Features
Cider Mill returns with new treats
By Michelle Chung ’20
September 15, 2016
As many students on campus may already know, the Cider Mill, located just down the Hill, opened last Tuesday Sept. 6th. A local favorite, it was ready to satisfy the needs of hungry college students and people all around the Clinton area. The place becomes so popular that 30,000 apples are crushed every single weekend to create fresh apple squeeze, donuts, pies and dozens of other mouth-watering options. With tons of appetizing choices and such a friendly and welcoming work environment, every student should visit the Cider Mill before the season ends.
The Cider Mill has been a popular site where customers have enjoyed freshly made apple products since 1927 when it was owned by the Wentworth family. The current owners, John and Mimi Fehlner, bought the Cider Mill in 1998 before it was slated to be demolished, while their son Ben and daughter-in-law Laura began working alongside them eight years later.
In order to make their products, the Fehlners use the hydraulic press that was bought by the original owners of the Cider Mill, which customers see as soon as they walk through the door. Every batch, 3,000 apples each, is washed thoroughly in a custom machine before being taken to an apple elevator, where they travel upward to a grinder (their skin, core, seeds and stem still intact before reaching the grinder) and become applesauce. A layer of applesauce is then tightly enclosed in a cloth, and ten cloths (called a cheese) are pressed and strained to create pure, delicious apple squeeze.
While the more popular products among Hamilton College students tend to be the sweet apple squeeze and the cinnamon sugar-flavored cider donuts, the Cider Mill has much more to offer.
“We always have something new to provide,” the son of the owners, Ben Fehlner, commented. “We have new cookies every year; we have soft pretzels this year, which are new, as well as maple popcorn, which is really good. So it’s an adventure every year.”
But what truly makes the Cider Mill so special to the dozens of college students who visit every weekend and the hundreds of other individuals, families and groups in the area? Ben believes the uniqueness of the Cider Mill comes from the feelings of community that the Mill brings.
“It’s not the kind of place where you just come for the stuff. It’s where you come for the environment and the atmosphere. I love the relationship we have with Hamilton College because we see teams of people, like the field hockey team or the basketball team, every weekend. There’s also a professor who will hold classes or discussion groups on the porch every once in a while.
“For me, what makes it special is that it’s part of the community, and it has such a rich history that there’s something for everybody. You have the little kids who love to see the machinery and eat the donuts, and the older guys who remember being here when they were kids, so everybody has something they can enjoy. Rather than a commercial enterprise, the Cider Mill is a community more than anything.”
Every student should make the short walk or the even shorter drive down the Hill to experience how wonderful the products from the Cider Mill taste or to speak to one of the kind workers and ask about the food-making process (especially before the season ends).
College students experience a unique set of stressors. Many of us know the pre-exam anxiety all too well and have ground our teeth with guilt about neglecting the gym for two weeks. For perfectionists, however, these familiar stressors take on a new meaning.
Perfectionists tend to hold themselves to impossible standards—or, if not impossible, standards that can only be met with great difficulty. Often, the reward of achieving these standards is negligible compared to the depression that comes with falling short. This focus on avoiding failure is toxic.
Perfectionism strongly correlates with anxiety, eating disorders and other mental health problems, and this makes sense—any branch of life where there’s room for control is fair game for perfectionists to obsess over.
But alas! There’s a fairly simple principle that can help perfectionists curb the exhaustion of unrealistic standard-setting. This principle is the weighing of tradeoffs.
A tradeoff simply refers to the giving up of one thing in return for another. Every time we cram for an exam until 3:00 a.m. instead of getting a good night’s sleep, we trade our health for the desired outcome of a better exam score.
When struggling to decide between attending a social event and spending the afternoon in the library, we face a tradeoff. Understanding the importance of balance in the daily tradeoffs we encounter is a way for perfectionists to find peace of mind while maximizing their productivity.
Picture this: every morning at 9:00 a.m., a Hamilton first-year—Sarah, we’ll call her—has calculus class. Her daily wake-up time is 7:00 a.m. so that she has enough time to review her notes. Sarah allots this time because she believes that any minor mistake is reflective of ill preparation. What Sarah does not understand is that she can maximize her performance by considering this daily tradeoff more carefully. If she wakes up at 7:45, she strikes a balance between sleep and pre-class preparation, maximizing her attentiveness in class.
John, on the other hand, is a junior at Hamilton who holds himself to extremely high standards of physical health and academic achievement. The gym, for John, is a daily mandate. His exercise tendencies not only take away from his homework time, causing him to work late hours into the night but also drain his energy and his alertness. John can still maintain great physical health by switching to a gym schedule of three times a week and devoting the remainder of his time to resting or academics instead.
Finding balance as a college student is essential to that success that is so coveted by perfectionists. Weighing priorities from a realistic standpoint can be difficult, but understanding the notion of tradeoffs is a great place to start.
The next time that you agonize over possible spelling mistakes in an email to a professor or find yourself allotting copious amounts of time to relatively minor priorities, take a minute to consider the opportunities for all-around wellness that you might be sacrificing by not successfully weighing tradeoffs.