If, for years, you’ve been smugly drinking cranberry juice ostensibly as a means of preventing urinary tract disease, that’s fine, continue drinking.

Or even if you’ve enjoyed a Nirvana Spa CranMary Mani/Pedi, where purifying protective cranberry and revitalising rosemary come together for the ultimate manicure/pedicure combo treatment, guess what? You still don’t even know the half.

Trudge with Thursday Life today to cold, wet Boston and share our view and experiences in the middle of flooded bogs nestled between the towns and villages of south-eastern Massachusetts. There are more than 17,000 acres of cranberry bogs – the workplaces of nearly 600 farming families. That’s where we got a whole new perspective on a glass of cranberry juice.

It was one of those mornings that called for a ‘toddy’, a comforter, a crackling log fire and a good book. Instead, we were out in search of Boston’s finest – plump, sweet, red cranberries.

This was not the preferred weather for cranberries (we were happy not to be the only grumpy ones there). Cranberries are best harvested after a crisp winter frost, and farmers like Kirby Gilmore (his family has been ‘in bogs’ for three generations), know that the task ahead is pretty simple.

“It’s about getting on with it!” he says. And weather imperfections aside, this he does. There are, after all, 150 acres to get on with, and with capital injection of US$20,000 to $25,000 per acre, it’s not difficult to understand why a typical work day commences at 6:30 am during the summer months and continues to 9:00 pm with assistance from four persons during harvesting (otherwise Gilmore does it all alone).

There’s not much time for idle chatter. The cranberries, which grow on long-running vines in sandy bogs and marshes, were flooded the night before and were now ready to be reaped. “Reaping,” shares Gilmore, “takes place each autumn, starting in mid-September and continuing until Thanksgiving.”

And so, with water from the heavens and the dry bogs now completely saturated with up to 18 inches of water, the berries are paddled loose from vines with picking reels. Floating, they form a red mosaic on the water. Gilmore and his crew in ‘cranberry ensemble’ now begin reaping.

“Cranberries float,” explains Ocean Spray’s Irene Sorensen, “because they contain pockets of air.” She breaks one to further illustrate the point. They do indeed.

Freed berries float to the surface of the water, and are later corralled and loaded into trucks. Wet harvested berries, used for processed foods, juices and sauces, then make their way by truck to a central receiving station for sorting and inspection.

Gilmore unwinds at the end of a long cranberry day with his own ‘toddy’ made with a couple of cranberries, which are boiled and further reduced. Orange juice is added, as is whisky and sugar.

We return to the bus disappointed that we’re unable to enjoy Gilmore’s home brew, but guess what? We plan to try out our own, only with rum instead of whisky. Gilmore and Sorensen have, however, given us a whole new respect for the red berry.

The Cranberry Bounce

No, this ‘bounce’ is not akin to Ele’s ‘Willi Bounce’, but with all the buzz at Ocean Spray about the 400,000 cases we’re guzzling here in Jamaica, who knows?

Ocean Spray judges cranberries by colour, size and freshness, and. wait for it. by their ability to bounce. An early New Jersey grower, John ‘Peg-Leg’ Webb, first noted this special property of the cranberry.

Because of his wooden leg, he could not carry his berries down from the loft of his barn where he stored them. Instead, he would pour them down the steps.

He soon noticed that only the firmest and freshest berries bounced down to the bottom; the soft and bruised fruit did not bounce and remained on the steps. His observations led to the development of the first cranberry bounceboard separator, a method Ocean Spray still uses today to remove damaged or sub-standard berries.

Dry Harvesting

There are two ways to harvest cranberries, we later discover. We do not get an opportunity to see the dry method, but this is how it works: growers use a mechanical picker that resembles a large lawnmower.

The picker’s moving teeth comb the berries off the vine and deposit them in a burlap sack at the back of the machine.

Helicopters often transport the sacks of harvested cranberries to protect the vines from heavy trucks.

Most fresh cranberries, great for cooking and baking and sold in the supermarkets, are harvested using the dry method.

Nearly 95 per cent of the Massachusetts crop is harvested wet, as it is a much more efficient harvesting method.