Every season has its iconic beverage. Winter demands hot chocolate and eggnog, spring brings dandelion wine, summer is the time for iced tea and beer. Autumn means apple cider.
But why is autumn the time of year for apple cider when you can buy apple juice in the grocery store year-round? Why wait?
Apple juice is not the same as apple cider. The main difference is that juice is filtered and cider isn't.
If we were purists we would refer to apple cider as juice because that's what it is: the result of pressing apples to extract their liquid.
According to David R. Williams, professor of English at Virginia's George Mason University, in his 1990 paper “Hard Cider's Mysterious Demise,” “the thin, clear liquid sold in the stores as 'apple juice' is in fact apple juice that has been homogenized, pasteurized, sweetened, filtered, and otherwise processed until almost all of the flavor, color, and content has been removed.”
See for yourself at mason.gmu.edu/~drwillia/cider.html.
It's no wonder many of us wait until autumn to drink something that actually tastes like apples.
Cider means business
For an orchard, pressing and selling apple cider can make the difference between staying in business and selling the farm.
According to Malah Miller of Dwight Miller & Son Orchard in Dummerston, “Our [cider] press is why we can [afford to] remain organic.”
She explains that apples sold “off the shelf” don't bring the same margin as “value-added” products such as cider and apple cider vinegar, which demand higher sticker prices.
And consumers accustomed to factory-formed food might pass on apples with “imperfect” appearances, even though their quality is otherwise excellent. When those apples are pressed into delicious cider none shall be the wiser.
Striking a balance
Producing desirable apple cider is an art requiring more than simply tossing random apples into a press and hoping for the best.
Scott Farm's Zeke Goodband says he strives for balance in his cider. A good cider, he says, calls for a blend of apple varieties: “Some tart, some a little sweet. Some aromatics. You need ones with good pectin for body, for mouth feel,” he explains.
Goodband says his farm's cider changes as the season progresses: “It's different every time. Early-season cider will be different from late-season cider.”
He says he favors, for his cider, older apple varieties, such as Cox's Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinette (the queen of the Pippins, a favorite during the farm's annual apple tasting event), Ananas Reinette, Orleans Reinette, Blue Pearmain, and Holstein.
And when those types of apples are unavailable?
“There are some days when I think we don't have the right apples, and we just run out of cider,” Goodband says.
Read Miller's explanation of good cider-blending practices borders on the lyrical:
“There's no set recipe. There's a formula, and the blend will change depending on the senescence of the fruit. I think of cider apples as a family. You got your little kids; your teenagers; Ma and Pa, who do most of the work - the horsepower generation - and Grandma and Grandpa, who are retiring.
“I build the family according to what's available. You can't have all 'kids,' for example, but all members of the family add flavor, depth, body, and interest, just like in a real family.”
Read says his farm has produced more than a million gallons of cider and that he builds his cider blends depending on his customer base. Whereas Dwight Miller Orchard used to sell to the mass market, these days it focuses on local distribution.
“Most people around here like depth in their cider and that means more of an acid base,” Read says.
Read especially likes McIntosh for its acidic flavor profile.
Pasteurization helps determine apple cider's flavor as well. Safety laws require cider sold at market be pasteurized - heat-treated - or else disinfected by exposure to ultraviolet (UV) light. Most cider sold in grocery stores has been pasteurized. The UV method is fairly new.
Dwight Miller uses UV to treat its cider because, as Malah explains, it produces a better product: “Flash-pasteurization makes the bottom fall out of the flavor - the thing that makes it cider.”
She says her orchard's mission is to produce certified organic fruits and vegetables - “good, healthy food” - and in their view UV affects cider's taste the least.
The law allows farms to sell unpasteurized cider too, but only from the farm; it can't have gone through a distributor or other third party. Scott Farm chooses this method - pressing and selling unpasteurized cider - for a variety of reasons:
Goodband says selling “raw” apple cider eliminates a very large expense: the purchase and maintenance of a pasteurizer. “We put our cider up in glass jars and we're happy just selling it here on the farm. It's a right fit for us,” he explains.
Then there's hard cider...
Should you travel just a few hours north into Canada - or overseas to the United Kingdom or France - and ask for cider, the contents of your glass will hardly resemble what you would get here. And prepare to show your identification.
In most other parts of the world where apples are pressed for drinking, “cider” means a fermented, alcoholic beverage.
And up until the end of the 19th century, that's what it meant in the United States, too.
According to Williams, hard cider was not only widely produced and consumed in the U.S., it also held a place of high esteem on American tables and in American taverns.
“Perhaps the height of cider's popularity came in the election campaign of 1840, when the conservative Whig candidate, William Harrison, managed to convince a majority of working class Americans that he was one of them by associating himself with the symbols of 'log cabin and hard cider,'” Williams says.
Indeed, hard cider - which is how we still know it - was crucial to Vermont's early history.
Children and adults enjoyed cider any time of the day from about 1700 until roughly the time of the Civil War. Because Vermont's early Colonial settlers were efficient at fouling the natural water sources wherever they landed, water was generally considered unpotable.
Apples, however wild and unpredictable prior to mass cultivation, were abundant, and safe to press and drink.
Cider consumption during the 1700s and early 1800s wasn't confined to Vermont. Cultural and food historians such as Williams tell us cider was the preferred alcoholic beverage of the nation's working class.
That said, he writes, “somehow, by the end of the 19th century and well before Prohibition, cider all but disappeared in the United States. That hard cider remains popular in all the other outposts of British culture, that apples are still a major American crop, and that every other alcoholic drink once popular in America came back after Prohibition, make the question of cider's disappearance all the more perplexing.”
Jason MacArthur, who with his wife, Lauren, owns Marlboro's Whetstone CiderWorks, says cider experienced a rapid decline in the late 1800s, “mostly due to the temperance movement, which were mostly Protestants, who also happened to be the cider drinkers.”
With the influx of German and Irish immigrants, who brought with them a beer-centric culture, and with newfound ease in making beer in cities, where ships brought grain, beer took over.
'A complete explosion'
During the last few years, MacArthur reports, “hard cider's population has risen. It's a boom, a complete explosion of the alcoholic drink market. We are fortunate to be in it.”
MacArthur found himself a little ahead of the curve when he found himself in Europe. Working at a vineyard in France, he noticed wine's inextricable connection to the local culture and agriculture. It was as if the terroir - the weather and geographical conditions of the local terrain - had woven its way into everyday life.
Upon returning to Vermont, he wondered, “What's like that for Vermont?” The answer: cider.
After conducting research, and after having made cider as a hobbyist since the late 1990s, in 2009 Jason and Lauren wrote a business plan and opened Whetstone CiderWorks.
Smaller craft producers, such as Whetstone CiderWorks, have popped up across New England in the past decade. A few West Coast makers claim to make “New England-style” hard cider.
Vermonters might recognize Woodchuck, a popular bottled hard cider made in Middlebury since 1991 (and recently sold to Ireland's C & C Group for $305 million) and now distributed beyond New England.
Even the major players are getting in on the act. This March MillerCoors released Smith & Forge, its hard cider brand. In April Anheuser-Busch debuted Johnny Appleseed. Earlier in the year, the company began distributing Stella Artois Cidre.
Why is hard cider so big in 2014? As MacArthur posits, “There are trends in the culture that you can't explain, but [cider] is all over the country now.”
He attributes some of its growth to the rise in people claiming gluten-sensitivity. Cider, unlike beer, which is made from grain, is gluten-free.
The generation known as “millennials” - ages 20-35 - might also drive cider's success, says MacArthur.
“Demographic research shows this group of alcohol buyers is curious, they have adventurous palates, and their tastes in drinks are more diverse than earlier generations. They're also into the local foods movement, and cider, where possible, can do that,” he adds.