October is just around the corner which means home-delivered cider will be coming soon to your doorstep!  Distillery Lane Ciderworks, located in Frederick County just outside of the town limits of historic Burkittsville, supplies all of the cider sold by SMC.  Our family-owned and operated farm specializes in growing unique apples that are perfect for cider, baking, and eating

The 2000+ trees in our orchard were custom-crafted and planted in 2002.  We selected our trees because of their extremely high consumer ratings in three important categories:  fresh eating, baking, and cider making.  You’ll find that eating a variety such as Liberty, a semi-tart, crisp variety, or baking with Bramley’s Seedling, an American classic, really does make all the difference.

Rob and Mike produce all of the cider in our just-built processing facility, which is shown on the pictures below.  The dairy receives our juice in bulk, then pasteurizes, and bottles it in ½ gallon glass bottles, which are available for home delivery.  We culture-blend our cider to balance sweetness, tartness, and acidity.  Each batch is unique because of the apples that go into the mix.  We are positive that you’ll agree that we produce some of the country’s best cider once you’ve tasted an ice-cold glass.  Our first batch of cider this season will be a blend of “Red Gravenstein” and “Bulmer’s Norman.”

Call us for information on varieties and pricing or visit our website: www.ciderapples.com

You have probably notice a change our website order interface.  This website has been a hard journey for us.  When we first launched the new site, we were flooded with phone calls and e-mails.  I believe for a week straight, we were receiving 100-200 e-mails a day, plus the phones were ringing off the hook.  although we thought that we had found all of the ordering issues, we obviously missed a lot. 

So we begin to go to work with the programmers to try to make improvements.  many changes came during the weeks that followed…. but things seem to stay the same.  some folks were getting there deliveries fine, while others were plagued with problems. 

Around the end of July, I thought that I came up with a solution to the problem.  after about a week of programming changes, that was launched.  Things defiantly got better.  Still not perfect, but better. 

So after about two weeks, I went back to the programmers, this time determined that we were going to simplify this, and make this easy to use.  Plus I was determined that we were not going to launch the new update, until I was confident that everything was working the way we wanted it, and that everything worked. 

So today is the big day.  Finally after 3-4 weeks, or discussion, programming changes and testing, the new update is released.  Overall, I think everyone will be impressed, and pleased with the new set up. 

Now when you log in, you are only dealing with one order.  if you log in before your delivery, then you are dealing with the order coming up.  if you log in after your delivery, then you are dealing with next weeks delivery.  Sounds easily enough, I hope …. 

I truly appreciate everyone’s help, business, patience, and support through this process.  I believe the worst is behinds us now and we can now turn our focus to the future…. apple cider….turkeys… and egg nog.    

At lunch today we got to talking about the crops and how truely blessed we have been this year with all the crops.  We have gotten rain at the right times, and the heat has not been as drastic as in years past, it has been a relatively “cool” summer.  It is not even September yet and the corn is already ready to chop and put away for winter feeding.  With corn you can either chop it all up and put it away as corn silage, in an upright silo or on the ground in either ag bags or in a trench silo, or you can shell it and store it as high moisture corn and let the stalks lay in the ground to help build up the soil for the next crop.  In this photo we are hauling corn silage from a farm about 4 miles from the main farm and storing it in the upright silos that sit just outside the creamery.  The tractor drivers will pull the wagons up to the unloader that sits at the bottom of the 80 foot silos, and begin unloading the silage out of the side of the wagons, the unloader will chop the pieces of silage up into even smaller pieces and shoot it straight up into the pipe leading into the top of the silo where it will be stored until it is ready to be fed to the cows this winter.