Well, there it is. When Jess was putting this year’s cider into the root cellar, she had me bring up these two jars—the last of last year’s cider stash. It’s kind of funny that our quantity of cider from last year lined up so tidily with what we produced this year, but there you are. I’m glad we didn’t run out of cider before this year’s apples were ready.

You can see from these bottles, which have sat on a shelf in the dark for a year, where the store-bought apple juice gets its look. The particulates have settled to the bottom of these jars, and what remains is probably what Tree Top and the rest of them bottle up and sell to you, O consumer, with the probable addition of 17 strange chemicals that neither you nor they nor anybody but some now-retired chemist in Jersey City knows exactly what they were for. Blech. The first time I tasted homemade cider is the last time I will ever give a second glance at the glop in the stores. The taste is out of this world. The distance between that and what is sold commercially is like the distance between a store-bought tomato and one you grew in your own soil. You look at the red things in the stores and think, “Those are tomatoes?” Homemade cider is so sharp and sweet that you never want to drink anything else.

When we serve cider we shake up the jars, restoring the original cloudy look. It’s entirely possible that those particulates are not just innocent apple pulp, but tiny bits of peel, core, seeds, and yes, even worms. The whole shebang is boiled for 15 minutes in canning, so I’m not worried about germs. (Most of our apples are clean off the tree, but I won’t swear they’re antiseptic.) And who knows, all that good honest gunk is probably what makes it taste so good. I’d rather drink cold tangy cider from apples we picked ourselves than unpronounceable chemicals from a lab in Jersey City.