“What you have told us is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make themall into cider.”

—Benjamin Franklin in Remarks Concerning the

Savages of North America, reporting an American Indian’s

response to hearing the story of Adam and Eve

No one knows for certain who discovered cider, or exactly wherein the world it was first made and consumed. In part this is be-cause of cider’s sheer antiquity, its origins lost, like so many

early human developments, in the mists of prehistory. In part it is alsodue to the widespread distribution of apples throughout the world’s tem-perate growing regions. And because there would be no cider withoutapples, to really understand the history and development of cider and ci-dermaking, it is essential to know a little about where the apple comesfrom and how it has evolved.

Of all the fruits of this earth, few have been more celebrated thanthe apple, few have been cultivated more widely, and few have had alonger history of use and enjoyment, especially among the great civiliza-tions of Europe and Asia. In recent centuries, as conquerors andcolonists migrated from the Eurasian continent to the four corners ofthe globe, the apple invariably went along for the ride—either in theform of seeds, which spawned new and unique varieties, or as graftedtrees or scions (cuttings) taken from old and valued parent strains.

The species that we now know as the cultivated apple (Malus pumila,or M. domestica) probably arose in the valleys and rugged foothills of theTien Shan Mountains, in the border country between northwest Chinaand the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. In fact,the Kazakh capital’s name, Alma-Ata, means lit-erally “father of apples.” From this mountainousregion to the shores of the Caspian Sea, plantresearchers have discovered wild groves of the15

TheH

istoryofC

ider

1.

OPPOSITE: A traditionalold screw-type ciderpress on Jersey,Channel Islands.

the air, on the ground, and on the skins and fleshof apples) will go to work on apples naturally andbegin the process of fermentation. They wouldhave found, as the naturalist Henry David Thoreaudid in his rambles around Walden Pond, that eventhe sharpest apples mellow nicely with age—especially after the first winter frosts:

Those which a month ago were sour,crabbed, and quite unpalatable to the civi-lized taste, such at least as were frozen whilesound, let a warmer sun come to thawthem—for they are extremely sensitive to itsrays—are found to be filled with a rich, sweetcider, better than any bottled cider that Iknow of, and with which I am better ac-quainted than with wine. All apples are goodin this state, and your jaws are the cider-press. . . . It is a way to keep cider sweet with-out boiling. Let the frost come to freeze themfirst, solid as stones, and then the rain or awarm winter day to thaw them, and they willseem to have borrowed a flavor from heaventhrough the medium of the air in which theyhang.2

Prehistoric peoples doubtless would havetasted this kind of natural cider. But we can alsoimagine other scenarios that might have led themto an understanding and appreciation of alcoholic,or hard, cider. Perhaps some band of hunter-gath-erers drank a bit of the clear liquid that pooled inthe hollow of a tree beneath a heap of partiallycrushed apples. We can only guess what that firstsip must have tasted like to them: Did they hearthe angels sing, or did they spit out the fizzy, tangystuff? Regardless, it seems reasonable to assumethat cider was probably discovered many timesover, by many indigenous peoples, in almost everyregion of the world where apple trees were grow-ing wild.

Around eight thousand years ago, with thedevelopment of agriculture and the rise of the first

great cities and civilizations, apples began to ap-pear both as an article of trade and as a cultivatedcrop in the ancient world. While the climates ofEgypt and the Tigris-Euphrates Valley were proba-bly not cool enough to grow apple trees success-fully (at least on any large scale), there is ampleevidence that apples were imported by caravanalong the long-distance trade routes that wound allthe way from India and China to the easternMediterranean. These silk and spice roads passeddirectly through the apple’s Central Asian home-land, and before long the virtues of the fruit hadled to its cultivation in many lands, including Per-sia, Asia Minor, and northern Mesopotamia. Ap-ples were celebrated by the earliest writers, bothpopular and agricultural. Homer mentions themin The Odyssey, when the wandering heroOdysseus sees them growing in the gardens ofAlkinöos, king of Phaiakia. The fruit was also saidto have been a favorite dessert of Philip of Mace-don and of his son, Alexander the Great. It was acustom they probably picked up from the Persians,who regularly served apples along with other fruitsas a final course at their banquets. In fact, by impe-rial Roman times, apples had become such a com-mon fixture at meals that they gave rise to theproverbial Latin expression ova ad malum (“fromthe egg to the apple”), which implied the wholeprogression of a meal or, by extension, the wholescope of any event. Today we would say “fromsoup to nuts” to convey the same idea, but backthen eggs were customarily served as the firstcourse at a Roman meal, and apples as dessert.

Cider in Roman HistoryThe first recorded references to cider also dateback to Roman times. In 55 B.C. Julius Caesarbegan his conquest of Britain, where his soldiersfound the Celtic inhabitants fermenting the juiceof the native crab apples to make an alcoholic bev-erage. The Roman legionnaires and administratorswho subsequently settled in portions of Gaul

17The History of Cider

domestic apple’s main ancestor, M. sieversii. Thetrees and fruits of this one species are incrediblydiverse, in many respects similar to the wide rangeof today’s cultivated apple varieties. Scientists arestill debating how much or how little other wildspecies of apples might have contributed to the ge-netic makeup of our modern apple. These includethe bitter-fruited M. orientalis, which hails fromthe Caucasus region, and the European crab apple,M. sylvestris, whose native range stretches fromthe British Isles to Turkey.

Back in September of 2005, I had my first op-portunity to tour the large and impressive CentralAsian apple collection at the USDA’s Plant Genet-ics Resources Unit in Geneva, New York, whichfor more than a century has been the center ofapple research in America. My guide was Dr. PhilForsline, who had traveled to the former SovietCentral Asian republics beginning in the late1980s and had brought back seeds and cuttings ofwild apple trees from a variety of locations and cli-mates, from mountains to deserts. To see thesemature trees fruiting today in western New York

State is a wonderful experience, and it illustratesdramatically just how diverse M. sieversii can be.Although the majority of apples were small, yel-low, and often quite bitter or astringent (great forcidermaking!), there were also a few “elite” vari-eties that could just as easily have been brought tothe market and sold for eating out of hand, withlittle or no improvement needed. The fact thatsome wild apples could be so large and tasty was arevelation to me, and demonstrated just how effi-ciently natural selection can work over thousandsof years, even in remote regions where humanshaven’t been living or farming. In a 2006 book, au-thors Barrie Juniper and David Mabberley suggestthat bears and horses, not humans, were chiefly re-sponsible for the selection, improvement, and dis-persion of the wild apple.1 Today the goal, atGeneva and elsewhere, is to revisit the geneticroots of the apple, and to use the ancestral M. siev-ersii and other species to breed greater disease re-sistance into our own cultivated apples, creatingnew varieties that will require far less spraying,chemical or otherwise.

Even before the modern apple became widelyknown in Europe and Asia, there is evidence tosuggest that various indigenous peoples were al-ready making extensive use of wild apples. Wildapples were depicted in Paleolithic cave art thatdates from between 35,000 and 8000 B.C., and ar-chaeologists have found the carbonized remains ofapples in Anatolia dating back to 6500 B.C., and atthe sites of Neolithic lake settlements in what isnow Switzerland and Italy, which were occupiedbetween 2000 and 1600 B.C.

How these ancient peoples used apples ismore a matter of conjecture than scientific fact. Itseems likely, however, that they would have sam-pled fruit from all kinds of apple trees, selectingthose apples that tasted sweetest and most palat-able. And it isn’t much more of a stretch to imag-ine how these earliest orchardists first discoveredcider, as wild yeasts that are found everywhere (in

16 Cider, Hard and Sweet

Phil Forsline, curator emeritus of the apple collection at USDA's Plant Genetic ResourcesUnit in Geneva, New York, discusses apple treesgrown from seeds collected in Central Asia (background), with a group of visitors.

gradually in northwestern Europe, over a period ofseveral centuries. It is true that the emperorCharlemagne issued an edict stating that brewers,including cider- and perrymakers, should be en-couraged to develop their trade. And in Franconia,the region in modern-day central Germany, a ci-dermaking tradition did become established as apart of estates and monasteries, one that continueseven to this day, with both craft and commercialproducers making cider, albeit under differentnames like Apfelwein, Most, and Viez.4

Yet even in Normandy, which would becomeone of the world’s most celebrated cidermaking re-gions, cider was widely consumed before thetwelfth century only in years when there was ashortage of beer or other drinks brewed fromgrains and herbs, which were the most commonbeverages at the time. Not until the fourteenthcentury did cider become as popular and availableas beer and wine in Normandy. By 1371, however,almost as much cider was being sold at Caen aswine, and some of it was being shipped up theSeine to the Paris market.

Cider in Normandy was subject to heavy taxa-tion during the disastrous Hundred Years’ War be-tween England and France (1337–1453), but in thecentury following the wars its popularity spreadgreatly. In 1532 Francois I toured Normandy andordered several barrels of cider made from thePomme d’Espice apple for himself. At Val-de-Seinein the Contentin region, a gentleman named Guil-laume Dursus began studying the different kindsof cider apples and assembled a collection of thosehe considered the best varieties, taking the graftsfrom his home in northern Spain. And in 1588Charles IX’s physician, a man from Normandynamed Julien le Paulmier, published a treatise enti-tled De Vino et Pomaceo, in which he listed someeighty-two varieties of cider apples. Paulmier’swork helped to increase the popularity of ciderover a much broader area of France and encour-aged its sale.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-turies, the production of cider spread from Nor-mandy to other parts of France: Brittany, Maine,Picardy, Île-de-France, and Orléans. In the eigh-teenth century, agricultural societies were formedthat encouraged the production of cider and ciderapples by sponsoring prizes and competitions. Be-ginning in 1863, grapevines in French vineyardssuffered extensive damage from phylloxera, an in-sect related to aphids. By the time the destructionhad run its course, and the great vineyards werereplanting European wine grapes grafted onto in-sect-resistant American rootstocks, the French in-terest in cider was beginning to grow. Eventually,by the end of the nineteenth century, the Frenchgovernment estimated that more than one millionpersons were engaged in cidermaking; by 1902 thenation was producing around 647 million gallonscommercially (that is, not counting what farmerswere making and drinking themselves).

Cider in EnglandOn their arrival in Britain the Romans found theinhabitants making cider, presumably from theEuropean crab apple (Malus sylvestris), which hadbeen growing wild there since Neolithic times. Ev-idence at the Windmill Hill archaeological site inWiltshire suggests that the ancient Britons usedapples for food, though they seem to have reliedmainly on wild trees rather than planting them toany great extent. However, the Roman introduc-tion of cultivated apples and horticultural know-how soon led to the first orchards beingestablished in England.

This situation changed drastically with the fallof Rome, and orchards were abandoned as a suc-cession of invaders—Jutes, Saxons, and Danes—attacked British towns and settlements. As in therest of Europe, though, the spread of Christianityhelped to keep both knowledge and useful artsalive in the monasteries. The monastery at Ely inCambridgeshire was especially famous for its or-

19The History of Cider

(present-day France) and Britain are credited withhaving introduced several cultivated varieties ofapples, at least one of which has traditionallythought to have survived to modern times: theCourt Pendu Plat, also known as the Wise Applebecause it blossoms very late, thus “wisely” avoid-ing early spring frosts. (Another very old Bretonvariety, the Pomme d’Api, or Lady apple, was longassociated with the Appia variety of Roman times,though modern European authorities doubt thereis any connection).3 Even more importantly,though, the Romans brought with them their hor-ticultural knowledge, and introduced orchardingtechniques like grafting and pruning, which theyin turn had picked up from the Greeks and theSyrians. And, as the Spanish writer Eduardo Cotohas pointed out to me, some of the Roman soldierswho settled in Britain probably came from the re-gion of northern Spain, where a local cidermakingculture was already developing at around this time.

By the second and third centuries A.D., Romanauthorities reported that various European peopleswere making a number of more or less ciderlikedrinks (pomorum), created from different types offruit, that were reportedly similar to grape winesand in some cases superior to them. In the fourthcentury, Palladius wrote that the Romans them-selves were making perry, or pear wine, and Col-umella listed thirty-eight different varieties ofpears and twenty-four varieties of apples. Aroundthe same time, Saint Jerome used the term sicera todescribe fermented apple juice, from which we de-rive the word cider. Sikera was actually a Greekword meaning simply “intoxicating beverage,” andit comes in turn from the Hebrew word sekar(which some people also believe to be the root ofthe slang term schnockered.)

Cider in Western EuropeWith the collapse of the Western Roman Empire inthe fifth century A.D., the horticultural arts entereda period of decline in many parts of Europe. Fortu-

nately, along with other fields of knowledge, theskills of grafting, pruning, and fruit growing werepreserved during the Dark Ages by the Christianmonastic orders. Monastery gardens featuredmany types of edible and useful plants, and the riseand spread of the Church’s influence encouragedthe large-scale planting of fruit trees and vines onabbey lands.

At the same time, the Islamic Moors, whoruled much of Spain until the late fifteenth cen-tury, established impressive botanic gardens andbuilt on the knowledge of classical authors, devel-oping new varieties and techniques that greatly in-fluenced those gardeners who followed them. Infact, we probably have Spaniards to thank for de-veloping many of the classic bitter, high-tannin ap-ples that still make the richest, most distinctiveciders. For although most cider drinkers in NorthAmerica, through cultural familiarity, considerFrench and English hard ciders the finest in theworld, the people of northern (non-Moorish)Spain were evidently making sidra, or cider, longbefore the birth of Christ. With a moderate climatesimilar to that of our Pacific Northwest—onewhere apple orchards mingle with orangegroves—the coastal regions of Asturias and theEuskadi, or Basque country of Spain, representperhaps the oldest apple-growing lands in Europe.

Many of the apples grown at this time wereseedlings. Yet cultivated apple varieties rarely, ifever, resemble their parents when grown fromseed. Seedlings from large apples may producesmall fruit; seedlings of red apples may have greenor yellow fruit; and seedlings of sour apples maybear much sweeter fruit. For this reason, apple va-rieties that were considered especially valuable foreating or culinary use would usually have beenpropagated vegetatively by grafting, while lesschoice or less palatable fruit from seedling treeswould have been pressed into cider.

Given this fact, it is somewhat curious that astrong cider-drinking culture developed only

18 Cider, Hard and Sweet

amore, on his estate at Holme Lacy. Scudamorewas one of the many Royalist nobles and gentle-men who had retired to their country homes afterfighting in the English Civil War, and who spentthe years of the Protectorate cultivating their gar-dens and identifying new and interesting varietiesof fruit—all in all, a very productive and civilizedway to pass the time during a period of social up-heaval and internal exile.

The keen interest in identifying and improv-ing cider-apple varieties in the seventeenth cen-tury led to both technological advancements and amarked improvement in the quality of cider. JohnWorlidge, in his Vinetum Britannicum (1676),listed useful cider apples, and other amateur cider-makers also kept careful records about the relativemerits of single-variety ciders and blends. LordScudamore is credited with having bottled cider asearly as the 1640s at Holme Lacy, at a time whenalmost all cider was stored in wooden barrels anddrawn off “on draft” as needed. Scudamore madeuse of the new, stronger, coke-fired English glassbottles that had been recently introduced. Theslight fermentation that took place in the bottlesreleased carbon dioxide gas, which produced asparkling drink and helped preserve the cider bet-ter than could half-emptied wooden casks or bar-rels, where aerobic organisms came in contactwith the cider and often spoiled it.

The rich soils and the mild, moist climate ofEngland’s West Country made this region an idealplace to grow apple and pear trees, and cidermak-ing in general fit extremely well into Britain’s farmeconomy of the seventeenth century. Productive,low-maintenance, and long-lived, apple trees wereset out widely spaced in the field or orchard, witheither crops or sod grown among them, the latterfor pasturing dairy herds. Most cider apples didn’tneed to be picked until October or later, by whichtime other crops had been harvested and thefarmer had a bit of leisure. Once pressed into cider,the leftover apple pomace could be soaked with

water and pressed again to make a weak “water-cider” or “ciderkin,” then finally used as a feed forlivestock. Farmworkers received a cider allowanceas part of their wages, typically 2 quarts a day for aman and 1 quart for a boy. This practice dates backto at least the thirteenth century, when workers inmonastery orchards were paid in cider, and it con-tinued for nearly five hundred years, until it was fi-nally declared illegal in 1878.

Two other factors that encouraged cider pro-duction in England at this time were the shortageof burnable wood and international trade restric-tions. To brew ale required fuel for heat, both tomalt the barley and to boil the wort before fermen-tation; the cidermaking process, on the otherhand, didn’t require heat. Wood in England was in very short supply, so planting fruit trees madedoubly good sense: There were apples and pearsfor making cider and perry, plus wood from oldtrees for fuel and other uses. By 1615 the nationaltimber shortage had also led to a ban on the use of charcoal for iron smelting and glassmaking,prompting innovators like Robert Mansell and SirKenelm Digby in the 1620s and 1630s to developstronger coal-fired glass, as mentioned above.6Add to this the shaky international relations be-tween England and other European nations, par-ticularly wine-producing countries like France and

21The History of Cider

chards and vineyards, and a twelfth-century planof the Christ Church monastery in Canterburyshows its pomerium, or apple garden, where applesand pears were grown for both eating and pressinginto cider and perry.

The Norman Conquest in 1066 sparked a newinterest in cider in England. The Normans intro-duced many apple varieties, including the Pear-main, a long, pear-shaped apple that was the firstnamed variety recorded in Britain. Around 1120,William of Malmesbury described extensive or-chards and vineyards that were being grown atThorney, Isle of Ely.5 Cider soon became the mostpopular drink after ale, and it began to be widelyused as a means of exchange to pay tithes andrents. A deed of 1204 stipulated that the tenancy ofthe manor of Runham in Norfolk would bring inan annual rent of “200 Pear-maines and fourhogsheads of Pear-maine cyder,” payable to the Exchequer every Michaelmas (September 29) byRobert de Evermore, the lord of the manor. A hun-dred years later, seventy-four of the eighty parishesin West Sussex were paying their church tithes incider.

As early as the reign of Henry III in the thir-teenth century, the borough of Worcester had al-ready become famous for its fruit trees and ciderorchards. By the end of that century, a number ofchoice apple varieties had been collected in theroyal gardens at Westminster, Charing, and theTower, as well as in the gardens of English noble-men. In the main apple-growing counties of thetime—Kent, Somerset, and Hampshire—mostmanors had their own cider mills and were press-ing their own cider.

In the early sixteenth century, cider lost someof its popularity in relation to ale when hops werefirst introduced to England from Flanders. Hopsgreatly improved the flavor, as well as the keepingqualities, of British ale. Yet around the same time, Richard Harris—fruiterer to Henry VIII—advanced the cause of British apple-growing whenhe reportedly “fetched out of France a great storeof grafts, especially pippins [a dessert apple alsosuitable for cidermaking], before which there wereno pippins in England.” These trees, along withother fruits, were planted in an orchard of about140 acres at Teynham in Kent.

The famous cider orchards of England’s WestCountry became increasingly well established dur-ing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, par-ticularly in the counties of Herefordshire,Gloucestershire, and Worcestershire. By the end ofthe seventeenth century, cider was being producedthroughout much of southern England, includingthe West Country, West Midlands, Devon, Somer-set, Shropshire, and the Welsh border counties.This century has been called the Golden Age ofApples in England, and the county of Hereford-shire in particular was described at this time byJohn Evelyn as having “become in a manner butone entire orchard.”

Adding to the growing fame of Hereford-shire’s cider was the celebrated Redstreak apple,which, it is said, grew from a seed planted byCharles I’s ambassador to France, Lord Scud-

20 Cider, Hard and Sweet

The Ingenio mill, used for grinding apples beforepressing, was invented by the Englishman John Worlidge and depicted in his 1676 book, VinetumBritannicum.

John Worlidge's design for a continuous ciderpress, from Vinetum Britannicum (1676).

world, marketing no fewer than seventeen brandsand accounting for more than half the cider con-sumed in Britain.

The Apple Comesto AmericaNot surprisingly, the apple was one of the firstcrops introduced to American shores by colonistsfrom England and western Europe. Although a fewspecies of small wild apples are native to NorthAmerica, such as the garland or sweet crab (Maluscoronaria), the prairie crab (M. ioensis), and thesouthern crab (M. angustifolia), it is not clear towhat extent they were used by the Native Ameri-cans. However, the first cultivated apple trees wereplanted in Boston (at that time known by its In-dian name of Shawmut) as early as 1623 byWilliam Blackstone (or Blaxton), a dissidentChurch of England clergyman and a minister tothe settlers at Plymouth.

Tradition has it that Blackstone was some-thing of an eccentric character and that he oncesaddle-trained a bull, which he rode around thecountryside, distributing apples and flowers to hisfriends. Like so many free spirits of the time,Blackstone apparently ran afoul of the British colo-nial authorities, so in 1635 he moved to Rhode Island, planting his first orchard there and intro-ducing what, by some accounts, was America’s firstnative apple variety, Blaxton’s Yellow Sweeting.Others bestow this honor on Roxbury Russet, agreenish-yellow apple with a rough skin (anothercommon name is Leathercoat), whose original treewas discovered sometime before 1649 on a hill inRoxbury, Massachusetts, near Boston. More than350 years later, it’s still grown and is still a finemultipurpose apple.

To the settlers of this new country, the applerepresented the perfect homestead fruit. An appletree, once it began to bear, would dependably pro-duce bushels of fruit that could be used immedi-ately for eating or cooking. Some varieties, like

Roxbury Russet, could be stored in a cold cellarand kept all winter long, while others, like the oldHightop Sweet apple reputedly grown at PlymouthPlantation, could be sliced and dried for later use.But cider played the most crucial role in America’srural economy, as pressing and fermenting thefresh juice of the apple was the easiest way forfarmers to preserve the enormous harvest thatcame from even a modest orchard. Cider was alsothe basis for many other products, such as apple-jack, apple brandy, and cider vinegar, which was

23The History of Cider

Germany, and it’s easy to see why hard cider cameto be seen not only as a refreshing and wholesomedraft, but even as a patriotic national beverage.

By the eighteenth century, the English thirstfor cider had become prodigious. According to thenovelist Daniel Defoe, some ten to twenty thou-sand hogsheads of cider (between 1 and 2 milliongallons) were exported from the area around theport of Exeter during the 1720s, and the construc-tion of canals enabled merchants to transport ciderin bottles to London and other markets.

Ironically, the very popularity of cider in Eng-land helped contribute to its decline during themiddle part of the eighteenth century. Up untilthis time, cidermaking had largely been a ruralpractice engaged in by farmers, who produced arough cider for home use and local sale, and bylanded gentlemen, who had the leisure and re-sources necessary to experiment with differentapple varieties and production techniques, in anattempt to match or even surpass the quality ofimported wines. But with the initial stirrings of theIndustrial Revolution and the movement of work-ers off the farms and into the cities and factories,the quality of English cider began to decline, evenas demand remained strong. Unscrupulous cidermerchants began buying large volumes of sweet,unfermented juice and producing adulterated orwatered-down beverages that resembled real ciderin name only. The “Devonshire colic,” a palsy-likesickness caused by lead leaching into cider fromthe joints and pipes of manufacturing equipment,further damaged cider’s reputation, as did therough drink known as scrumpy, which was some-times made from rotten fruit, other fruit juices,surplus vegetables, sugars—just about anythingthat would ferment. The new British ales likeWhitbread, Bass, and Guinness were seen, quiterightly, as more healthful than these degradedciders, which came to be considered a beverage ofthe urban lower classes and as a cheap, quick wayto get drunk.

The first attempt to revive the popularity andgood name of English cider occurred near the endof the eighteenth century, when the famous plantbreeder Thomas Andrew Knight published hisTreatise on Cider, and then, in 1811, the PomonaHerefordiensis, which included information on allof the cider apples and perry pears grown in thecounty of Hereford. Around this time many Eng-lish apple varieties, particularly the Golden Pippin,were seriously afflicted with diseases such as applecanker. Knight began to make intentional crossesbetween different varieties in an attempt to createnew apples and halt the decline, and this sparked anew wave of interest in fruit breeding during thenineteenth century, encouraged by the activities ofthe Royal Horticultural Society and other groups.

In the late nineteenth century, the character ofEnglish cider began to change, as small regionalcidermaking gave way to a more centralized, in-dustrial system of production. Between 1870 and1900, more than a dozen cider factories openedaround Herefordshire, including H. P. Bulmer Ltd.,which was founded in 1887 by Percy Bulmer andgrew to become the largest cidermaker in the

22 Cider, Hard and Sweet

The illustrations opposite the title page of JohnWorlidge's influential Vinetum Britannicum (1676)show his designs for "modern" cidermakingtechnology, which has not until recent yearschanged very much.

Apple trees grown at Geneva, New York, fromseeds collected in Central Asia.

sumed in Massachusetts; that amounts to morethan 35 gallons per person. President John Adamsdrank a large tankard of cider every morning untilthe end of his life, believing (probably correctly)that it promoted good health. One “Lazarus Red-streak” argued in 1801:

Experience shows that the use of [cider]consists with sound healthy and long life. Ourinhabitants are settled in favour of it. TheNew Englanders are of all people the longestlivers. Why then try an innovation so diffi-cult, so doubtful, to say the least, in point ofhealth and economy, as the substitution ofbeer in the place of cyder?8

Because it was so widely available and such auseful commodity in daily life, and because cur-rency was relatively scarce, especially in ruralareas, cider became a common unit of exchange,as it had been earlier in England. It was frequentlyused by farmers to pay the doctor, the school-teacher, the minister, and other local professionalsfor their services. As it was plentiful, cider alsotended to be quite inexpensive. The seventeenth-century historian John Josselyn wrote, “I have hadat the tap houses of Boston an ale-quart of cyderspiced and sweetened with sugar, for a groat”(about fourpence), and in 1740 a barrel of cidercost about three shillings.9 More than seventy yearslater, in 1817, the American pomologist WilliamCoxe reported that cider in the Middle Atlanticstates was selling for about five dollars perhogshead, and he advised cidermakers to convertpart of their supply into vinegar, which wouldfetch three times the price of hard cider.

Although cidermaking was commonplacethroughout America, the best quality of cider andthe greatest commercial quantities were beingmade in New Jersey, especially in Newark. Localcider apples included the Harrison, which pro-duced a cider described as having a “high colour,rich, and sweet, of great strength, commanding a

25The History of Cider

used to preserve other fresh foods and for myriadother purposes around the home.

Americans planted apples wherever the cli-mate allowed, from the New England colonies tothe mountains of northern Georgia. In 1647 appleswere being grafted onto wild native rootstocks inVirginia, and in the same year the first grafted treearrived from Europe—a variety imported fromHolland known as the Summer Bonchretien,which was planted by Gov. Peter Stuyvesant inNew Amsterdam. Stuyvesant’s farm was located inthe Bouwerij (Bowery) district, and the trunk ofthis historic apple tree remained standing on thecorner of Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street inNew York City until 1866, when it was broken offby a cart.

While well-to-do planters and colonial offi-cials could afford to import grafted stock from Eu-rope, much of the apple’s spread in America wasby seed, which could be easily carried and plantedby settlers pushing inland and westward. Manyfarmers spread pomace (the seeds and skins leftover from pressing cider) onto their fields, thentook grafts from any seedlings that sprang up andbore good fruit.

The American folk hero Johnny Appleseedbecame a symbol of the apple’s spread as it fol-lowed western settlement in the years after theRevolutionary War. Born in Leominster, Massa-chusetts, in 1774, the historical Appleseed’s realname was John Chapman. In the first half of thenineteenth century, Chapman did operate an ex-tensive frontier nursery in the Susquehanna Valleyof Pennsylvania, from which he traveled as farafield as Ohio and Indiana, preaching, plantingapple seeds, and selling seedling trees to settlers,who were eager to install such familiar and usefuldomestic plants, and to demonstrate that theywere improving their homestead land grants.

Because these seedling trees produced fruitsthat were unlike the apples they came from, newtypes of American apples quickly emerged, many

of them unnamed varieties and unique to a partic-ular farm or estate. By the early 1800s, Americannurserymen were already offering around onehundred named varieties of apples for sale; by1850, more than five hundred widely recognizedvarieties were being cultivated; and in 1872Charles Downing’s Fruit and Fruit Trees of Amer-ica listed close to eleven hundred different kinds ofapples that had originated in America.

French Huguenots who settled in NewRochelle, New York, and along the northern shoreof Long Island also brought with them a wide vari-ety of fruits. Around 1730 Robert Prince estab-lished Prince Nurseries in Flushing, not far fromthe spot where the first commercially importantAmerican apple, the Newtown Pippin, originated.By 1845 the Prince catalog, which purported tooffer only the best kinds of apples, was listing 350varieties. Even though many farmers relied onseedling trees, the familiar and proven varieties of-fered by nurseries were popular among home or-chardists, then as now. Farmers would “top-work”their trees, sometimes grafting many varieties ontoa single trunk. The ultimate goal for homesteaderswas “to furnish the home with fruit from the firstof the season through the autumn, winter, and thespring, and even till early summer.”7

Cider in AmericaBy 1775 one out of every ten farms in New Eng-land owned and operated its own cider mill. Thereare numerous reasons why cider, like the apple it-self, flourished in the American climate. For onething, most early settlers preferred not to drink thelocal water, which could be unpalatable or even—close to settlements—polluted. This left milk andalcoholic beverages, but importing such a staple asale from England was expensive and chancy, andearly attempts at growing barley and hops in NewEngland had proved a dismal failure. For a time,desperate colonists sought creative, if dead-end,solutions to the problem, brewing beers out of

24 Cider, Hard and Sweet

pumpkins, corn (maize), molasses, maple sap, andeven native American persimmons.

Apple trees, however, could be grown almosteverywhere in America, and it didn’t take long forthe colonists to put down their persimmon beerand take up cidermaking in earnest. Consumed bymen, women, and children, by hired hands andHarvard students, cider quickly became America’snational drink. In 1726 it was reported that a sin-gle village near Boston, consisting of about fortyfamilies, put up nearly 10,000 barrels of cider. Onehistorian stated that in the year 1767 a per capitaaverage of 1.14 barrels of cider was being con-

The Harrison apple, renowned in early Americafor making superior cider, was considered extinctuntil the 1970s and ’80s. Modern cidermakers are now rediscovering and replanting this fine old variety.

Until around 1850, apple growing and cider-making remained closely linked to the small, self-reliant homestead farm, but the migration ofworkers to cities and to the fertile lands of theWest after the Civil War meant that many old or-chards were abandoned. Also, homemade farmcider, which was unfiltered and unpasteurized,didn’t travel well to the new centers of population.Coupled with this growing urbanization and reset-tlement during the late nineteenth century, asteady stream of immigrants from Germany andnorthern Europe led to the establishment of morebreweries in America and the increased consump-tion of beer, especially in cities.

At around the same time, in 1848, the firstapple trees were being planted in central Washing-ton State by a territorial legislator named Hiram F.“Okanogan” Smith. More than a century and a halflater, the orchards of Washington now produceabout half of the U.S. apple crop (or about 5 per-

cent of the world harvest), but these apples aregrown intensively for fresh shipping, not for cider.And although the planting of commercial appleorchards in western New York and other areas ofthe East also continued during the 1850s, growerswere beginning to get discouraged by greater dam-age from insects like the codling moth and dis-eases like apple scab. This led to the widespreadcutting of orchards during the 1880s and a greaterreliance on arsenical insecticides and fungicides.

Even more damaging to cider, though, wasthe rise of the temperance movement, whosemembers considered the beverage once hailed assafe and wholesome even for children to be littlebetter than demon rum. In fact, American cider-makers had for a long time been increasing the“octane,” or alcoholic content, of natural cider(which normally ferments to around 6 percent alcohol, much lower than grape wines). At firstthis was done to improve the keeping qualities of

27The History of Cider

high price in New York.”10 The Shaker communityin Canterbury, New Hampshire, was making ciderof such high quality that it sold in Boston for asmuch as ten dollars a barrel. In his 1817 book, AView of the Cultivation of Fruit Trees, WilliamCoxe gives some indication of just how much cider(and cider brandy) was being made in its heyday:

In Essex county, N.J. in the year 1810,there were made 198,000 barrels of cider, and 307,310 gallons of cider spirits were distilled—one citizen of the same county in1812, made 200 barrels of cider daily througha great part of the season, from six mills andtwenty three presses. In the present season,1816, 25,000 barrels of cider were madewithin the limits of a single religious society,as it is called, in Orange township, Essexcounty New-Jersey; comprising about threefourths of the township.11

An interesting footnote to this account is that1816 came to be known as the Year without aSummer, due to an unusual global cooling eventthat occurred after the massive 1815 eruption ofMount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies. Killingfrosts struck the northern United States andCanada in each of the three summer months,mowing down corn and other field crops andcausing food shortages in North America and ac-tual famines and bread riots in parts of Europe. Onthe bright side, though, the cold temperatures alsodecimated the insect population that year, result-ing in one of the best apple crops ever.

American apples and cider were also beingexported to the West Indies, and even to Europe.The first recorded shipment of apples from NewEngland to the West Indies occurred in 1741. In1758 a package of Newtown Pippins was sentacross the Atlantic to Benjamin Franklin in Lon-don. And in 1773, when the English apple cropfailed, merchants imported great quantities ofAmerican fruit.

26 Cider, Hard and Sweet

Back at home, cider even played a part inAmerican politics. When George Washington ranfor the Virginia legislature in 1758, his agent doledout nearly 3 imperial gallons of beer, wine, cider,or rum to every voter. In the presidential cam-paign of 1840, Whig candidates William HenryHarrison and John Tyler, whose famous sloganwas “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” played to anti-im-migrant sentiments and used the symbols of thelog cabin and cider barrel to represent self-relianceand traditional American values. Cider was freelyserved to all voters, and the Whigs won in an elec-toral landslide, 234 to 60.

Yet by this time cider’s place in American cul-ture was already starting to wane, and as the nine-teenth century progressed, several independentand unrelated forces combined to weaken itsstanding still further. One major factor was urbanmigration. In 1790 the United States was an agrar-ian nation: Some 96 percent of Americans lived onfarms and raised most or all of their own food;only 4 percent lived in towns or cities. By 1860, 84percent still lived on the farm. But forty years later,this rural population had dropped sharply, to 44percent, and by 1910 only 30 percent of Americanswere still on the farm.12

Virginia fruit historian and orchard consultantTom Burford, who helped rediscover andrepopularize the famous Harrison apple.

Many farmers sympathetic to the temperancecause took axes to their apple trees and swore offalcoholic beverages of any kind. Others, not quiteso fervent, started pasteurizing their pressed sweetcider and marketing it as inoffensive apple juice, orcalling the fresh, unfermented juice from the press“sweet cider,” a term that has been the cause ofmuch confusion since then. Another blow cameduring the unusually frigid winter of 1917–18,when temperatures in the Northeast plummeted,wiping out whole orchards of cider apples, includ-ing an estimated one million Baldwin trees. (Thewinter of 1933–34 was equally hard, with -40°Fweather sounding the final death knell for theBaldwin as the leading commercial apple; after this,many farmers replanted their orchards with thehardier McIntosh variety.) By the time Prohibitionwas enacted in 1919, the production of hard ciderin the United States had dipped to only 13 milliongallons, down from 55 million gallons in 1899.Over the next several decades, the once proudAmerican tradition of making hard cider was keptalive only by certain local farmers and enthusiasts.

Yet today, after a long hiatus, Americans areonce again developing a taste for hard cider. In2004 hard cider consumption in the United States

exceeded 10.3 million gallons, up from 5.3 milliongallons in 1996 and just 271,000 gallons in 1990.Demand for cider is also growing in traditionalproducing countries like England (which pro-duced some 130 million gallons in 2006) new mar-kets like China (the world’s largest apple-growingnation), and elsewhere around the world. Yet cideris still a relatively minor player in the overall alco-hol industry, equivalent to only about 0.3 percentof the total U.S. beer and flavored malt beveragemarket in 2012..

So what does the future hold? It really is any-one’s guess, but there are encouraging signs. In-creasingly these days, small orchardists and seriouscidermakers in the United States are planting dis-tinctive European cider apples and experimentingwith both traditional and newer American vari-eties to see which are the best for making cider.Over the past few years it has become easier andeasier for cider lovers to find high-quality bever-ages made by regional cider mills and wineries.And in the twenty-first century, blessed and en-cumbered as we are with our Information Agetechnologies, it’s nice to know that something asold and traditional as the art of cidermaking is notonly alive and well, but flourishing.

29The History of Cider

cider, especially cider that was intended for long-distance shipping or export. Producers increasedthe final strength of the cider much as they dotoday, by adding a sweetener (honey, sugar, raisins,and so on) to the juice before or during fermenta-tion. By the late eighteenth century, the alcoholcontent of the standard cider sold in taverns ranaround 7.5 percent—still not producing that muchof a kick. Some producers, however, added rum totheir rough cider, making it a less than “temperate”beverage. Also, the impurities found in traditionalapplejack (a strong, concentrated liquor that wasmade by freezing hard cider outside in the winter)gave drinkers awe-inspiring hangovers and, overtime, led to the unfortunate condition known asapple palsy. Finally, just as had happened earlier inEngland, the good name of cider was besmirchedby unscrupulous manufacturers, who made it outof just about anything, as is evident from this com-mentary from 1890:

The writer has found, by oft-repeated tri-als, that it [cider] is the most difficult of allarticles to obtain in saloons, restaurants, andgroceries. All keep an article they sell forcider; but in many cases it has but a smallportion of fermented apple-juice, while inothers there is no trace of the apple, the stuffsold being a villainous compound of vinegar,glucose, whisky, and pepper. Now it is per-fectly patent that such a concoction couldnever be sold in this country for cider, anymore than it could be sold in France for wine,if the knowledge of the true article prevailedhere as does that of true wines in that coun-try. But before such knowledge can prevailhere, the cider makers must learn how tomake cider correctly. There is where the faultlies, and the consumers will learn their partfast enough when a fairly good article is of-fered for their acceptance.13

The Baldwin apple, prized for cider use, was once a leading commercial variety in the U.S. However, manytrees died in the bitterly cold winter of 1933–34, and it was largely replaced by the hardier McIntosh.