Apple cider is just as important part of the autumn here as a pumpkin pie and Halloween decorations are. People know the best cider mills and apple orchards just like Estonians know their mushroom forests. The only difference is that the information about cider mills is shared freely and not kept as secret like they do in Estonia, where the locations are not disclosed to even close relatives until one can’t get there on their own anymore.
In the early times, apple cider created some confusion for me, because in Estonia a cider is a light alcoholic beverage by default. Here, however, it turned out that it was just freshly squeezed apple juice. Why one gets juice while squeezing an orange, but cider while pressing an apple, I still find baffling.
But where I wanted to get with this long intro was that cider mills are not just farms where you can buy a few bottles of juice, oh, sorry cider, but they also sell donuts, apple butter, apple jam and hot apple cider. In fancier places there are also pumpkin fields, exhibitions and corn mazes.
In addition to the great cider confusion, there is a great apple butter frustration in my household now. I had seen the mentioned product in various stores and always imagined something nice and creamy with fresh apple taste. Kind of like lemon curd. It turned out that it was just apple jam with Christmas spices.
The first cider mill we visited was small and only cider, donuts, jams and spices were available. But. They had an ATM hidden behind another barn door. The second one was already more upscale, offering both hot and cold cider, various jams, dozens of donuts and pastries, pumpkins, the opportunity to take a picture with pumpkins, a corn maze and a pumpkin field. In addition, there was such a huge pumpkin, next to which all the specimens shown at the Paunvere exhibition would fade.
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