This year, Soup & Cider Day will take place on Sunday, October 19, noon—2 PM at beautiful Skyline Farm on The Lane.
If you’ve been to NYHS’s annual Soup & Cider Day, you’ll remember how it goes: Kids and adults gather to pitch apples into the hopper of NYHS’s antique cider press, help turn the crank, and watch the cider flow. Meanwhile, we always get lucky with plenty of soups, breads, and desserts from the best cooks and bakers around … potluck contributions from friends and neighbors right here in town. (Interested in the history of this decades-long event? Read about it here.)
But this year, we have an exciting update: the UMO student engineers who completely refurbished the press completed their task with flying colors. Our new/old cider press will take center stage this year and it promises to yield the best and fastest cider we’ve had in years.
The students worked on the cider press for the 2024-2025 academic year, finishing up their project in April. At their final presentation before faculty and fellow students, they demonstrated how they worked to disassemble our old press, analyzed every inch of it, and figured out how to make it, well, almost brand new.
Throughout the months-long project they received additional guidance and support from North Yarmouth residents and engineers Ed Gervais and Caleb Milliken. And with contributions from Cascon of Yarmouth the students successfully gave us a cider press that will last for many years.
Our favorite part of the project? The students used steel running shoes spikes on the cider press’s bales to provide our cider press with the ultimate “chewing capacity”—meaning it will guarantee us a pretty awesome cider flow. We can’t wait to see our press in action and taste the results!
