Why Cider? A short version of my journey from brewing beer to making cider
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| A Blackberry Sage Cider made by the author with a neighbor's sage and locally grown blackberries. |
Among friends and acquaintances, I've historically been known as a beer guy. I started drinking craft beers over 30 years ago when a great and iconic craft bar in Reading, PA began serving me when I was a couple of years shy of the legal drinking age. That initial spark with beers like barleywine, brown ale, and pale ale led to decades of drinking and enjoying beers that are different from the mainstream.
It took a while, but the beer renaissance of the early aughts inspired me to start brewing while I was working on my PhD. I even predicted my future then: "I'm going to get my PhD and open a brewery!" I would jokingly say to my colleagues. And that half-joke became reality when I decided to open a small brewery instead of taking a teaching gig somewhere I did not know or care to be. All the while, I continued to support and drink independent beer.
I enjoyed the brewery life, but it was in those years of running a brewpub that things began to shift. I opened that brewery with my brother-in-law as a business partner. In the beginning we both brewed the beer, and I ran the pub with my partner. Our eclectic approach to brewing gained regional recognition, and we grew quickly - to the point that we needed to firm up our roles. Simply because he had children and I did not, my brother-in-law took the day job part of the operations and became our head brewer. I took on the challenges of running a brew pub and selling our beer.
It was that commitment to the pub that became so influential to my future. My training in anthropology, and a belief in working for social justice, guided how I ran the pub. I paid our staff a fair living wage and instituted a unique work environment in which everyone did a bit of everything, rotating through various roles each shift and sharing tips. I also created a truly local kitchen in which everything outside of oil and some herbs was sourced from within 50 miles of the pub, almost always directly from the farmer/butcher/cheese-maker/baker/producer. One year we even won an award for "Best Farm to Table Restaurant" of Philadelphia, and we were more than an hour outside of the city!
I believe that commitment to local producers was a large part of our success, and an even bigger part of the community that we built at the pub. The relationships we built were more than just a buyer-seller or consumer-producer situation, and we became and remain friends with many of the people we worked with and served through the pub. While the idea of a local economy is somewhat obtuse in the age of Amazon, Walmart, and fast food, it became palpable in the world around the pub. We were supporting our staff of 20 people by supporting 30-some small family owned local producers to create our "product."
While developing and implementing the local approach to running the pub, I still held interest in fermenting liquids. At first I continued brewing some tiny batch specialty beers, but time was short, and brewing was time consuming. I dabbled with kombucha, but never found that very fulfilling. Then one day an old friend showed up at the brewery full of excitement. He and a couple of our buddies had just harvested a pick-up truck full of apples, and were taking them to get pressed. "Can you make cider?" he asked. "We're going to have too much to know what to do with - do you want a bunch of the juice?"
And there it was. As luck would have it, we could make hard cider under our brewing license, and we still had a couple of small fermenters sitting unused from my tiny-batch beer brewing. The next day, my friend returned with a pick-up full of apple cider, and we carted it all in and filled up the fermenters. My first batch of hard cider had commenced, bringing my efforts at creating a truly local business ever closer to reality.
I continued making cider at the brewery for almost five years, creating the only truly local beverage on our draft list. While our beer was made right there on site as well, we were shipping ingredients from all over the world to make that beer. Hops were coming from Australia, New Zealand, or the other side of the country. Grains were coming from the mid-West US (we were on the East Coast) at best, but also from Canada, Germany, and the UK. Even our yeast was getting shipped in. Our "local" beer wasn't local in the least bit outside of where it was made.
And this brings up the question of why "local" is important to me. You can do an internet search of something like "why does supporting local matter" and a whole slew of good articles come up. And they all get at the reasons behind my pursuit of building a locally based business. For me, one of the more compelling reasons lies in the act of supporting other locally owned businesses, which are often small and family owned. Distilled down, supporting local means supporting other families in your community. The approach keeps money in the community and the local economy.
In their book, Selling Local, Jennifer Meta Robinson and James Farmer investigate the idea of local food as a community based food movement. They describe economic, social, and environmental benefits that result from participating in a robust local food community. They see local food, with its focus on quality and deliberateness, as oppositional to the quantity and convenience of the mainstream Capitalist food market. “Food depends on relationships and enables them. Done right, local food can help stabilize local economies, both urban and rural, increase access to healthy foods, lessen environmental consequences, draw people into association with one another, and provide them with the raw materials for personal and cultural expression.” [1]
Supporting local is good for the environment. When we buy local, we aren't trying to harvest early, and store things in refrigeration and ship them across the world. Our fresh food is truly fresh, and it's from a few miles away. There is no national or global supply chain outside of your or your friend’s vehicle. We even had one farmer deliver occasionally with his bicycle! And supporting local farmers, helps to preserve that farmland in your community, also a boon for the environment when compared to more development.
Then there's the community building that comes with supporting local. When you buy something local, you typically are buying from the producer themselves, someone in their family, or someone in your community that works for them. Those people then have further incentive to come and support your local business. In our pub, it was common for a cheese maker, butcher, or farmer to be sitting at our bar, and chatting with our customers as they consumed their products. People got to know each other through our systems of local production. Supporting local helped to build community in a very tangible way.
When I started to make cider for the brewpub, it slid so nicely into that local model. We quickly partnered with a local orchard, just 15 miles away, for a steady supply of juice, and cider became entrenched on our menu. I began using other locally grown fruits, and my ciders evolved and gained a small following. Cider was allowing me to have fun with liquids again.
When the COVID pandemic hit, the brewpub fell apart. While the brewery kept brewing, my entire staff of 20, including myself and my partner, were left looking for new jobs. I had a couple of offers to take part in new brewery ventures. I considered brewing beer again, but it just didn't feel right. I couldn't find excitement in getting back into an industry that relies so heavily on the global supply chain, especially as problems with that supply chain were being increasingly exposed throughout the pandemic.
Still, I love the industry, and I believe in the “pub model” as a place for people to gather and talk, especially in a time that feels like people are more divided than ever. And so the idea of a cider pub began to come into focus. It took over a year and half to develop the idea and get the doors open, but we have a cidery up and running, and it's all the locally sourced, locally supporting, community building goodness that I knew it would be. We’re experiencing again, that supporting local food and producers can broaden our world and enhance our lives and communities.
[1] Selling Local: Why Local Food Movements Matter. 2017. Jennifer Meta Robinson and James Robert Farmer. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.
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