Admission – The LEGO Winter Village series fills my heart with the pure joy usually reserved for life changing moments. OK maybe that not level of joy, but definitely the same amount you get from having an entire chocolate cake to yourself.

Up to Christmas 2018 I’d limited my Winter Village fever to acquiring “the hot” retired sets. AKA am I going to donate a kidney to get my hands on the Winter Village Cottage? (No, I sold a bunch of fabric instead.) I’ll also admit that an ebay seller’s gambit of “Get it before the price goes up again,” totally made me grab the Post Office set. Once I had that cherry red mail truck put together there were no regrets!

During this acquisition phase my son and I were having a lively conversation about what the 2018 set would be. He thought it should be a winter themed Dino park, because everything should be a Dino park. I was leaning towards restaurant or another store. Even with the unveiling of the official Fire Station set, I found myself dreaming of more Winter Village buildings. Soon I was googling “LEGO Winter Village” and fell into the rabbit hole that is MOC building.

MOC stands for My Own Creation and is essentially what we all did in the 80’s, using LEGO blocks to create things from our imaginations. However instead of the shitty primary colored houses I made as a child, these LEGO fans make beautiful creations. Some of them even write up instructions so that you can build them too.

I was not seriously contemplating building a MOC until I clapped eyes on the Winter Village Apple Cider Mill and Fell In Love. This MOC was designed by Miro of Humblebricks. For $7.50 you get a 366 page PDF with building instructions and a parts list. You can use the list to buy the parts or pull the parts from your own collection. I bought all the parts for the build so it could be assembled along with my other Winter Village sets. (A little more about that later.)

The Apple Cider Mill is a two story building in an Arts and Crafts-equse style. (One of my personal favorite architectural styles.) From the front you can see a covered porch spanning a small creek, a central multi colored chimney, arched drive way and a windowed second story. The grounds are populated with snow covered trees and lamp post.

From the right side we get to see some more of the great agricultural details of this design. Dark red groved bricks give the second floor some texture. I especially like the roof line with it’s curved eaves and brown accents. On the ground level we can peek into the loading dock of the mill. Though I wonder how they keep the place warm in the winter. Maybe the loading bay doors are being serviced. 😉 One other cool detail is that the drive way under the arch has a variety of shapes as if it is comprised of rocks.

On the left hand side are the steps up to the porch, a cute little bird house nestled among trees and the water wheel that powers the mill. If you’re wondering it does spin! The same agricultural details are mirrored on the second story. If you peer down the long covered porch you can see the cheery green door with gold handle.

And now for the most exciting view of all, the inter workings of the mill! The build had a separate roof piece that flips up ‘doll house style” to give you better access to the second story.

The majority of the ground floor is devoted to the cider making part of the business. However if you were a minifig entering the house by the front door you’d find a cozy fireplace and Christmas tree. The fireplace is lighted by a light brick with a red tint. This is turned on by a long pole cleverly build into the Mill’s foundations.

Nearer to the back of the building Farmer Joe is hard at work mashing the apples. The “mashers” are connected to the water wheel and spin around if the wheel is moved. I’m sure mashers are the proper scientific word used in the cider business. (BTW – Farmer Joe and his daughter Betty are from Set 40261.)

Above the mashing area, a couple of kegs of cider are stacked along with a bag of seed? For all we know it may be Farmer Joe’s blackjack winnings. Truth be told I like to think Farmer Joe’s hobbies are playing the fiddle and growing the county fair’s biggest pumpkin. Maybe after having a few drinks of the hard cider he lights up the square dance floor. But he’s a man who wears kelly green overalls, he is without guile.

If you traipse up the clearly not to code flight of stairs you’ll enter the kitchen. Excuse me while I squeal MINI KITCHEN! Why are tiny kitchens so delightful? Has it been built into my genetic code? Anyway, the kitchen features a stove, sink, various cabinets and a business sized pie baking oven. The oven is lit by a standard white light brick if you push a button on the side of the oven.

You can tell Betty is a prize baker by the number of pies she bakes and the way she pulls focus. Oh and they also appear to have a mouse problem up in the rafters. Betty I have a selection of LEGO cats if you’d like to adopt. one. (Side Note – I had a brown 4 x 6 plate shatter during the build which accounts for the odd gap in the kitchen floor foundations.)

Now for some knitty gritty details about MOC building. Since you have to assemble your supplies it is more of a project than picking up an official LEGO set. Miro does have the parts list up on Rebrickable where you can easily export them to other websites. I took the list and imported them into a “Want List” on my user account in BrickLink. Inside the want list you can click “Buy all” which will take you to another page. On that page you can filter what stores to look for. (I usually only buy from US stores.) Then you can click Auto Select and Bricklink will find you all the parts across multiple stores. Of course store’s inventory is not static, so you either have to buy all the parts at once or start tracking what you do and don’t have.

On a related noted you should double check all your orders because it’s easy for a seller to miss one tiny brick when you’re buying 70+ pieces from them. This is time consuming and may not appeal to some people. (I enjoyed it, but I’m weirdly anal retentive about some things.) I had two orders that had a missing brick. The first seller only refunded me the cost plate he had forgotten and I had to go buy the piece from someone else. Booo annoying. The second seller dropped me the missing piece in the mail at her own shipping cost. Hooray, I’d buy from her again. (She is LinkItUp on bricklink if you’re interested.)

One other brick buying tip I found out late is that the color of white lego bricks varies greatly over time. If you want your finished MOC to have a consistent shade of white you need to flag your Bricklink list to only buy new bricks. My MOC has several shade from pretty much creme to bright optic white. The only other color difference I noticed was on the dark red bricks. However in that case you really have to look to see the difference in shade.

Now a word about the building instructions. The PDF file is massive so I decided printing it out was not the way to go. I put a digital copy on my Google drive and opened it up on my iPad. Then I could swipe through each page as I build and it worked great. On the whole I feel the Apple Cider Mill instructions were well done. On each page you get a key of the new blocks and Miro uses hot pink to highlight where those blocks should go. I would say that 85% of the time I knew what I was supposed to do, no problem. Occasionally you need to add two same sized bricks in different colors. Then the hot pink masks which color goes where. I would go to the next page to see the bricks in their normal color and then place the bricks. Not a big deal in the long run, just something to consider. The only part of the build I found really confusing was constructing the water wheel. You construction one half of the wheel and then the instructions show pieces added that you can’t actually connect to anything. I had to page forward several pages to figure out that I was basically building the other half the same way and then they would be linked together. I think reordering the steps in this section might have be more clear. However that’s a minor quibble in a build I otherwise found very enjoyable.

On the other side of the coin were the free directions for the matching Apple Cider Truck. No disrespect to Miro on this because if I was putting out free directions I wouldn’t format them either. The truck’s instructions are a LEGO Digital Designer file. This was problematic for me because LEGO Digital Designer only runs on a true computer of which I only have one. It resides in a room totally unsuitable for building LEGO. I got the bright idea to export it as a PDF. This did work but in PDF format it became difficult to parse where some new bricks were added. (In digital designer you can see the bricks moved into position.) In the end I was triumphant and completed the build vowing never to rebuild it again. It was put away in a zip-lock bag intact for next year.

One final thing to note is scale. This baby is a monster both in height and base plate area. The measurements given by Miro are Width – 12.5″ Depth- 7.5″ and Height at 9.25″. The size difference isn’t too apparent with the New Fire Station set since it is also a two story building. However some of the criticism of that set was that it was not in scale with the other Winter Village buildings either. When you slide in something like the Winter Village Bakery you can see how colossal the Mill is by comparison. The size difference wasn’t a deal breaker for me, but may be for others.

I would count my first foray into building a MOC a success! I love the finished building with all it’s textures and warm colors. I can’t tell you how much the 3 colors of bricks in the chimney fill my heart with glee. With the moving water wheel works, tiny kitchen and additional truck it offers a lot of nice options for play. Both my 8 year old and myself enjoyed using the completed build. (Though trees falling over is just as problematic as it is with the standard green LEGO pines. I just can’t bring myself to create a barren treeless landscape.) I’m looking forward to building this again next Christmas season or maybe sooner! I also know someone who’s pretty partial to second story pie making facilities. Mmmm Betty, you are a master of pies.