SCA Artisan's Day

I have been looking more into the SCA over the past couple weeks to see what kinds of stuff they do. On Thursday this week I had planned to go to an archery practice and then to a group meeting at a restaurant. Unfortunately the person who had originally planned to pick me u pwasn't able to because he didn't have time; he had originally agreed to pick me up but then after I told him where my work was, he said it was farther away from the site than he originally thought. This was a bit surprising because I had showed him where it was on Google Maps before.

So I ended up skipping that part and just going to the group meeting. Most of the meeting was just about administrative stuff, which wasn't really that interesting. But I did get a chance to talk to some of the people there. They have people there that do a lot of interesting medieval-type stuff, including metalworking, embroidery, coin-making, and so on.

Yesterday I went to an SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) event called Artisan's Day. This was a local event where we do arts and crafts stuff (the term the use for that is "Arts & Sciences", or "A&S".) I went because I was interested in seeing what kinds of stuff they made. We had a few things planned, including making apple cider, planning for woodworking projects, and learning medieval stories to tell. As it turned out, we had so much apple cider to make that we didn't get to the other stuff; we just ended up having dinner around a campfire.

Here are some pictures:

The first step in the process is chopping the apples into pieces.

Most of these apples were picked off of apple trees in the backyard of the person who was hosting this event and some of their neighbors. (We did get permission first.) Since these apples were obviously grown without pesticides, many of the apples were bitten off by birds or partially eaten by worms. This picture shows an apple where a worm has eaten all the way to the center. What we do here is cut off the brown part and throw it away, then use the good part. (Thus we see how apple cider was made before industrialized agriculture.)

Here we see the apples being ground up into pulp. Not shown in the picture: finished apple cider that is put back into the system in order to keep the grinding machine cool. A couple times during the process we had to shut the machine down because it was starting to overheat.

This is the press that is used to press the pulp into finished apple cider. This is considered "raw cider" because it is right out of the press. Raw cider can also be turned into "hard cider" - an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting the apple juice. The way you do this is add in some yeast, seal the bucket with a "vapor lock" (a valve that allows carbon dioxide to go out but does not allow oxygen to get in) and wait a couple months.

This is the waste product. It includes both the bad parts of apples that were thrown out, as well as what is left of the pulp after the juice is pressed out of it. What do you do with the waste?

Feed it to the chickens!


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So, anyway, it was fun to see this whole process, but I'm not sure yet whether the SCA is something that I will want to be involved in long-term. My guess is a lot of the A&S stuff would be cool to see in action once or twice, but I just don't see myself putting in the time and effort to really get good ad it. And the SCA group seemed to be a much older group, and they seemed to be less interested in the kind of action-packed fighting stuff that I like. But on the other hand I haven't actually gotten to do fighting with them yet, so I don't know. There is a  "Newcomers" event next month that is supposedly geared toward new players who want to get a taste of the fighting action, so I will make sure to go to that.