncountable hectares of apple after apple out on the eastern slope, here on the peninsula, pretty much every farm I know has more apples than they could eat, even if it were the only thing to sustain them through winter. So you dry them, you turn them to apple butter. And you cider them.

The first two of these activities are kitchen-bound and so, by nature of limited space, tend to be solitary affairs: more than one person running back and forth between the pressure cooker, food mill, mandoline and oven is bound to end in blood, burns and tears.

But cidering? Oh, cidering almost demands community: hauling the apples up, cleaning the press. Cleaning the carboys. Finding (then cleaning) the airlocks, caps and related paraphernalia. Grinding, grinding grinding. Dumping, cleaning, pressing, pressing until the wood starts making popping sounds. More grinding. Swapping catch pans, pouring, straining, swapping again. Carting off the pomace and loading up the next batch. Cidering on your own would be a long and tiresome affair. But as a cider party, the “party” part just comes naturally.

We took at least one shortcut this year, borrowing an electric grinder from our neighbor Denise. Past years have taken hours of cranking, cranking the finicky and cantankerous manual grinder; with Denise’s, we just dropped apples into the hopper and, in a spray of juice, crunched up bits of pulp spat out the bottom as fast as we could feed it.

Took us less than half an hour to go through four or five boxes of King apples from the old Swanson tree, and about the same for five more in Cortlands.  Pierce had bought up all the gloriously purple Pendragons, and juiced those separately, with Logan following with a batch or two from her own nursery.

All in all, we probably put out about 10-12 gallons of cider, minus that which got diverted to repeated and perhaps overly-enthusiastic “taste tests”. Four each of “single varietal” King and Cortland, and a gallon or two each on the Pendragon and mixed batches. Jacob has done whatever magical chemistry one does to get the fermentation started. And now, as the saying goes, we wait.