An Apple a Day

The User's Guide to Hard Cider

by Robin Catalano and photographs by Jennifer May, September 28, 2007

Imagine yourself in Colonial America. You’ve risen before the sun to start a fire, milk the cows, and tend the fields. As light filters into the morning sky, you sit down to a breakfast of porridge and hard cider. You look out the window....

Wait. Hard cider? As in alcoholic cider? As it turns out, hard cider, a traditional beverage passed on from centuries’ worth of English ancestors, was taken with every meal, including breakfast, in the earliest days of the colonies. During this period, sometimes referred to as the “cider age,” due to the abundance and low cost of the drink, the thought of drinking something else, like water, was considered positively uncivilized (not to mention unhealthy, as contaminated water was a common problem).

Hard cider has been made in Europe from the beginning of recorded history, and probably even earlier. It’s no wonder that the fermented juice of the common apple has long been a popular drink throughout England, France, and Spain, or that it has begotten the ubiquitous “cider pubs” of the British Isles, where you can partake of traditional tavern food and dozens of ciders. Or that, by some accounts, when the revolutionaries of 1773 New England spied three English ships anchored in Boston Harbor and discovered tea and hard cider among the cargo, they instinctively knew which beverage to toss overboard in protest of import taxes, and which to savor with dinner.

Despite being one of the oldest drinks in the world, hard cider has changed little over the centuries. Whereas apple juice is pasteurized, clarified, and heat-stabilized for long shelf life, cider is, in the words of John Vittore, co-owner of Hilltop Orchards in Richmond, Massachusetts, “the juice from apples with nothing added and nothing taken away.” It is made by grinding apples into a “must” and then fermenting it, generally for about six weeks. The juice is pressed out and aged in oak for several months. During the process, the naturally occurring sugars are converted to alcohol, around six percent.