What's better than a crisp fall afternoon? How about a crisp, sweet glass of apple cider to welcome the change of seasons?

Cider is a versatile beverage. You can serve it ice cold, or heat and spice it up with cinnamon, cloves and ginger. Producers can give it sparkle by adding carbon dioxide or ferment it into hard cider, which is usually 3 to 7 percent alcohol.

But it begins and ends with the fruit. Pure cider contains nothing but the juice of pressed apples. Yet it is a more hand-crafted product than apple juice, which is made from concentrate and filtered numerous times for clarity. Cider is filtered, too, but only enough to remove the skin, seeds and pulp.

Cider-makers use a mix of apple varieties to get a flavor balance that is satisfying but not cloying.

"There's no traditional recipe," Steve Linvill, of Linvilla Orchards in Media, says of his cider. "It's always a blend, half sweet apples and half tart apples. We use half Yellow Delicious with Staymans. Sometimes we'll use Jonathan. Sometimes we'll throw some McIntosh in there for tartness."

Tom Rosazza, of Glen Willow Orchard, near Avondale, Chester County, says apple varieties harvested in August and September tend to be fairly tart. Sweeter apples are picked in the fall, and the last batches, in early November, are again tart.

Flavor consistency is maintained by storing sweet or tart apples until needed, Rosazza says. For his cider, he uses a blend of Red Delicious and Golden Delicious for sweetness and Staymans for tartness.

Cider-making is a centuries-old enterprise. English monks produced and sold cider as early as the ninth century.

The first settlers in the New World drank ale and cider because it was safer than the local waters. The Founding Fathers also quaffed hard cider, making alcoholic beverages from the fruits at hand.

In 2000, domestic apple growers grew about 2.4 billion pounds of apples that were pressed to make apple juice and cider, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. About half of the apples came from Washington state.

Some of the most elegant ciders come from apple-rich Normandy, in northern France. Sophisticated New England ciders are often pressed from heirloom apple varieties.

Only a few orchards in the Philadelphia region still press their own apples for cider because, since 2001, federal regulations have required pasteurization or other processing methods to prevent outbreaks of E. coli. That became too expensive for many growers, who now ship their apples elsewhere for processing.

Linvilla and Glen Willow aren't making cider this season because of equipment problems. Linvilla's press was damaged in a fire in August, and Glen Willow's needs replacement parts.

That leaves Mood's Farm, near Mullica Hill, as one of the few regional presses operating. (Another is Lansdale-based Zeigler's, the nation's largest-selling brand, which has sold about 8.5 million gallons in the last 12 months.)

The Mood family has been farming and making cider since 1966. On an average day, Richard Mood and his wife, Joyce, extract about 770 gallons of cider from apples grown in their orchard. Their cider is a mixture of mostly Golden and Red Delicious apples.

The couple also oversee a charming farm store that sells cider, fresh vegetables and fruits, "apple crush" (a Slurpee-like drink), and apple cider doughnuts.

Mood's Farm uses a 40-foot-long presser with conveyor belts, rollers, filters and screens to squeeze every drop of juice from its apples. The leftover bits of apple become a natural fertilizer for the Moods' 30-acre orchard.

The farm employs a "cold" process that uses ultraviolet light to prevent E. coli contamination. "The temperature isn't raised at all," Richard Mood says, adding that heating cider for more than a few seconds dulls the flavor.

If you ask Mood how to make "hard" cider, he says with a straight face: "Put it in the freezer for about four days. That'll make it hard."

Yes, that'll make cider hard. But alcoholic cider is made by fermenting the juice with brewer's yeast.

You want the cider to be tart, says Nancy Rigberg, co-owner of Home Sweet Homebrew, a Center City shop that sells beer and cider homebrewing supplies.

"The tarter apples have more acid. Sweet apples ferment flat, [so] they really don't have any character," she says.

There are other ways to tweak the flavor. Some producers make tart cider as an ingredient to give backbone to the regular cider blend. Or juice from crab apples may be added to bring up the acidity and tartness. Hard cider can even be given an "oaky" character by adding oak chips or synthetic oak flavoring, Rigberg added.

She says more people are drinking hard cider these days as an alternative to beer. It goes well with modern, light cuisine such as roast chicken, turkey and white fish, as well as with most red meats.

In 1990, 122,000 cases of hard cider were sold in the United States, according to Frank Walters, director for research at M. Shanken Communications Inc., a New York-based publisher of food and beverage magazines. Now sales have climbed to about four million cases a year.

Hard cider has become "part of a complementary drinking trend," says Alan Dikty, a contributing editor to Tastings.com, a beverage review Web site. "It can go easily with an evening of beer drinking or be drunk on its own."

It's also easier to find these days. The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board changed its classification of hard cider from a wine product to a malt beverage in 1998. That means it can be sold at beer distributorships as well as in State Stores, restaurants and taverns.

Even more accessible is nonalcoholic sparkling cider, which is unfermented apple cider injected with carbon dioxide at the bottling stage. It's an excellent substitute for champagne.

Apple cider production ends in November. But the Moods have customers who can't wait until spring to start enjoying fresh cider again, so they buy gallon jugs of it now and freeze it to last through the winter.

So Richard Mood is right: Putting cider in the freezer will make it hard. And handy to enjoy whenever you're thirsty for a bracing taste of autumn.