LEFT: Murphy and Anna Evans pose in front of Honey Moon Mead and Cider in Bellingham, Washington. Honey Moon opened in 2005, after Murphy’s home brewing outgrew their house.
RIGHT: The apples for CiderHead come from Bellewood Acres in Lynden, Washington. Bellewood Acres grows 1.07 million pounds of apples on 25,000 trees, says John Belisle, owner of the farm. The apples ripen throughout September and October, and take about a month and a half to pick. “With Honey Moon, we try and give them some special apples so they can make some good cider with it,” Belisle says.
Workers sort through the apples and judge the quality of each one. Apples deemed not worthy to sell fresh are separated from the ones for the store, to be turned into juice. “The pretty ones go to the store where their value is the utmost value and the ugly ones make juice,” Belisle says.
After the apples go through one last check, they are pressed into juice and sanitized. “[The worker’s] job is quite simple,” Belisle says. “He doesn’t let anything go past there that he would not eat.”
The apples go through a belt press and the juice is collected. The press makes 130 gallons of juice per hour. It takes 13 pounds of apples to make one gallon of juice. The rest of the apple is saved and fed to cows.
Belisle poses in the distillery at Bellewood Acres. Belisle and his wife moved to Lynden in 1995, planted apple trees in 1996, and started selling them in 2000. He started his business small by just selling the apples on the side of the road. “People bought the damn apples and it just kept going on from there,” Belisle says.
LEFT: Yeast is added to the juice when it arrives at Honey Moon from Bellewood Acres. Evans lets it ferment for around two weeks and condition for three months. Next it is filtered to remove the yeast and any apple material in the fresh juice. The cider is then bottled and sold.
RIGHT: CiderHead is sold in bottles, cans and kegs. Honey Moon’s raspberry cider won a silver medal and the rhubarb cider won a gold medal in the Pacific Northwest Cider Awards. The name of the cider was inspired by a biography of Abraham Lincoln that Evans read. When Lincoln ran for the state congress of Illinois, he was accused of being a cider head, meaning someone who drank a lot of cider. “I thought if Abraham Lincoln was once called a cider head, that would be a good name for our hard cider,” Evans says.
