Cider Presser

The valley's only cider press runs through the apple harvest, and the hard cider pays the estate's winter wages. You work the great screw-press that makes it.

The work

• Load the cheese, turn the screw, draw off, and barrel.
• Keep the pressroom sweet and the flies losing.
• Work the rotation with a crew of four through the harvest.
• Mind the barrels — the hard cider pays the winter wages.

Context

• Reports to the press boss.
• Crews of four working in rotation through the apple harvest.
• Day-rates for the season, with a generous allowance of the product.
• In-person, dawn to dusk while the apples last.

Recorded in the parish register of Sleepy Hollow, autumn of 1799.

• Strength and rhythm for press work in shifts.
• Careful with the barrels — the hard cider pays the winter wages.

Not a fit if the allowance of the product would become the point.

Seasonal arm of the Van Tassel estate: acre upon acre of pumpkins and the valley's only cider press.

Who we are

A skeleton crew of two off-season and thirty hands at the October peak. Harvest is our whole year — we press dawn to dusk and pay day-rates above any farm in the glen.

How we work

Six weeks of everything, then quiet. Crews work in rotation with a generous allowance of the product, and the last week of October is the week the whole year turns on. Losses to nocturnal pumpkin theft: recurring, unexplained, and budgeted for.

Who thrives here

Seasonal hands who can commit to the full run, frost to finish, and who would rather earn a year's margin in six weeks than a little every month.

Recorded in the parish register of Sleepy Hollow, autumn of 1799.