Cider Mill thrives despite apple squeeze
Thanks to spring’s weird weather, it was slim pickings in northern apple orchards this past fall, and that meant Cold Hollow Cider Mill had to pay double for its apples, which in turn forced the business to nearly double the price it charges for its signature product: cider.
One would guess Cold Hollow lost some customers after the $7, or so, sticker began appearing on its gallon jugs. The mill might have recouped by pricing its cider even higher, but there is, after all, only so much consumers can abide.
“We chose to eat margin,” says Paul Brown, 55, who with his wife Gayle, 51, have owned Cold Hollow for a dozen years.
Fortunately, their business, one of Central Vermont’s most popular tourist attractions, located on Route 100, is buoyed by its trademark array of other Vermont products that are sold right alongside the cider.
In the nooks and crannies of two sprawling buildings, one a reconstructed dairy barn, are such goods as: Johnson Woolen Mills jackets, honey from Franklin County, maple syrup from three suppliers, Vermont coffees, Warren Kimble folk art and Bove’s Marinara Sauce. Then there’s Cold Hollow’s own line of apple jellies and butters; apple-flavored barbecue sauces, mustards and other condiments, plus freshly baked apple pies ($13.95).
And recently Cold Hollow has added new attractions, including the “Apple Core Luncheonette” that opened in July and that serves gourmet sandwiches, soups and salads in a relaxed and rustic setting; and a renovated bakery, with its antique counter and pie racks. It features dining tables so customers can enjoy all kinds of treats, including the Hollow’s renowned cider doughnuts, which Gourmet magazine in 2000 declared to be among America’s best.
And, finally, there’s the string of solar panels installed this past fall out back, panels that Paul thinks might some day rival the cider press itself as a tourist curiosity.
“We will call it the ‘Solar Orchard,’” Paul says of the panels that generate power for the New England electric grid and that will reduce Cider Hollow’s electric bills from Green Mountain Power by 5 percent. Paul talks of constructing a footbridge through the solar field and putting up interpretive signs explaining the benefits and science of solar power.
“It would blend old with new,” he says of any juxtaposition of 21st century technology with the mill’s old “rack and cloth” press that crushes some 40,000 pounds of apples on a busy a day.
Visitors can see the process of cider making through a window in the newly painted viewing room. Its walls and others in the building have illustrations and written factoids meant to answer questions any curious visitor might have.
Wonder, for example, how many McIntosh apples are needed to make a gallon of cider? Answer: 36.
The weather that whacked the orchardists of the northern Midwest and Ontario this spring was unusual, according to Paul. It involved a March and early-April hot spell, sunshine and 80-degree temperatures, that brought out the buds. The hot spell was followed by a cold snap that froze and killed those buds.
As Paul explains, Cold Hollow’s suppliers in the Champlain Valley of Vermont and in Chazy and Peru, N.Y., were largely spared, but with the national apple shortage these suppliers, who found their apples in big demand, were able to raise their prices. “They are loyal to us but not so loyal they will give last year’s pricing,” Paul says with a verbal shrug.
Over coffee and a panini, Gayle explains that the luncheonette was largely her idea (confirmed by Paul), and that she hopes it will attract a noon crowd from the new Green Mountain Coffee Roasters operation, and other businesses, within walking distance of the mill.
“Some 50 people have been working there since last month, and we hear there might soon be 150,” she says enthusiastically.
The couple also hopes the luncheonette will attract shoppers, especially locals, who account for only about 10 percent of Cold Hollow’s retail business.
Gayle credits Sue Grant, who is known in the area for her culinary prowess, with developing the recipes for the sandwiches and the salads featuring organic greens from Pete’s Greens. But she’ll take some credit herself.
“I am a mad scientist,” she says with a laugh, though she studied geology not culinary arts when a student at the University of Vermont. She says she occasionally subjects friends at dinner parties to her culinary experiments.
She adds: “My vision is to use all the products that we make at the mill, and to wrap them all up into what we do here in the luncheonette.”
After lunch, Gayle takes a visitor on a tour through the mill: past the bakery; along the condiment aisle; past a glassed-in beehive, which she uses to call attention to the environmental and genetic threat to the honeybee, which in turn is seen as a threat to orchardists and other growers, and into the cider viewing room.
Then it’s off to the apple storage room; outside to spot where the pomice is stored in bins to be picked up by a farmer for pig feed; into the mail-order room, which handles about 10 percent of Cold Hollow’s business and finally to a location back in the barn building, where Paul is packing plastic bags with freshly popped, organic, maple-flavored popcorn.
“Did I mention it’s unsalted?” asks Paul.
Paul describes the couple’s business as an “agritainment” center, a destination like a number of others in Vermont where visitors come (in fall, by the tour-bus load) to buy Vermont products while learning how they are made.
Take, for example, an eight-ounce jar of cider jelly, which, if a customer were paying attention to a wall illustration would know “has the flavor of 24 McIntosh apples packed inside.”
Gayle imagines some day producing calvados, which Paul doesn’t exactly rule out, though he says it would require new expertise, equipment and permits.
Gayle also imagines some day making cakes of the pomice — the apple skins and seeds and cores — and marketing them as horse treats. Before that can happen, though, she will have to persuade the orchardists to use biodegradable stickers on their apples.
And she doesn’t rule that out.
Dirk Van Susteren of Calais is a freelance writer and editor.
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