Breakaway Classic Adventures
Breakaway Classic Adventures
A popular hard cider crawl takes us to Three Falls Cider in Castile, NY
One of the most important aspects of starting an adventure is planning your trip’s itinerary to have a healthy mix of physical activity with equal portions of rest and relaxation. Each travel destination will have its own set of local amenities offering a variety of unique and memorable après experiences. When you are part of the fly-fishing culture, one such après activity is indulging in the local spirits. Hitting the local pub or watering hole, also called a pub crawling, is a celebratory ritual - a ritual that is just as important as catching that fish that you’ve traveled countless hours to earn bragging rights on.
When fly fishing for salmon on Scotland’s River Avon, it’s almost a crime not to visit the famous Glenlivet Distillery to sample a Glencairn of their wonderful 12-year-old single malt Scottish whisky. Whisky spelled without the ‘e’ and consumed ‘neat’ and not ‘on the rocks’ since ice will ruin the taste. In the Galway Region of Ireland after fighting off those Lough Monsters, the infamous Irish Pike, it’s fitting to cap off the day by having a fine stout like a draught of Guinness, best served at room temperature at the local pub such as McSwiggans. A trip to Canada to fly fish the upper reaches of the Grand River for world-class brown trout is not complete without a visit to the Sleeman Brewery which dates back to 1834 as one of the nation’s first craft breweries. You must visit the original Sleeman Tap Room in Guelph, Ontario and quench your thirst with one of my favourites, their easy drinking Cream Ale!
Closer to home but equally as important, as all of the above-mentioned fly fishing bucket list destinations, should be a trip to WNY’s Three Falls Cider Mill in Castile, New York, located a block south of Route 39 at 29 East Park Road, just minutes away from our famous Wiscoy Creek. After a hard day of chasing wild and feisty browns and brookies, fishermen should reward themselves with a fine glass of their Bourbon Barrel Aged Cider, as hard as it gets! Three Falls Cider is named after a series of three waterfalls in nearby Letchworth State Park aptly nicknamed the ‘Grand Canyon of the East’.
Family owned and operated, Three Falls Cider mill has been a staple of the Castile community since the 1930s, and with some secret bootlegging going on during town hall meetings, the ‘Dry’ was finally taken out of the town’s description in 1984! The current owners, Pamela and Daniel Chasey, acquired the mill in 2008 and after five years of attending the CINA (Cider Institute of North America) at Cornell University, Dan became an ACA (American Cider Association) Certified Pommelier, a head Cidermaker specializing in the development and production of hard cider.
What makes their brand of hard cider different from most hard ciders that you’d find in a grocery store is that theirs is a true artisan handcrafted variety of hard cider, and as Dan calls it, ‘From Tree to Glass’. They don’t use any concentrate juices like large production companies must use to produce their large volumes to meet market demands. Three Falls Cider starts by growing their own apples, picking them and bringing them to the mill around the second week of September, when the process of extracting the juices begins.
The extraction process is quite simple. 30 bushels of apples at a time are prepared by washing them in a large vat with a conveyer taking them once bathed and scrubbed up to the slice and dicer, reducing the apples to 400 pounds of pomace. The pomace is then placed upon a large press to squeeze out all of the juices. It takes about 3 bushels of apples to make one gallon of juice. There is never any water added - again, a stark difference of cider mass produced from concentrate. Theirs is 100% gluten free juice! After pressing one load, they will get anywhere from 75 to 90 gallons of juice which then goes to the fermentation tanks where the fun of making the hard cider begins.
There is a series of five large stainless steel tanks. The first two are the fermentation tanks where yeast is added to begin the fermentation process, which lasts about three weeks. As the juice begins to turn into alcohol, the flocculation or settling of the yeast lees begins and the product is then moved to a new tank for aging, which may take from 3 to 5 months to a year, depending on the desired end product.
Three Falls Cider has some special aging processes that are unique to their brand of hard cider, making them truly handcrafted. I mentioned that you must try their Bourbon Barrel Aged Cider as this one has an alcohol content close to 7% - just short of being classified as a wine which begins at 8.5%. The cider is pumped into oaken barrels that have been secured from a whiskey distillery so that the barrels are steeped in bourbon which blends with the cider, giving it a very distinct flavor. Another special blending process that they use is to age the hard cider in bourbon barrels that were previously used by a maple syrup producer. The combination of the maple syrup and bourbon blending with the hard cider makes it sweeter and hard to beat!
The tasting room at the mill is open three days a week: Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 12:00-6:00pm. It offers a comfortable indoor seating area, but the large spacious outside deck overlooking Wolf Creek is the perfect place to relax and indulge while listening to the sounds of a babbling brook. On tap are a dozen or so blends of hard cider that the mill produces, ranging from dry to sweet and fruity with alcohol content ranging from 4.5% to 7%.
To make your visit complete, start talking fly fishing with Dan. As a member of the Houghton Fly Fishing Club, he’ll speak your language. In his spare time, mainly in the months of June and July when he’s not hard pressed to make cider, Dan is somewhere on a local trout stream looking for more well-deserved bragging rights of his own.
Indrek Kongats is an artist, traveler, outdoorsman, and business owner residing in Ellicottville. He operates River Dog Art Gallery in Houghton, NY, and his Breakaway Classic Adventures specializes in adventure travel destinations. Learn more about him at breakawayclassicadventures.com.