Cider Made Simple: All About Your New Favorite Drink (2015)
The rolling countryside of western New England looks like apple country. In the fall, when the leaves turn to fire, you expect to see a clapboard farmhouse surrounded by gnarled trees, like something out of a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (“where the big piles of golden and rosy apples lie under the orchard trees, in the mild, autumnal sunshine”). Outside of Lebanon, New Hampshire, there is just such a place, and its antiquity isn’t faked. The white farmhouse dates to the eighteenth century and looms on a small rise, and as you pull into the lane, an orchard that looks like it might date back to Hawthorne’s time seems ready to swallow you up. This is Poverty Lane Orchards and Farnum Hill Ciders, and its owners, Stephen Wood and Louisa Spencer, have done more to revive traditional American cider than anyone else in the country.
My first visit came on the last day of harvest, near Halloween. Dawn brought a few flakes of snow, but by the time I arrived at the orchard it was a perfectly luminous, crisp fall morning. Steve greeted me in front of the cow barn—which turned out to double as the cidery—and offered me one of his giant hands. Men who work in fields grow hands like shovels, and Steve got his start in the orchards in 1965. Even though he’s been making cider for over two decades (three, depending on how you count), he still describes himself as an orchardist, as if cider making were merely a downstream complication.
He was dressed like an orchardist, with a wool sweater as thick as a parka along with a canvas coat that seemed to be in service mainly for the bulging pockets. We went immediately to the barn, an antique structure with ribs still showing the bite of old colonial handsaws. In order to fashion it into a cidery, he’d had to do a minor refit—but it still looks mostly like an old barn. In one corner there’s a stout steel tank, and in front of the doors, an array of wine barrels; the very sharp-eyed might notice the floor looked a bit more modern—the kind of level surface critical to moving heavy containers of liquid. It was, of course, unheated, and I immediately began to covet Steve’s wool.
Orchard Not Necessary
I am an Oregonian and therefore acquainted with the way wineries work. I point my car west, and when the lush land begins to undulate and grow rows of grapevines, I know I’m in wine country. When I began touring cideries, I did roughly the same thing, following GPS instructions, all the while scanning for apple trees. It turns out that’s not how most American cideries work.
As Steve Wood explained, forty years ago apples became a commodity. They’re produced in bulk and the juice is stored in quantity. Anyone can buy that juice, so all a cidery really needs to get started is a small industrial space with tanks in which to ferment it. Most of what’s available on the market comes from eating apples, and the juice isn’t particularly interesting—though cider-makers can get some character by blending. There’s even a small source (one currently dwarfed by demand) of juice available from orchards with cider trees—for example, in addition to making his own cider, Steve Wood sells juice to cider-makers. As cider continues to grow in popularity, many makers are contracting with growers to provide fruit, including apples from newly planted cider varieties. For many cideries, it makes sense to leave the growing to the experts.
If you Google the words “American cider,” you’re going to find lots of stories about Steve Wood and his Farnum Hill Ciders. The New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, Slate.com—lots of national news organizations have been covering the revival of cider in America, and they all beat a path right to this barn. The country may have a long and storied history with apple cider, but it’s a fractured one. There’s no taproot to link the modern era back to anything like traditional cider making—that was lost many long decades ago. Cider making only got revived recently, and to the extent there’s anything like a developing American “tradition,” it began when orchardists like Steve and Louisa first started grafting trials at Poverty Lane in the early 1980s.
The continent’s first infatuation with cider came in the early seventeenth century, when cider-drinking English settlers arrived. North America does have native crab apple varieties, but none that were apparently much use to the people already here. If you recall the stories of the hard early years Europeans endured on their new continent, the apple tree looks like one element of salvation. Apples provided nutrition and a source of sugar and could be preserved whole or in liquid form. To English immigrants used to unclean water, cider was thought to be a necessity. The earliest domestic apples were harvested around 1623 in Boston and, within a few decades, new North American varieties were springing up around New England. One of the earliest was the Roxbury Russet, an apple you can find at Poverty Lane (though not much of it—Steve much prefers Golden Russet).
Settlers grew apples as far south as Georgia. They spread in part by graft, but just as often by seed. This in turn led to an explosion of new domestic varieties. Farmers let seedlings get big enough to produce fruit and took grafts from those that bore tasty apples. John Chapman, known to history as Johnny Appleseed, was the most famous evangelist for planting seedling apples, helping push them out into the “west”—Ohio and Indiana. But by the time he was spreading the word (and seeds) in the early 1800s, apples were already an article of religion in America.
In the first years of the new nation, there were three locations particularly noted for cider. New England was the most organized, receiving encouragement from the Massachusetts Agricultural Society to breed and grow cider fruit. They may not have needed much encouragement, though; farmers couldn’t grow barley to make beer, so apples were the go-to source for fermentable sugars. At independence, one in ten farms had cider mills and everyone—men, women, and children—drank it. Per capita consumption was thirty-five gallons a year.
Observers of the time also praised Virginia ciders for their quality. It was another of the most important early cider regions, and the place that gave us the Hewe’s Crab apple. But the name of the town most associated with apples at the time was in between New England and Virginia. To modern ears, the name just doesn’t sound bucolic, but it was: Newark, New Jersey. This was home to the country’s best cider, and also its best apple, the Harrison. William Coxe, writing in 1817, called it “the most celebrated of the cider apples of Newark … it produces a high-colored, rich, and sweet cider of great strength.” Coxe goes on to mention that Essex County was producing six million gallons of cider in 1810—a staggering quantity for a product that did not lend itself to mass production.
By the time John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, cider had been a major part of American culture for 150 years. Many people think it lasted another 150, until Prohibition would deal a fatal blow, but that overstates its stay. People reviewing the history of American cider inevitably come to the Presidential election of 1840 as an illustration of cider’s enduring popularity—but that’s the moment we can actually see it fade from American life.
In the campaign, William Henry “Tippecanoe” Harrison and John Tyler used images of log cabins and cider barrels as symbols of their authenticity against patrician incumbent Martin Van Buren—the 1840s version of running on Mom and apple pie. But this misses the context of the campaign, which illustrates that contemporaries thought log cabins and cider stood for something very different from authenticity—they signaled obsolescence. Harrison was sixty-seven, and critics mocked him as borderline senile. In fact, it was a Democratic newspaper in Baltimore, mocking Harrison, that gave him the symbols he’d ride to the White House. “Give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension on him,” wrote John de Ziska, and “he will sit the remainder of his days in his log cabin by the side of the fire and study moral philosophy!”
The point: Harrison was as obsolete as log cabins and cider. Not Mom and apple pie—gramophones and leisure suits.
By the time that election was over, cider was already becoming a lost art. In his 1822 edition of The American Orchardist, James Thacher wrote about cider like it was a vibrant part of American life. But barely more than a generation after Tippecanoe’s triumph, J. S. Buell wrote a volume to try to revive interest in what was clearly a lost art. “Most people are familiar with the juice of apple under the name cider, while an exceedingly limited number know anything about the wine which may be obtained from the apple.” In fact, the obituary was right there in the campaign materials of 1840, which used the words “hard cider,” rather than the common use of “cider” that was common in Thacher’s day. By sometime around the halfway mark of the nineteenth century, hard cider had become a footnote in American life.
Why Cider Vanished
In 1990, cider was essentially extinct in the United States and had been since the start of Prohibition in 1920. Prohibition usually gets credit for delivering the coup de grâce, but that exaggerates cider’s state of health before 1919. By 1915, Americans drank just thirteen million gallons of the stuff—less than 1 percent of the beer produced that year. It had been dwindling for decades, and ceased to have a significant national presence since the 1850s. What happened?
Everything from urban migration to the temperance movement gets the blame, but many of the explanations fail to convince. (The rural population barely fell between 1790 and 1860—from 96 to 84 percent—and the temperance movement certainly wasn’t driving whisky out of business.) I think the reasons are partly cultural and partly technological. Early-American cider was essentially a farmhouse product, beholden to the seasons. It was difficult to streamline the process or make it on an industrial scale. That was fine for the agrarian country at independence, but as the nation began to flex its industrial muscles, cider making couldn’t keep up.
The second factor was beer. It was hard to grow good barley or hops in the United States, and for long decades, what was brewed was neither particularly good nor popular. Instead, the United States was a liquor country, and we drank vats of the stuff. That changed in the mid-nineteenth century, when legions of well-trained German brewers started immigrating, bringing their lager-making technology with them. They figured out how to work with rough American barley and hops, and, all of a sudden, Americans developed a taste for beer. In 1810, there were only 140 commercial breweries in the country; fifty years later there were more than 2,500. Production increased twentyfold.
This wave of immigration coincided with an era of technological innovation, turning brewing into an industrial enterprise. Like other industries, brewing specialized. Farmers grew the ingredients, maltsters turned grain to brewing malt, brewers made the beer, and distributors sent it in rail cars around the country. Breweries could make beer twelve months a year and were only limited by the size of their industrial plants. Cider, by contrast, was made on the same farm where the apples were grown. It would be decades before refrigeration and concentration would make it possible to scale up production. Cider got the reputation of a bumpkin’s drink—rough, backwoods, old-timey.
Cider was a goner long before people left the farms or started to agitate for abstinence. It’s worth noting, though, that those later developments—urban migration, the shift of apple-growing westward, temperance and Prohibition—played a different role. They may not have caused cider’s demise, but they certainly doomed its quick revival. After Prohibition ended in 1933, breweries, wineries, and distilleries were still around and went back into business. Cider … not so much. It would take a few more decades before anyone thought to revive it; and by then, it was more reinvention than revival.
In the 1970s, just as Steve Wood was taking over the orchards in New Hampshire, the business was getting difficult for family farmers. Apples had become an international commodity. Supermarkets were looking for Technicolor, wax-dipped giants to attract customers’ eyes. In an era before “heirloom,” smaller, imperfect apples were a hard sell. But even worse, as Wood explained, “we also knew we couldn’t possibly compete on the hillsides of northern New England in production efficiency with other players.” Even if they did produce supermarket-ready fruit, they couldn’t make money growing it.
At the time, cider was remembered by Americans in the same manner as the cotton gin—something important to history, maybe, but for reasons long forgotten. It didn’t occur to Steve and Louisa to turn their crops to liquid. Then, on a trip to England in the early 1980s, Steve saw the future. “We were taking a trip from Wales to London though Hereford and passing through weird orchards and—poor Louisa—I pulled over to the side of the road to see what the hell I was looking at. I found I was in one of the cider districts of England.” It took years for them to begin to see a future as cider-makers, but in that moment they saw that there were other uses to which apples might be put.
Steve and Louisa began looking into cider very gingerly. They made contact with the legendary Bertram Bulmer, who was at the time already into his sixth decade as chairman of HP Bulmer, and went on to consult with other cider-makers and researchers in England and France. It didn’t take very long before they were conducting grafting trials of several hundred different varieties of European cider and American heirloom apples. In this early stage, Steve was mainly focused on seeing which varieties would grow—and indeed, which samples of the scion wood were even true to variety. “Tremlett’s Bitter and Yarlington Mill,” he found, “were two that are all over the country by those names but aren’t those apples.”
Even years after they had begun to get a handle on which apples grew well in New Hampshire, they were still thinking like apple growers, not cider-makers. Steve was anticipating the market and wondering if they could sell heirloom varieties. “Then it struck us that we had a decade of horticultural experience with a few hundred uncommon varieties on this ground and we’d already figured out that among those varieties there were a handful that we really grow the hell out of here.” In 1989, they planted a thousand cider trees and, although they hadn’t quite come to terms with it, set their future as cider-makers into motion.
Just a couple years after Steve and Louisa were speeding through the orchards of Herefordshire, Morgan Miller was making his first trip to the English West Country. Morgan’s story involves a similar love story, as he became transfixed by the ciders he found there. He worked in taverns rather than orchards, though, and when he returned to the United States, Morgan was more interested in promoting cider than making it. Wine had gone through a renaissance, and beer was in the midst of one; he wanted to spark a revival of cider, too.
He considered starting a cider magazine, but when he looked around, he found almost no American cideries. “I think I discovered seven cideries. I think.” Depending on which source you consult, America produced somewhere between a quarter and three-quarters of a million gallons of cider in 1990. To put that figure in perspective, it’s what a modest craft brewery makes in one year. This is why Steve and Louisa were seriously questioning cider’s viability, and why Morgan ultimately scrapped his magazine idea. Instead, a few years later, he would use a newfangled technology called “the Internet” to launch a website that functioned as a clearinghouse for all cider activities in America.
Cider started to flourish. The growth was strong enough to encourage orchardists to consider planting cider fruit. Morgan ticked off the various cideries that were opening and the acres put into cider-fruit production. (Things may have been growing, but they were still small enough that he could keep track of individual orchards.) But then things really exploded, and cider grew at an annual clip of 70 percent for the next five years and passed five million barrels in 1996. Wineries and breweries sensed an opportunity and jumped in. More and more, the small, orchard-based producers were being eclipsed by large industrial manufacturers.
“And then,” Morgan said, “there was the crash.” Beginning around 1997, craft brewing went through a period known retrospectively as “the shake-out,” when many overleveraged breweries and speculators saw their production collapse. Unlike beer, which had enough market share to weather the storm, “cider went poof.” Morgan believes there were two challenges cider couldn’t overcome. It hadn’t had enough time to establish itself, and it had been positioned, as Morgan sheepishly described, “as a ‘girl-drink,’ which was how it was always advertised.” This coincided with an explosion in a dubious category known as “alco-pop”—sweet, fizzy, lightly alcoholic drinks. They came in many forms, like Zima, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, Smirnoff Ice, and others, but as a category, ciders blended in with them. Morgan writes the obituary for 1990s cider this way: “You can make malt-based alco-pops much cheaper than cider, so why go there?”
The first attempt to establish cider in the United States fizzled by the turn of the new millennium. Some companies managed to survive, but cider had to wait for a second dawn before Americans would rediscover the simple joys of fermented apple juice. That came about a decade later, when “craft cider” finally came of age.
As little as two or three years ago, most Americans were unaware that cider was becoming a thing. In my hometown of Portland, Oregon, in 2010, a brave gentleman named Jeff Smith opened Bushwhacker’s, the first full-time cider bar in the United States in what seemed like an admirable, if quixotic, venture. But within a couple years, Smith’s bet started to look smart. Cideries started opening almost as fast as breweries in the Pacific Northwest, and pubs and restaurants started putting them on tap lists. National brands have become successful, sparking brewing giants AB InBev and MillerCoors to belatedly launch their own brands in 2014 (Johnny Appleseed and Smith & Forge).
The Three Schools of American Cider
The United States, now in the thick of its second modern cider revival, does not have a single national cider-making technique—it has three. Traditionalists make natural cider in the manner of the Europeans. They follow the methods and practices established in Herefordshire, Normandy, or Asturias, and their ciders, while not mere imitations, recall those European ciders. Modernists look to the wine world, where the methods are designed to strip away everything but the fruit. Practitioners of this school pitch (add) relatively neutral yeast strains, focus on specific apple varieties, and use careful blending to produce the flavors they prefer. The Experimentalists, forced by circumstance to work with eating apples, use any process or ingredient they can to infuse flavor into their ciders. They fiddle with odd fermentations and add other fruit, spices, and even hops to give their Red Delicious and Gala ciders more zip.
But unlike the last wave of American cider, this one looks different. Morgan Miller, who by now has been watching the market for nearly thirty years, thinks American cider has finally come of age. “The biggest change I’ve seen is that it’s now seen as a legitimate drink unto itself.” The biggest change since the 1990s is that now there is a “craft” cider segment. As with wine and beer before it, Morgan continues, “People are quick to recognize that there are different tiers to cider; there are different flavor profiles.”
Having more sophisticated customers means cider-makers can pursue their own fascinations rather than trying to make mainstream ciders to appeal to a mass audience. “It’s almost like we all got the same idea about four or five years ago,” says Sharon Campbell of Washington’s Tieton Cider Works. “And then we’re all interpreting that idea in a very different way.”
The American cider landscape is still wild and largely unsettled. There are cider-makers who farm their own cider fruit and make products from the European tradition, and there are cider-makers who buy juice by the truckload and trick it out with spices, other fruits, and funky fermentations. And everything in between. But if we look past the dazzling array of products, I have found three different philosophies that seem to guide American cider-makers. All three see their products as examples of the “American” tradition, yet they are different and in some cases contradictory. But this may be the greatest evidence of their provenance. America is an immigrant country, and our instinct to borrow, reinterpret, and invent is our national tradition.
The Traditionalists
When I arranged to tour Kevin Zielinski’s orchards, he told me to meet him at the family’s Farm Market. It is located on the outskirts of Salem, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley—one of the best growing regions in the world. The rich alluvial soil settled on the valley floor after the last ice age and is now caressed by misty winter rain and dry, mild summers. The Willamette Valley supports, among the nation’s largest concentrations of hop, hazelnut, and Christmas tree farms, more than 250 wineries producing celebrated pinot noir. Zielinski’s grandfather planted EZ Orchards in 1929, but his mother’s side of the family came out in a wagon train in 1850. Locals know the Zielinskis for the annual Harvest Fest at the farm and their little produce store, not cider. And yet within the cider community, Zielinski commands enormous respect for his coruscating, complex French-style ciders.
Kevin met me in the parking lot, and then we hopped in his pickup and drove to the orchards. The Zielinskis have been growing apples and pears on the farm for decades, but the fruit was destined for the grocery store, not the bottle. He took me to a field where the old Jonathan trees had been grafted with cider wood that spring—signs of change at EZ. Being able to graft onto mature trees gives Kevin a head start over other Northwest cider-makers, who are starting out with new trees; the grafts will produce apples more quickly, and because the old rootstock is well established, the trees require less fertilizer. (Later, when he’s using natural yeast to ferment the juice, that nutrient balance will keep the fermentation slow and sedate.)
Orchardists use tape to protect new grafts, much like we bandage a wound. Kevin pulled out a pocket knife and peeled back the yellow tape to reveal two pieces of wood spliced together. Grafting doesn’t look like it should work. Underneath the tape, Kevin revealed a section where the old branch—as thick as my wrist—had been lopped off. The new branch was healthy and thick with leaves, but it did nothing to conceal the line where the old limb had been. At this point, Kevin has enough scion wood from his own trees to change a whole field from dessert fruit to cider fruit.
Kevin didn’t intend to become a cider-maker. In 2000, a winemaker approached him with the idea of growing cider apples to make French-style cider. The vintner supplied the scion wood for grafting—twelve varieties of French cider apples. But then, before the trees were producing much volume, he took a job at a Washington state winery, leaving Kevin with an acre of obscure, inedible cider apples. That was in 2003, long before people were clamoring for cider fruit, but he decided to go ahead and let the apples mature. He knew many winemakers from the valley and had for years made his own wine. Why not try making cider? His first vintage came out in 2007, and he’s been refining and expanding ever since.
In the decade and a half since that first orchard went in, Kevin has mostly stuck with French varieties, which make up 85 percent of his blend. I have now visited orchards in five countries, but Kevin seems to relate to his trees more intimately than anyone I’ve met. As we approached each new variety, Kevin would light up and describe the qualities of the fruit and the growing behavior of the tree, as if they had individual personalities, like people. He’d point out the ones that had bushy habits, or the tall, lanky trees. Not every variety took to Oregon’s terroir, and from time to time we’d come across a droopy runt failing to thrive. Even then, he’d call it a “curious” variety, as if it were just misbehaving.
“I didn’t have a lot of concern about growing these trees. That’s what I am—I’m an orchardist. I’ve grown probably twenty-plus different types of apples in my career, and they all behave differently. So I can work with that.” Some were just bound not to grow well so far from Normandy. But others, like Frequin Rouge, Reine des Pommes, Saint Martin, and Marie Ménard, seem to flourish. One of the tastiest apples I sampled was the Frequin Rouge, a bittersweet with tons of spicy tannin.
With each new variety, the pocketknife would appear in his hand and he’d have plucked and cut the apple almost in a single motion. He cut them horizontally, to reveal the seeds arranged in a star shape inside. As we walked from field to field, he tried to pick especially ripe fruit that had begun to liquefy, or “watercore,” near the peel. “It’s the conversion of the fruit as it ripens.” With one exception, he managed to grab a ripe apple every time. I asked how he could tell which apples were at that level of ripeness. “See how it’s a little bit translucent?” he asked, holding up a fully ripe and a not-quite-ripe apple for comparison. I studied the skin, and they looked exactly like each other. He grinned and we bit into it.
PRODUCTION
There are very few Americans making natural cider. This is partly because it’s a complicated, time-consuming process, but mainly because to Americans it seems unnecessarily dangerous. Other cider-makers I spoke to seemed startled that I’d even suggest it. But that’s how Kevin has always done things. “My wine-making interest was in doing spontaneous ferments, either no use of sulfites or very low use of sulfites and post-malolactic fermentation.” The taste of ripe produce is in Kevin’s blood, and his orientation in making cider is attention to the fruit. He chose the method of production that he thinks interferes as little as possible with the expression of the fruit we were tasting as we walked around his orchard—harvest-fresh, directly off the trees. “If I’m making cider from fruit, let’s let the fruit be the factor that has the most influence.”
The method of letting cider ferment itself seemed like a natural fit to Kevin. “I went with a very fruit-sensitive, fruit-aware method of fermentation. I know there are other things happening, but I haven’t manipulated them. I think this [spontaneous fermentation] is truer to what the fruit itself would do than if I’d purified it with SO2 and made a yeast inoculation.”
The process he uses is identical to the one employed by cider-makers across Normandy. He uses a similar blend of apples to create a high-tannin juice with relatively low acidity and then ferments it naturally at cold temperatures for months over the winter, racking it often to help strip the cider of nutrients. Then he bottle-conditions the finished cider for months longer. Kevin considers his process very much in the French tradition and even refers to it as the méthode ancestrale. He has never used sulfites or any additives, but is considering adding a very small amount as he steps up production with young, nutrient-rich trees.
Kevin doesn’t eschew modernity. He uses the press and fermentation vessels at a nearby winery to make his cider, and it is a state-of-the art operation. Unlike the cider-makers of Europe who let the climate chill their juice, Kevin has artificial refrigeration. Nevertheless, the basic process, from start to finish, is just like the one I saw at Christian Drouin in Coudray-Rabut (even the equipment was very similar). This all-natural approach, tree to bottle, is still vanishingly rare in the United States. A few cideries are beginning to put toes very tentatively in the waters of natural fermentation. Former Goose Island brewmaster Greg Hall recently launched Michigan-based Virtue Cider with a focus on traditional European styles and one cider fermented naturally. On Vashon Island, Washington, Dragon’s Head has experimented with natural fermentation, as has Virginia’s Old Hill Hard Cider. These are specialty ciders, however—a way of experimenting with flavor and process in a cidery where pitching yeast remains the norm. This process is slow and expensive, but cider-makers will increasingly turn to it if there appears to be a market. In wine, beer, and spirits, super-premium artisanal products have found enthusiastic audiences.
So what is it about the traditional approach that appeals to Kevin? It’s partly about the way the cider showcases the apple. Cider is an agricultural product, a beverage born on the tree. When you decant a bottle of Kevin’s naturally carbonated, bubbly Cidre, he wants you to be able to smell and taste his apples. But I think there’s something more to it than that. Even though they make cider differently in England, France, and Spain, the traditional makers I met all hinted at another reason they were willing to go to such effort. The less you do to a cider, the more you get out of it. When we were tasting his cider together, Kevin explained the flavors he was experiencing in the “front-palate, mid-palate, and back-palate”—and the descriptions through each phase were detailed and loving. If traditionalists could make the same cider in another way, they might be tempted. None of them—and this includes Kevin Zielinski—is convinced it’s possible, however, so they do it the long, slow, old-fashioned way.
The Modernists
The Farnum Hill barn/cidery may have an organizing principle, but I couldn’t detect it. A pod of wine barrels was basking in the sunshine near an open door, seemingly separated from the herd that huddled back in a dark room. Fermenters and tanks were tucked here and there, where they would accommodate the width of a forklift. In this way, it looked a whole lot like the cideries I had seen in Europe. One thing was different, though. Written on the barrels in chalk were these gnomic etchings: “Spitz,” “Ash. K,” “Wick.” They were a clue that although Steve Wood considers his cider to be wholly authentic and natural, he does not subscribe to the traditionalist view.
“When we first started, we were trying to make English-style cider, thinking about French cider, and there really was a day we had an epiphany when we realized we were getting aromas and flavors that we never encountered [in Europe]. We slowly started to realize that a lot in England and France were kind of hidebound by tradition.” Instead of European cider-makers, Steve turned to a different touchstone—American vintners. “We’re basically trying to make wine with something else.” Winemakers gave Farnum Hill the template it still uses to make its ciders, and this is a hallmark of this school of cider making.
When European cider-makers start bringing in their fruit, they don’t pay special attention to the blend of apples. They look at the proportion of bitter, sweet, and acid apples, but work with the fruit that’s available. A finished cider in France or England may use dozens of different varieties. Once the ciders have naturally fermented out, they might do a small amount of blending, but this is to adjust a gross element, like the level or type of acidity. That’s not at all the approach at Farnum Hill, where the ciders are constructed very carefully to achieve a particular flavor profile.
The method of construction started from deconstruction: Early on, Steve and his team sat down to taste ciders and develop an objective vocabulary so they could identify what they were tasting. Steve said they told themselves, “If you smell peaches, dog shit, a frog, and dried apricots, that’s what you write down.” He doesn’t like to mention this to his customers because it sounds fussy, but it was a key to not only understanding cider, but finding a way to describe what they were shooting for. They have detailed tasting notes going back years.
That’s why there are casks bearing inscrutable chalk notations—they refer to cider made from particular apples (Esopus Spitzenburg, Ashmead’s Kernel, and Wickson). They are all sharps, but “the difference between [them] is huge,” Steve exclaimed. To illustrate, he took a small amount from each cask so I could taste them. It was striking. In one, the acidity was lacerating, just rough and vicious—it reminded me of some of the extreme sour beers American craft breweries make. Another was also sharply acidic, but it was bright and lemony and made you think of the rays of sunshine streaming into the cidery. Steve can use those different types of acidity to produce a flavor profile he likes. You can’t un-blend cider, he pointed out (“it’s like putting sugar in your coffee”), so the important blending at Farnum Hill happens before bottling.
“We’re not thinking about the varietal mix—I mean, when we finally get something blended we’ll reconstruct it [by variety]. We’re not thinking about 42 percent Dabinett and 14 percent Wickson; we’re thinking about what it smells and tastes like.” In this way, Steve is able to use a specific palette to broadcast a Farnum Hill house flavor. “We’re acid lovers,” he told me. In England and France, some cider-makers want the softness that comes with malolactic fermentation, when the harsher malic acid is converted to gentler lactic acid, but Steve wants the edge of malic acid. With malolactic fermentations, “you get a peanut butter sandwich—absolutely no sharp acid left.” Using the techniques gleaned from winemakers, he can put whatever edge on the cider he wants.
Another of the country’s most respected cider-makers, Diane Flynt, has a similar approach. She’s the founder of the Foggy Ridge cidery in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia. She did not start out, like Steve Wood, as an orchardist. She planted her trees specifically for cider making in 1997, focusing on some of the most illustrious of the old American cider apples: (Virginia’s own) Hewe’s Crab Apple, which by the time William Coxe was writing about it in 1817 was already at least one hundred years old, Harrison (Coxe: “produces a high coloured, rich and sweet cider of great strength”), Graniwinkle (“resembles a sirup in taste and consistency”), Newtown Pippin (“the finest apple of our country”), and several others. She grows more than thirty varieties, including some French and English apples. It wasn’t until 2004 that she got her first full harvest, and the first Foggy Hill ciders came out the next year.
Wine is the reference point for Diane, too. When I asked her what she was trying to achieve with her ciders, she described her favorite wines. “High-elevation wines that have a lot of acidity, lower alcohol, very crisp, clean.” In fact, she has hired a winemaker, Jocelyn Kuzelka, to help with the cider making. Foggy Ridge’s orchards are up in the mountains at 3,000 feet [915 meters], far higher than those in Europe, New England, or the Pacific Northwest. At one point, she mentioned a fact other cideries have never highlighted: that a large diurnal variance (the difference between the day’s high and low temperature) produced the best grapes—and, she felt, the best apples too. I sensed, as she was talking, that she was obliquely describing the Foggy Ridge palate when she talked about high-elevation fruit.
Diane has a rounded accent that makes it seem like she’s speaking more slowly than she actually is. Continuing with the theme of making good ciders, she said, “We strive for a very clean ferment; I don’t want a lot of funk.” Like Steve, she’s focused on the flavors of the apples. “We want to really express the fruit, because we go to a lot of trouble to grow the fruit.” This is not an unusual perspective for an orchardist cider-maker. Orchardists spend a lot of time lovingly tending their trees and sampling their fruit. They have a proprietary sense over the flavor that they want drinkers to appreciate. But that’s true of traditional cider-makers, too. For the modernists, though, even fermentation flavors occlude the apple.
PRODUCTION
There are times when it feels impossible to fully appreciate the variables that a cider-maker confronts. It seems that way to cider-makers, too. When he gets going, Steve Wood sounds like he has at least mapped the terrain of these variables, like booby traps he must carefully step around. In the course of one long burst of information, he touched on yeast strains, fermentation temperature, fermentation vessels, pH, and blending, and words like “mercaptans,” “porosity,” and “reductive aromas” rained down amid oblique references to the science of positive ions and binding sulfites. “We dump thousands of gallons of the stuff out on the ground because we tried something and it didn’t work.” He sighed. “It’s possible to know more than somebody else about something and still know nothing.”
He knows a lot. And more than that, what he has learned has given him pretty strong views about how to make cider. One of the defining characteristics of cider-makers like Steve is the use of yeast. Farnum Hill was fortunate to have the insight of Nicole LeGrand Leibon, who previously worked at White Labs, a yeast company. Steve has enormous respect for Nicole’s palate, and she has been one of his key collaborators on blending. Despite all this sophistication, Farnum Hill uses a nearly fifty-year-old commercial strain, Pasteur Red Star Champagne yeast. After several yeast trials, “we decided we wanted something that ferments absolutely reliably to dryness and adds absolutely no character of its own.” He chuckled and noted, “Wine guys hate that yeast because it doesn’t do anything for you; we like it because it doesn’t do anything for you.” This view is the logical terminus of the get-yeast-out-of-the-way philosophy, but it typifies the modernist approach.
When I asked Diane Flynt about her yeast, I made the mistake of mentioning natural fermentation, and I think she must have thought I had a preference for it. “There’s some romance about wild yeast, but wild yeast is Saccharomyces,” she said when I stumbled into the question. (Saccharomyces is a strain of yeast, the same domestic or wild; she was in effect saying, “yeast is yeast.”) “I think yeast is natural fermentation. There’s not anything special about it. You can buy it; it’s just a yeast.” (For the record, I’m blissfully agnostic on the question of yeasts. I’ve enjoyed ciders made a multitude of ways.)
In fact, they think about yeast a lot at Foggy Ridge. The process there is to ferment different juices with different yeasts. “We choose yeast based on fermentation requirements, but also, we’ve found that some apples work better with some yeasts, with different yeasts than others.” This went back to the process that both she and Steve use to construct their cider from blends. In the case of Foggy Ridge, though, Diane and Jocelyn believe different strains actually coax more of the character out of the fruit than purely neutral yeasts. A similar philosophy, but different approach.
Both ferment cold, and Diane uses stainless steel. (“We ferment like a winemaker.”) Where Foggy Ridge uses multiple yeasts, at Farnum Hill, wood-aging helps develop character. Part of this has to do with the “porosity” of the oak that Steve mentioned earlier, but there’s also “definite microbial interaction.” I found this most curious: The yeast he wants perfectly neutral, but a soupçon of wood-borne bacteria he encourages. “Who knows what the hell is in there.” He paused as he regarded the barrels. “We make a lot of gestures to the gods.”
The most important—and most distinguishing—feature of this approach is blending. It’s where the cider is actually put together, scent by scent, flavor by flavor. Both do a “field blend” of fruit coming in the door. This is to bring the acidity into a comfortably anti-microbial zone. “We’re looking for a pH of like 3.5, maybe 3.6,” Steve explained. “The Dabinett, for example, is like 4.4, so you need a lot of acid to bring that stuff down.”
The final blends at both cideries result in product lines that have regular names, like Extra Dry, Farmhouse, and Semi-Dry (Farnum Hill) and First Fruit, Serious Cider, and Sweet Stayman. But like wine, these are vintage products and they taste different year to year. They have something recognizable, but it’s impressionistic. When Steve was describing what he was shooting for with Extra Dry, he said, “We’re looking for a bunch of the high fruits, little bits of tropical things, pineapple to grapefruit, orange and orange peel. We want the bitter and acid in pretty close balance with maybe the acid a little bit ahead of the bitter. We want the finish to carry the fruits all the way down and the acid to clean your palate.”
I have spent some time in Oregon’s Yamhill County drinking pinot noir and pinot gris, and I’ve spent time in Europe talking to traditional cider-makers. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Steve’s description reminded me a lot more of the way vintners talk. That seems like a pretty good metaphor for the modernist cider-maker.
The Experimentalists
Evangelists come in all flavors, from the dogmatic, fire-and-brimstoners to the born-salesman P.T. Barnums. When Nat West decided to take his expansive home-cider operation pro in 2011, he made no bones about his preaching ambitions. He called his company Reverend Nat’s and he speaks the gospel of cider to anyone who will listen. If you’re looking for someone to sketch out (foresee?) what the future of American cider looks like, Nat is a pretty good place to start.
Reverend Nat’s is a cidery of the modern variety, located in Portland, Oregon’s dense inner Northeast on a surprisingly secluded, leafy side street. There are many trees about, but they grow from little bare patches cut out from the sidewalks. If there are any apple trees among the maples and oaks, they’re ornamental species. The building is an old warehouse, but Nat has installed a cozy taproom near the entrance. When you walk in and sit down at the bar—as I did the first time I visited—your view is the cidery beyond. In the middle-distance are stacks of “totes”—plastic cubes the size of an industrial washing machine—bubbling with fermenting cider or sweating with thawing juice, while in the back of the cavern are large steel fermenters, adding depth to the visual tableau. The day I visited, one of Nat’s assistants was filling carboys with juice for use in yeast trials.
Unless you’re a close watcher of the burgeoning cider market, you’re probably unaware of the nearly existential war taking place in the United States to define what cider should be. The protagonists in this battle run the gamut from the large industrial cideries who want you to think of cider as a sweet, appley frolic to artisanal producers like Steve Wood and Kevin Zielinski making sophisticated, complex products. Tentative new drinkers are caught in the middle, susceptible to the notion that there really is an answer to what cider “should” taste like.
Nat West is the perfect guy to reframe the discussion. He does not see the debate in terms of “sides.” There is no cider-maker less doctrinaire, less driven by standards and tradition (which is just one clue that “Reverend Nat” and Nat West are not the same being). In the short time he has been making cider, Nat has been known for his flights of fancy. The cidery’s flagship is called Hallelujah Hopricot, and is made to resemble a Belgian witbier (sort of). Nat spices the cider with coriander, bitter orange peel, and grains of paradise, infuses it with Cascade hops, and tops it off with apricot juice. Another of his potions includes ginger, lemongrass, lime zest, and wild quinine.
Kevin Zielinski uses natural fermentation for the same reason Steve Wood pitches an extremely neutral yeast—to accentuate the apple. Nat takes the opposite view. He uses beer yeasts to create more flavor for his ciders. The Hopricot uses a Belgian saison yeast famous for producing compounds that taste like tropical fruit. He also uses an English ale yeast and a Czech lager yeast. In each case, he chooses the yeast because of the flavors it adds to his cider, which from the traditionalist’s perspective means obscuring the fruit.
At the same time, Nat is a student of cider making—he loaned me an American cider-making book from 1822—and produces wholly traditional products like a still Kingston Black English-style cider. He’s one of the few American cider-makers to experiment with natural fermentation, and secretes bottles of English farmhouse cider behind the bar. One of his regular products is Revival Dry (which uses English bittersweets) and another is Newtown Pippin (made solely with the ancient American heirloom variety). Usually “experimental” refers to people doing things that deviate from the standards. With Nat, everything is grist for experimentation. After the 2013 harvest, he used the spent pomace from English bittersweet apples to make a naturally fermented ciderkin—a product he read about in the nineteenth-century book he loaned me.
Hopped Cider
Among the dense thicket of experimental American ciders, at least one group has emerged as a kind of modern-day standard: hopped cider. The first cidery to make one was, appropriately, Oregon’s Wandering Aengus. More than 90 percent of the commercial hops produced in the United States are grown in Oregon and Washington, and Wandering Aengus is just a few miles from the nearest fields. “We got the ball rolling,” said founder Nick Gunn, who credits his partner, James Kohn, with the idea, “and now there are a lot of hop ciders out there.”
Because American cideries have to work with apples originally cultivated for eating, they regularly add in ingredients to round out the flavor profile. In beer, hops are boiled to convert certain acids into bittering compounds that help balance the sweetness of the malt. Cider isn’t boiled, though, so the hops go into finished cider at cool temperatures. In brewing, this is called “dry-hopping,” and brewers employ it to add aroma to their beer. That’s how it works in cider, too, but because aroma is the central component in what we call “flavor,” the bright, citrusy aromas seem to translate into taste as well as scent. Different hop varieties produce different aromas, so cideries can customize the flavor for their ciders.
Hopping a cider seems to create a bridge to beer drinkers, as well, especially on the West Coast, where hoppy beers are wildly popular. They provide an access point for beer drinkers, who find something recognizable in their local cider. It’s difficult to track their numbers, but one can safely say there are dozens of hopped ciders on the market, and new ones arrive every month.
Nat got his start as a home cider-maker, as a way of helping a friend get rid of his annual burden of backyard apples. He had been doing a project on his house and happened to have some twenty-ton house jacks handy. “So I whipped together a twenty-ton hydraulic cider press.” He tells the story of what came next in suitably reverential tones. “I remember the first thing I did. It was summertime, so it was getting dark, and I had just finished getting it all together. I took the apple, put it in a metal bowl, and put the press on top of it and crushed the apple. Some juice came out and I shared some with my daughter and we drank it and we were like, ‘Yes! This is awesome.’”
Nat started sharing his cider with friends at a regular potluck dinner he hosted every week, and his production grew and grew. Pretty soon he was scanning the neighborhood for trees he could use to feed his hobby. At one point he was making five hundred gallons of the stuff a year—the equivalent of thirty-two beer kegs. It was around that time that he found a small orchard that had cider fruit—bittersweets and heirloom apples. The regular production was spoken for, but Nat made a deal to buy the “windfalls”—those apples that fell to the ground in the autumn. From there, it wasn’t a huge leap to convert it to a commercial operation.
PRODUCTION
Nat West and Reverend Nat are not the same person. The latter figure is an invention of the cidery—Colonel Sanders, not Martha Stewart. Yet West, with his long, old-timey goatee, sometimes seems a bit Reverendish. As we were touring the cidery, his way of speaking was mostly casual and almost folksy, and I imagine that at public events, he slides into the Reverend role easily enough. There were moments when he would drop paragraphs of dense technical explanations into conversation, though, and the portrait shifted. A question about fermentation sparked a comment about long-chain acids and sugar molecules. He gave me a more technical description of malolactic fermentation than I received anywhere else. And once, in describing bacteriological behavior, he veered from the scientific back to the folksy and amusing. “We get molds that are crazy—you get these fronds that are sticking straight up in the air. We have a fish-fry scooper and we just scoop it off the top.”
He has a similarly dichotomous approach to making cider. On the one hand, the way he makes cider is purely modern America. Since it has been centuries since America made cider on a commercial scale, nearly all the apples have been bred for eating or cooking. In the Midwest and especially in New England some of the cooking varieties—Cortland, Newtown Pippin, Northern Spy—work pretty well in ciders. They don’t have tannin, but they have aromatics, flavor, and acid.
In the Pacific Northwest, supermarket eating apples are king. Most of these varieties are bred for sweetness. Washington state produces 60 percent of the country’s apples, and nearly 90 percent of those are just five varieties: Red Delicious, Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith, and Golden Delicious. Those apples are not particularly good for cider—in fact, they’re bad—but they are cheap. Oregon cider-makers can have a 5,500-gallon truck of apple juice for no more than $2.20 a gallon. It’s why the large majority of West Coast cideries just use dessert fruit. But lest you think a lesser apple makes a lesser cider, Nat would like a word with you.
“One of our company’s unofficial mottos is ‘making good cider out of bad apples.’ Literally bad apples—they’re not good apples.” But, he says, “We’re certainly not doing ourselves any favors by complaining about the lack of bittersweet apples. I’m like, Do you people have no imagination? Can we not figure out a way to make good-selling, honest cider with what we have on hand?”
Nat, of course, has no doubt about the answer to the question.
Cideries working with dessert fruit don’t spend a lot of time fooling around with fermentation. I was surprised when I visited Wandering Aengus to find no conditioning tanks, just fermenters. Because the juice is largely just simple sugars, a dash of acidity, and very little in the way of interesting flavors or aromatics, there’s no reason not to ferment a batch out fast. Nat can completely ferment his Hallelujah Hopricot in just six days. This is why he puts so much emphasis on yeast; since the fruit contributes so little, he leans on the yeast for added character. If he’s using a beer yeast, he’ll ferment it at the temperature appropriate to the type of beer—warm for his saison and English ale yeasts, cold for the lager strain. “We try to hit a taste; we pick a yeast for a taste and then we baby that yeast to get the most flavors out of it. We’re aiming for esters, and we get more esters out of the hot stuff.”
It’s also why cideries regularly add spices, other fruit, and hops. I recently went to Bushwhacker’s, the cider pub in Portland, to assemble a list of the extra ingredients appearing in American ciders on the store’s shelves. What follows is not exhaustive, but it is more than a little suggestive: allspice, apricot, Asian pear, blackberry, boysenberry, brown sugar, caramel, cherry, chipotle, cinnamon, cloves, cucumber, currant, elderflower, gin-barrel, ginger, habanero, honey, hops, juniper, lavender, raisins, raspberry, rose hip, smoked apple, tea, and verbena. I’ve tried enough of these to know that they’re not all successful. The most interesting additives are subtle and evocative. They pick up a flavor or aroma latent in the cider and accentuate it. From time to time a bold flavor functions like an infusion, but then the drink becomes less like a cider and more like a cocktail.
The Sound of History Rhyming
Adding flavors to cider may strike you as the kind of thing that would only happen in these modern, debased times. In fact, humans were adding flavor at least two hundred years ago. Writing in 1822, James Thacher made the observation, “An English writer says that an infusion of hops is useful in cider, to give it a flavor, and an agreeable bitter. Another recommends grinding elderberries with the fruit, which gives the cider a fine color as well as flavor… . Ginger, cinnamon, spices, raisins, etc. have their advocates, who assure us that they are very good ingredients in cider.” He went on to write the following, which I strongly believe are practices that will stay confined to the nineteenth century. “Some advise to make use of bullock’s blood, calf’s feet jelly, isinglass, etc. which may be well if the cider needs doctoring” (Thacher’s emphasis). Even Nat West isn’t likely to make a calf’s-feet-jelly cider anytime soon.
In most of Nat’s ciders, there’s a blend of different ingredients and techniques, and this is another way to inflect a cider without overwhelming it. One of his most interesting projects involves fermenting apple and cherry juice with a strain of pure Lactobacillus. “Lacto” is the bacteria that turns milk into yogurt, and it is used in certain types of beer to produce a similar tangy flavor. It works surprisingly well with fruit juice, too, giving it a blast of acid, but also some softer esters that accentuate the juice. Amazingly, he pitched the bacteria at 95°F [35°C], and yet it was still free of the objectionable compounds bacteria sometimes produce.
We could go on and on—I’m not even going near Tepache, a Mexican pineapple cider—but one other cider deserves a mention. Nat has been conducting experiments in ciderkin, a very old cider that farmers used to make to extend their production. No matter how efficient a cider press is, the apple never releases all of its juice. Two hundred years ago, farmers re-wetted the spent pomace (skins, dry pulp, and seeds), let it sit a couple days, and pressed again. They got a thin juice that would make a low-alcohol cider. Nat does the same thing, letting the juice ferment naturally. When he’s working with dessert-fruit pomace, he often adds botanicals to enhance the flavor of the ciderkin. If he has pomace that includes tannic apples, as he did when working in collaboration with the Portland-based cidery Cider Riot, he adds nothing else. The Cider Riot collaboration was one of the most interesting American ciders I’ve tasted. It had the aroma of a Basque cider but not the intensity; it was light, tart, and very refreshing.
Of all the world’s cider regions, none is as interesting in the second decade of the twenty-first century as the United States. As I’ve toured around, I’ve asked cider-makers what kind of ciders they think Americans will be drinking in a decade. This is something they think about deeply—their livelihoods depend on it. If you zoom out to the bird’s-eye view, they all agree: The future is biased toward “good” cider. They look at what happened when good spirits, wine, and beer started becoming more common, and they expect the same thing to happen with ciders. But when you zoom in and ask what “good” cider is, the differences among the three schools come into focus.
Steve Wood thinks good cider will be defined by fruit. “You gotta start with something that smells good and then you have to keep delivering on the promise. Tannin, fruit, acid, and some kind of balance.” Cider won’t come into its own until we have the fruit to make it special. “Most of the ciders, the so-called ‘craft’ ciders, are being made from apples that nobody wants anymore.”
Kevin Zielinski is also committed to good fruit, but for him, tradition is even more important. “We are now on a different stage, and the players, all with motivation and zeal for the craft, are beginning to understand the traditions we have inherited. I choose to echo the past, to understand in today’s age of technology the craft of cider making with traditional fruit.”
Nat West had the most radical answer—one that made me re-think the idea of “proper” cider. In his view, there’s a cultural residue clinging to the idea that a cider must be made a particular way. “American cider should have an American taste to it. I’m not defining what an American taste is, but an American taste is not English, it is not French. If you’re trying to create a style or a culture, don’t use other existing styles as your reference point. Look at what you have on hand here, and what people here are already used to and accustomed to. No one is accustomed to drinking French and English cider.”
This is an incredibly liberating point of view. My own personal tastes run to the traditional and simple. Having visited cideries in England, France, and Spain, I can now taste those countries in a glass of traditional cider. Sometimes I pick up a sagardoa or cidre from the market just so I can take a little vacation to a Basque or French orchard. But those countries don’t have the patent on authentic. There’s absolutely nothing that says American cider-makers must follow their practices. “Who says that’s better, that that’s desirable even?” Nat asked. “We can grow bittersweet apples here, we make ciders with bittersweet apples, but do we need to? We’ve got great apples here—it’s still called cider.”
You find a ton of different products on the shelves right now all bearing the name “cider”—sweet, carbonated supermarket ciders like Angry Orchard; sophisticated, vinous ciders like Farnum Hill’s; traditional, natural ciders like EZ Orchard’s; and wildly experimental ciders like Reverend Nat’s. At the moment, people are very interested in cider and they’re all selling. It’s very likely, however, that Americans will develop preferences. It’s easy to distinguish English, French, and Spanish ciders, because drinkers in those countries have particular preferences. We don’t know what “American” cider will taste like in the future, but there’s a very good chance one of these cideries is already making it.
