When the calendar turns to November, Dave and Linda Cooney and some of their friends gather every year to practice a craft that dates back to at least 55 B.C.

That’s when Romans arrived in England, according to www.DrinkFocus.com, to find the local villagers drinking an alcoholic beverage that would today be called hard cider.

By the late 11th century, making and fermenting apple cider had become an important industry and its consumption was widespread across Europe. As 19th century unfolded, demand for hard cider began to fizzle in the United States, where, according to DrinkFocus.com, German-style beers had become popular because they could be brewed faster and in greater quantities.

But that didn’t stop Dave Cooney’s maternal grandfather, Frank Peyerl (pronounced like “pearl”), from planting some 300 apple and pear trees during the early 1940s in the first of what would become two Muscatine orchards. And it didn’t stop some of Cooney’s friends earlier this month from making about 20 gallons of sweet cider — the unfiltered and unsweetened non-alcoholic drink made from pressed apples.

About a dozen of those friends gathered in late October to pick about 25 bushels of apples from the 16 trees the Cooneys still care for on their six acres at 1403 Logan St. They bought the place in 1983 Peyrel’s estate after he died in 1982 at age 94.

Peyerl, who was born in Langerisarhofen, Germany, ran Peyerl’s Apple Orchard with his son-in-law, Robert Bieber, who died in 2003 at age 81. They sold apples and pears to fruit stands and neighborhood grocery stores, and their orchard was well known throughout Muscatine in the 1950s through the 1970s.

“There are three of the original trees still in there,” Dave Cooney, 55, said of the 16 trees in his orchard. He said there are still 25 to 30 trees at the part of the orchard that was started by Bieber. It’s where Cooney’s aunt and Bieber’s widow, Marcella, still lives.

The Cooneys no longer sell apples. They give many of them to friends and use the rest to make cider with an old press that Dave Cooney says he bought about 20 years ago at an auction for $75. “It’s the 1921 version,” he said of the press.

But the age of the press really doesn’t matter. The process of making cider — which yields a sweet and satisfying beverage that is cloudy when poured because not all of the apple particles have been removed — hasn’t changed much for centuries.

At the Cooneys’ house on a brilliant fall afternoon, he scratted the apples by cranking the mill. He worked while listening on the radio as the University of Iowa lost its first football game of the season.

At the other end of the mill, the crushed apples, which are known as pomace or pommage, were caught in pillow cases. The wrapped pomace — also known as the cheese — was then pressed to extract the juice, or must. The must was then filtered through another cloth and poured into plastic jugs.

Cider made this way has a limited shelf-life because it isn’t pasteurized and it has to be consumed soon or frozen. All of the Cooneys’ friends left that day with jugs of cider.

Dave Cooney, who works at Monsanto, and Linda Cooney, who works at Lutheran Services in Iowa, say they have downsized their orchard. They began caring for fewer trees and giving away apples and cider after their children, Kyle, 29, of Bettendorf, and Leia, 32, of St. Charles, Ill., grew up and moved away.

“The kids haven’t been back since in the fall or in the spring, when it’s time to prune the trees,” Dave Cooney said with a laugh. “We lost our child labor.”