A Pressing Matter
Mountain cider from Ashe County, NC
This Friday, November 16th, in the village of Lansing, North Carolina, the Molley Chomper Cidery (165 Pine Creek Road) will celebrate the end of cider pressing for the year and simultaneously release their first cider of the fall season—Old Orchard Creek Blueberry. The Cardinal Burger Wagon will be on site with hot food and The Worthless Son-in-Laws, a band, will make music. The party starts at 6:00 pm and continues until 9:00. Lansing is 16 winding miles north of West Jefferson, NC, and if you ride another 16 miles north from Lansing, you could find yourself in Virginia, near Grayson Highlands State Park.
Molley Chomper Cidery, 165 Piney Creek Road, Lansing, NC. Photos by Donna Campbell
Donna Campbell and I recently paid a return visit to the cidery, arriving just as owners Tim and Kate Arscott were washing up the premises from a pressing of apples. It takes four months from pressing to bottling their finished products. They make especially delicious hard ciders that are subtle, bubbly, not overly sweet, and easy going down.
This season has been a spotty one for heirloom apples in this part of North Carolina because of a very late freeze on the front end of summer and the two hurricanes and excessive rain that played havoc with some orchards in September. Disappointing leaf color, I might add.
But regardless of rain or storm or frost, Molley Chomper remains loyal to the Appalachian heirloom growers who are their neighbors in North Carolina and Virginia–the closer the orchard to the cidery, the better. Since moving to Ashe in 2012, the Arscotts have worked closely with Big Horse Creek Farm, run by their friends Ron and Suzanne Joyner, who are featured in my new book, The Month of Their Ripening.
For the third time since they began this enterprise, they have also tapped into the blueberry and apple harvest at nearby Old Orchard Creek Farm, where owners Johnny Burleson and Walter Clark have a booming pick-your-own-blueberry business set high in a steep mountain bowl with old, heirloom apples sloping down below the blueberry grove toward the creek bottom. It’s a sight to behold.
Less than a decade ago the Arscotts were living the big city life in Atlanta. Tim was a successful management consultant to financial institutions, and Kate was a nonprofit fundraiser. When their first child was born, they began looking for rural property. They eventually bought their farm in Ashe County. The property already had some intriguing old apple trees. They named the place Bent Apple Farm, but soon realized they could probably not make a living growing apples, even though they have planted hundreds of trees each year since they’ve been in residence. The idea of making cider seemed much more promising. Get this, they gave up successful careers, moved to this remote holler and then figured out what to do. That is plain gutsy.
Kate Arscott in the Tasting Room at Molley Chomper
The Arscotts started experimenting in the back bedroom of their farm house, pressing cider from apples on the farm. Their first batch was called “Mountain Maelstrom,” inspired by the chill winds that blow through the holler and rattle their windows.They still make the blend today.
“I was naïve coming from Atlanta,” Kate explained. “I also wanted to raise goats. I was going to milk them, make cheese, do the whole back-to-the-land thing. Then Suzanne Joyner said, Don’t do it! Goats will eat your apples. They will escape from any enclosure and destroy whatever they can get! So Molley, our mascot, is a made-up goat.” Kate smiled and pointed to a handsome steel sign with the goat’s happy figure punched out of the metal, perhaps as if she chomped her own image in steel.
Tim continued working long distance with his consulting clients in those early years and bankrolled the start-up until last September when he finally moved full time into the cider business. His mother also retired last year and moved to Ashe County to help with their two children. This year the youngest started school.
“The pace of our lives is not much slower than it was in Atlanta,” Kate said. “But it is much more fun and fulfilling. At the beginning it was just us doing everything. Now our accounting goes to an accountant, and our employee, Nick, who is strong and can move big containers around, is learning cider making.”
Molley Chomper is already outgrowing the former library building at the Old Lansing School where they are headquartered, and the Arscotts are looking for a storage facility for their finished products. Every year they have sold out every bottle they’ve made. They now ship cider as far east as Raleigh, as far south as Charlotte, and were recently invited to sell their bubbly in the highly competitive cider market of Asheville.
All original names and consistent flavors.
The family has actually put Lansing on the foodie map. A gourmet pizza restaurant, Pie on the Mountain, is now owned and run by Kate’s brother, Matt Cordell. Following the Arscotts’ practice in their tasting room, Cordell sources products from local vendors as much as possible, including Ashe County’s Rose Mountain Butcher and Farms, Vannoy Hams, Stickboy Breads, and craft beers from New River Brewery. He also only sells soft drinks from the local Dr. Pepper bottling plant, a big employer in the county. Cordell also uses a few well-known small batch products from outside Ashe such as Allan Benton’s Bacon, from Tennessee.
This year Molley Chomper bought some 1200 bushels of apples to press. Next year Kate says they plan to double that amount and reissue a special cider made from Ashe County’s other signature crop besides Christmas trees—the pumpkin.
“This cider is made from Ashe County pumpkins without any other flavoring,” Kate explained. “It’s not like something that is made with pumpkin pie spices that make you think it’s pumpkin. We press and ferment the juice, and then keep it in bourbon barrels. We’ll release it this spring because it ends up being a very light, melon-y cider, and it was a big hit last year, so we’re upping the production. It’s an heirloom pumpkin that is specific to our cidery. People asked for more.”
“Porch Swing” is their summer cider, which I have enjoyed since my first visit more than a year ago. Then there’s “Hopped Molley,” which is made with hops. “The Dregs” is a blend from ciders still in the cellar at the end of the year. Others—"School House” and “Bent Apple”—are consistent favorites.
“We make varying amounts of each cider depending on what apples are available,” Kate said. “We press them fresh every year, and it’s the combination of apples and yeast that makes the flavor and aroma distinctive. Of course, the apples change every year. We may use 30 to 40 varieties per blend and vary the percentages according to the quality of the crop. We have learned our yeasts– how to test and taste them to make sure that our core flavors remain the same.”
The Arscotts took intensive chemistry classes from a British yeast expert who taught them how to assess the juice by sampling and blending them in beakers. They also learned how to evaluate the health of various yeasts. They now have eight large stainless storage tanks in their facility, and they pasteurize and label all the bottles in house, with the goat logo printed on every bottle.
We talked some about cider made from other fruits—the possibilities of serviceberries and persimmons–but getting quantities of some odd ingredients can be difficult. Molley Chomper has yet to bottle “Big Horse Creek” again, a signature cider they blended in their first year from Ron and Suzanne Joyner’s apples. Fingers crossed that the Joyners’ apples will have a good year in 2019. “People really loved that one.” Kate said.
If you visit Lansing for the release party, don’t miss the chocolate gravy served for breakfast in Warrensville nearby at The Whistle Stop Cafe. Chocolate gravy is not something you find just anywhere in North Carolina for breakfast. James Beard winner Ronni Lundy, the writer who gave us the book Victuals, can tell you that.