Ideas came and went about what we were going to do with our land in Mosier. I’d written cookbooks and run a folky Americana band, but neither prepared me to write a business plan or do a P&L statement. I had written about food most of my life, and wanted to get out from behind a computer and do some actual making. For several years I worked on starting a small-scale cheese business. I spent some time as an intern on a goat farm about an hour from where we lived, making cheese

A brief detour from our backstory brings us to just now, which involves picking, grinding, and pressing our own small yield from our first (beautiful) cider apple trees. We were in Mosier all of August, but "without portfolio," which translates to we had no cider barn. We had to return to California, but our apples weren’t on our schedule. They said, “uh, we’re gonna fall off these trees if you don’t pick us.” In England they have machines that shake the trees and only the ri