I love a good mural. This mural by Laura Grace welcomes visitors to the mill & tap room of Ridge Cider Company. Ridge employees burst with pride as presses in back await the bumper crop of apples now in the field. Matt, a partner, has taken to flying drones over nine orchards owned by Applequest Incorporated, sole provider of apples to Ridge. A proud map shows their locations and names, Leroy Orchards the largest of all. These orchards make Ridge Cider perhaps Michigan's only estate grown hard cider. In Fennville, Virtue Cider sources apples from orchards up and down the Lake Michigan coast. south as far as Berrien and north as far as Allegan County. In Fall, Vander Mills has apple boxes from a wide variety of growers lined up outside their crush room, different names spray painted on the gray boards.
A video shows panoramic views flying slowly over the rolling hills and ridges planted row on row with apple trees. Matt' photographs capture better shots that made me think of paintings first. His video also shows trucks of apples in boxes rolling up to the industrial building that houses the operation, and there's a jolly sequence where Jeff, tap room manager, is cleaning out the vanes of a crusher and grinning back at the camera man.
The tap room manager is a fellow always in motion. When I arrived, Jeff was washing and sanitizing all the tables with a sense of ownership, tables crafted from reclaimed wood from abandoned Newaygo Houses. This is no big deal other than this fact: Jeff looks as if he could bench four hundred pounds. You can be sure he handles his own keg when a tap runs dry. Sadly, no kegs of the juniper flavored cider remain in their cooler; it'll be a month tops before flavoring and carbonation completes.
What's better than visiting a tap room during the first year before the pressures of expansion take hold. Ridge opened in Spring of 2015, pouring cider from orchards plucked in 2014. Jeff has time to talk about cider, how the R.H.A.C. has three kinds of citrus hops or how new chilled carbonization tanks shorten carbonization to a twenty-four hour process. R.H.A.C stands for Ridge Hopped Apple Cider, and it might be months or years until a cease and desist letter comes from a small time guy band called the RHACs.
He has a full beard kept well trimmed so one can get the full effect of his beamish grin as he talks recipes. He worries at night that residual yeast might kick in late and turn a good hard cider into an apple wine. He knows when to add Larry Hasselman's honey into the RaschBerry Fruit Cider to keep honey from transforming into alcohol. Thanks to micro brewing & craft cider making, guys like Jeff at Ridge or Chad at Pigeon Hill have been freed from the need to form a guy band in order to be cool. They can talk lyrically about their brewing process instead.
The tap room has all the rural charm of a barn where neighbors meet for square dancing and line dancing socials. There's a few campy touches, a dried apple tree in the corner with a tapped trunk. It'll look better hung with Christmas ornaments. By removing alternate staves on three barrels, light shines through these oak barrels repurposed as chandeliers. A fisherman has caught incredibly large yellow bellied perch and large mouth bass. A taxidermists has mounted an assortment on driftwood structures, bragging about the fecundity of the local lakes. On one of those lakes, a lady has a cottage and she has welcomed her guests to her porch with cider from two growlers she filled up about an hour ago. She's filled the two growlers up every Friday since summer began.
A FatHead on the wall shows a beekeeper in his white top and trousers, a man with a bemused expression and a tangled wreath of gray hair. He reminds of John Lithgow or Ian McKellan with a smudge pot at ready. That's Larry Hasselman of Fremont, local supplier of honey for the aptly named Hassel Cyser, a mead with a kick well above seven percent alcohol. He supplies honey to Kentucky Fried Chicken and looks like a character from "Back to the Future" working among his bees.
Watch these walls.
I love a good mural. This mural by Laura Grace welcomes visitors to the mill & tap room of Ridge Cider Company. Ridge employees burst with pride as presses in back await the bumper crop of apples now in the field. Matt, a partner, has taken to flying drones over nine orchards owned by Applequest Incorporated, sole provider of apples to Ridge. A proud map shows their locations and names, Leroy Orchards the largest of all. These orchards make Ridge Cider perhaps Michigan's only estate grown hard cider. In Fennville, Virtue Cider sources apples from orchards up and down the Lake Michigan coast. south as far as Berrien and north as far as Allegan County. In Fall, Vander Mills has apple boxes from a wide variety of growers lined up outside their crush room, different names spray painted on the gray boards.
A video shows panoramic views flying slowly over the rolling hills and ridges planted row on row with apple trees. Matt' photographs capture better shots that made me think of paintings first. His video also shows trucks of apples in boxes rolling up to the industrial building that houses the operation, and there's a jolly sequence where Jeff, tap room manager, is cleaning out the vanes of a crusher and grinning back at the camera man.
The tap room manager is a fellow always in motion. When I arrived, Jeff was washing and sanitizing all the tables with a sense of ownership, tables crafted from reclaimed wood from abandoned Newaygo Houses. This is no big deal other than this fact: Jeff looks as if he could bench four hundred pounds. You can be sure he handles his own keg when a tap runs dry. Sadly, no kegs of the juniper flavored cider remain in their cooler; it'll be a month tops before flavoring and carbonation completes.
What's better than visiting a tap room during the first year before the pressures of expansion take hold. Ridge opened in Spring of 2015, pouring cider from orchards plucked in 2014. Jeff has time to talk about cider, how the R.H.A.C. has three kinds of citrus hops or how new chilled carbonization tanks shorten carbonization to a twenty-four hour process. R.H.A.C stands for Ridge Hopped Apple Cider, and it might be months or years until a cease and desist letter comes from a small time guy band called the RHACs.
He has a full beard kept well trimmed so one can get the full effect of his beamish grin as he talks recipes. He worries at night that residual yeast might kick in late and turn a good hard cider into an apple wine. He knows when to add Larry Hasselman's honey into the RaschBerry Fruit Cider to keep honey from transforming into alcohol. Thanks to micro brewing & craft cider making, guys like Jeff at Ridge or Chad at Pigeon Hill have been freed from the need to form a guy band in order to be cool. They can talk lyrically about their brewing process instead.
The tap room has all the rural charm of a barn where neighbors meet for square dancing and line dancing socials. There's a few campy touches, a dried apple tree in the corner with a tapped trunk. It'll look better hung with Christmas ornaments. By removing alternate staves on three barrels, light shines through these oak barrels repurposed as chandeliers. A fisherman has caught incredibly large yellow bellied perch and large mouth bass. A taxidermists has mounted an assortment on driftwood structures, bragging about the fecundity of the local lakes. On one of those lakes, a lady has a cottage and she has welcomed her guests to her porch with cider from two growlers she filled up about an hour ago. She's filled the two growlers up every Friday since summer began.
A FatHead on the wall shows a beekeeper in his white top and trousers, a man with a bemused expression and a tangled wreath of gray hair. He reminds of John Lithgow or Ian McKellan with a smudge pot at ready. That's Larry Hasselman of Fremont, local supplier of honey for the aptly named Hassel Cyser, a mead with a kick well above seven percent alcohol. He supplies honey to Kentucky Fried Chicken and looks like a character from "Back to the Future" working among his bees.
Watch these walls.
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