A juice and cider maker at the Steinbach Farmers Market is interested in your apples.

“We can’t get enough apples from Manitoba,” says Part Owner of Burwalde Juice and Dead Horse Cider Garry Wiebe. “We actually have to import apples from Ontario and BC because we just can’t get enough.”

Wiebe estimates they have already pressed 50,000 pounds of apples this year.

“What we do is custom press apples for people. So, if you have an apple tree in your backyard and don’t know what to do with it, you bring the apples to us and we’ll press them and turn them into juice and give it back to you. Or, if you don’t want the juice, we will buy the apples from you and use them to make cider.”

Wiebe, who works with “the brains behind the organization”, his son Marcus, explains how their journey to cider making started with producing pumpkins.

Wiebe says after earning a contract for 70 acres of pumpkins, the company that ordered them went bankrupt leaving the farmers unpaid. Going back to the drawing board, they decided to press apples and were busy making juice when another company came by and asked them to produce 2000 litres of juice for making hard cider with.

They provided the juice only to learn that the company had changed its mind. Wondering what to do next, it came to them that perhaps they could make the hard cider themselves. “We got our licenses, it took us about 6 months to do that, and we took the juice which had been frozen until the time we were ready to ferment, and it will be two years in December since we started.”

Wiebe says they have been pressing apples now for approximately three years and producing hard cider for over a year and a half.

Their hard cider has four flavours with almost all of the produce coming from Manitoba. “We have the apple cider. We have a cherry cider in which we use Manitoba and Saskatchewan sour cherries, and the other one is a citrus hop.”

Wiebe then mentions what he considers to be their best flavour. “We take a Kerr apple, and it has to freeze on the tree. Once that Kerr apple is frozen a couple of times, then we pick it and press it.”

The apple itself was developed at the Morden Research Station of Agriculture, is a cross between a crab-apple, Malus Dolgo, and Haralson. “It couldn’t be much more Manitoban than that.”

Wiebe says they currently looking to expand their product line by creating non-alcoholic cider and incorporating more flavours in the coming year.