♪♪ [George Naylor] My son graduated from college in 2013 and he and his friends came up to visit the farm and they were having all kinds of fun.

And there were apples on the trees and my son said, well we ought to make hard cider.

And he built a little press and a grinder and sure enough we made hard cider.

Then he said well we ought to plant some more trees.

I wasn't going to get in the way of him coming back to the farm.

So, we planted a bunch of trees with the idea of making hard cider from these special apple varieties.

♪♪ [George Naylor] It's been an adventure and that's why we've called our orchard Excellent Adventure Orchard.

♪♪ [Patti Naylor] That was the beginning of it.

Why not do something more?

We've got this land.

The orchard that is right over here right now that was planted in 2014, in 2013 that was soybeans.

Adding something more down to Earth, something perennial, an orchard, is really something that was like yeah, we need to do this.

♪♪ (tractor engine starts) [George Naylor] Having the cider orchard has been an adventure, partly because most businesses you start out with a business plan and you make a big investment.

Well, our business plan is that we have done this by the seat of our pants on a shoestring.

And so, we haven't mortgaged the farm in order to set this up.

♪♪ [George Naylor] People will be appalled when they see that.

♪♪ [George Naylor] One thing people need to realize is this was all prairie out here.

We're out in the middle of flat prairie in what is called the Des Moines Lobe of Iowa where the ground is flat.

And so not very many people would plant an orchard out on this kind of land.

The wind is incredible.

And our trees tend to lean to the north.

Planting an orchard out on the prairie wouldn't make sense to very many people.

So, we're bucking the tide there too.

♪♪ [Patti Naylor] We are certified organic, which means that we follow the National Organic program.

We have to show what we're doing, we really are doing it, what we say that we're doing we're doing.

And so, all of that has to be documented.

And it's something of a burden, but I think it's really good for us to do that.

And if you have your system set up well it goes very smoothly.

It's just that you have to remember to write a lot of things down.

[George Naylor] Here, do you want this one instead?

[Patti Naylor] No.

This is one set for me.

Oh, you're right, that is mine.

(laughter) ♪♪ [George Naylor] We have to pick the apples and because there's so many different varieties they mature at a different time of the season, starting at the end of August and then all the way through November.

And so, we have to be aware of what's getting ripe and pick the apples.

When I planted a lot of these trees nobody knew for sure if these kinds of apple trees would grow in Iowa because they come from England and France.

But we have a lot of varieties of cider apples and they are categorized as bitter sweet, bitter sharp, sharp and sweet.

And so, the bitterness is something in these special kinds of apples that add a dimension to the taste and mouth feel of the cider.

They generally have French names.

Some of those are called Amere de Berthcourt, Reine des Pommes, then there's Ellis Bitter that comes from England, Kerr Crab and Dolgo Crab.

These all add a special dimension to the cider.

So, that is part of the art of it is to figure out what's the good blend.

♪♪ [George Naylor] And I want to emphasize I have support from all of my neighbors.

♪♪ ♪♪ [George Naylor] And when we know we have enough apples of the kind we want, we will put them through a grinder and then put them through a press that squeezes out the juice.

(apples going through grinder) ♪♪ [George Naylor] So, then we have five-gallon buckets of juice that we experiment with.

We have done this incrementally to make cider in small batches and kind of experiment with the different kinds of apples and different kinds of yeast.

I made cider in five-gallon buckets and maybe I'll end up with 20 gallons or 25 gallons in a season.

We have friends come over and try it out.

That's about as far as we go.

But that's an adventure to try to learn how to make a good cider.

♪♪ [George Naylor] I guess there's something special about drinking something that you've made yourself and it reflects the kind of artistry that went into making it, I guess.

[Patti Naylor] This is what a farm can be and should be.

It's really an example I think of some possibilities, real possibilities of what we can do on the Iowa landscape.

It doesn't all have to be corn and soybeans.

We can have a lot of stuff out here.

♪♪ [Patti Naylor] George and I work together on this.

It's something we can go out and work together, sometimes we work separately, but depending on the jobs that need to be done.

But it really is something that we can do together and that is really an important aspect of it, something we can do together in the years to come too.

♪♪ [George Naylor] I guess I can say yeah, this is good cider, if I do say myself.

♪♪ [Patti Naylor] Good job, George.

Should we try it?

♪♪