The Fizz #34: Sean Turley's Cider Club is changing the conversation around New England cidermaking
Apple expert Sean Turley talks about the difference between cider and dessert apples, and how apple foraging is creating new cider varieties in Maine, and pushing the industry forward.
It’s official—I’ve moved to Maine! As a new Portlander, I’m thrilled to help tell the story of the incredible fermentation culture we have up here in New England. This week, I joined a meeting of Maine’s Cider Club, founded and run by local apple enthusiast, Sean Turley. Sean is an apple expert, forager, documenter, columnist, and I’d like to say, historian, dedicated to spreading knowledge and building community around cider apples.
Cider club is a monthly event which takes place at different cideries, allowing folks to get up close and personal with local producers. We headed to Portersfield Cider in Pownal, Maine for the event, which was hosted outdoors in a gorgeous setting. The rules are simple. Everyone brings a bottle of cider and a desire to taste. Some bottles were homemade, some store-bought, some American and some international. Each person pours everyone in the circle a taste, and we talk about what we’re experiencing—is the cider sweet? Tart? Is there tannin? How does it make you feel?
This little tasting group, composed of mostly beverage-industry folks, serves as a way for us to get to know one another in this state, to share something we love together, and to learn about the incredible variety that apples can bring to cider.
After the event, I spoke to Sean Turley about the history of Cider Club, the unique environment of cider-making in Maine, and why cider apples should be taken more seriously across the industry.
Margot: When did you start Cider Club?
Sean: It was in June of 2018. There were a couple of motivations—cider felt like something that a lot of beverage people locally knew about a little bit, but were not providing a good range of ciders necessarily, particularly not ciders that were that good. It was more about availability. Part of it was trying to change the conversation about cider and get better cider in front of people who can make decisions about what to sell and what to carry.
The other part of it was a bit selfish. Getting more people involved in introducing and bringing ciders with them meant expanding not only everyone in attendance, their knowledge base, but also my own.
In the spring of 2018, we met at David Buchanan's place in Portersfield with a couple of friends and he had just come back from the Finger Lakes with about 20 bottles of cider, many of which were from cider makers I'd never had, and it was just fascinating. It was like, oh yeah, oh wait, this is really interesting. This is very different than we make it here. In 2018, the number of Maine cider makers was far less than it is now. I want to say Cornish was just starting, Rocky Ground maybe had just released stuff.
So it felt very much developing. It still does, but there just wasn't a dialogue happening in the state yet really about cider. There were so few producers that it seemed like everyone could benefit from just trying more ciders.
Margot: When I talk to people in Maine about cider, everyone points me your way. What made you get inspired by cider?
Sean: I think this is very much a growth out of what has become an apple obsession. Years ago, my wife Cecilia and I were driving around Maine and came across an orchard called Sandy River Orchards in Mercer. When I was growing up, my parents would be very careful about buying groceries, but fruit was always something they would buy in whatever quantity I wanted. Fruit was always something that I was looking for and when we stopped by Sandy River and discovered 20 varieties of apples, I went back home and did a tasting for friends, and then just started becoming fairly obsessed with apples.
Maine has a very strong apple community that goes back decades, so that was really easy to be part of. Out of that, invariably came discussions about cider and where these two things collide—how you make cider and what fruit do you actually use? There's this thing called Apple Camp—the last year it happened was in 2019. We’re inviting people from across the country and mostly Maine people. We have discussions about apple growing and cider making and one of the things that stuck with me there was how almost no-one who made cider in the state had access to cider fruit. That got me really thinking about, well, does anyone grow cider fruit in our country?
And if not, why? How should we deal with this problem? Or is there a solution at all? Or are we all forced to make cider with dessert fruit? I just started to get really interested in trying to advocate for using the right ingredients to make cider, to really create something noteworthy and special and not just some type of gimmicky thing—an alcoholic drink with apples in it.
That got me very deep down the rabbit hole of thinking about cider and the intersection with fruit and what fruit is available and how to approach those problems, as well as trying to be a bit of a resource to people who are growing.
Margot: You mentioned that Maine has a long history of cider making. Can you talk about that at all?
Sean: Like a lot of states, there was a strong commitment to agriculture and a lot of local cider making. Almost every farm in the state of Maine would have some type of orchard and among the various trees they would grow, certainly there would be trees that whether on purpose or just by happenstance would be good for cider.
Maine’s history of cider making was more of a local, micro production. In the thirties and forties, a couple of things happened. In the thirties, there's this really terrible winter, I think in 1934, that destroyed a huge amount of apple trees in the state. People started turning towards varieties that would not blow up in the middle of winter from fluctuations in temperature—there were literally trees exploding, because it was an incredibly cold winter, but then also an incredibly warm winter.
[“Temperatures in central Maine during the last three days of December, 1933 dipped to –28 on the 28th, -20 on the 29th, and –40 on the 30th. … On January 22nd the temperature in Winslow was –33. Twenty-four hours later it was +44, a rise of 77 degrees. From January 27th to the 28th the temperature dropped 50 degrees in 24 hours. On the 29th it dropped 50 degrees in 12 hours.” Two-thirds of apple trees in Maine were killed during this harsh winter. Learn more about it here.]
The second thing that happened was that all these other easy to grow, but terrible for cooking cider making apples became very popular, and the local orchard idea fell by the wayside. That changed quite a bit when John Bunker, who started Fedco Trees started getting to apples in the early seventies and late sixties. He built up Fedco itself, which sells a lot of these heirloom varieties.
He has done a tremendous amount of research into apple varieties in Maine. He has established the heritage orchard and has been doing talks for 50 years, trying to connect with local people for varieties that have been lost. He was at the forefront of creating a movement in our state. That intersects with local growers, historic societies, orchardists, and now cider makers. There's already this incredibly rich tapestry of people in Maine that's been going for decades. So it means if you're interested in this type of thing, there's always someone to go to and rely on, which I actually think makes us pretty unique.
I don't think there’s a John Bunker in every state. That made a tremendous difference.
Margot: What do you hope to see from the main cider community as we go into the future?
Sean: I would like to see, and this has been happening a bit, is a turning away from quantity toward quality. The industry itself is clearly at a crossroads around mass production versus a higher quality good, where you can explain why it's expensive and what work went into it, or what ingredients went into it really make that difference.
I was talking to Tom Oliver, a cider maker in England about this. In England, starting in the early 1900s until very recently has always been a pub drink—inexpensive, not really quality controlled, or no one really cared. In fact, a lot of pub cider in England is mostly water and fructose, barely apple cider. Tom has been really trying to change the conversation around cider, to be an item of some esteem, and trying to educate people on why his ciders are in 750 milliliter bottles and why they're on certain release schedules and why you can't recreate things and all those types of questions that you deal with in wine that people, I think, accept and understand.
Whereas the other direction we could go in, which I hope we don't, is just producing things that are called cider because they have apples in it. Regardless of what else is in it, other fruits, additives, all sorts of things. I think the way I would like to see it go is very much what Cornish Cider is doing or Rocky Ground is doing where, really it's about what they're using in the product and explaining to people why that results in a drink, as opposed to just churning out more cider.
Something we're running into, and going back to why I was originally interested in this, is that there just are not enough cider apples anywhere in the country yet to sustain a mass market of cider makers. A lot of people have chosen to make cider, but to compromise the fruit. That certainly helps make cider more popular, but it also tells a different story and gets people to have a different mindset about what cider is, which I think is deeply problematic.
It would be as if wine coolers were what people thought of as wine for decades. Then you're going to convince them to be like, no, no, no— wine is this specialty product. We need to move the conversation more towards wine and away from beer. Like wine, cider is a local product it's made with local apples. Maybe you're adding yeast, but that's it. We had this concept of local beer, but local beer is importing your hops from somewhere and malt from somewhere else and yeah, I'm brewing it here, but there's nothing really local about most beer.
Cider is a local product that reflects a place. You can get into a conversation around terroir and other parts of it that are really interesting, but you don't get those conversations if everyone's just taking dessert fruit and putting it in cans and selling it like a cool, goofy, mango habanero or something. Then people think oh “cider is only this thing you buy in cans and crush”. Cider can be a really interesting and conversation driving thing to drink. That's what I'd like to see.
And I think even among main cider makers, there are kind of two camps. Anestes keeps a list of all the cider makers in the state and more than half of them are just producing a drink that has apples in it and they're calling it cider and I would say this is kind of hurting the conversation. It sort moves the dial in a way that I think is counterproductive. I think it's really incumbent on the people who are investing the time to make things that are interesting, with the right fruit, to use their voice, to use their platform, to get out there and change this conversation. So that 20, 30 years down the road, people think of cider, and you don't have to convince them that cider is this interesting product.
Margot: Do you find that more folks in Maine are starting to grow cider apples?
Sean: Some are, and this is happening on a couple of different scales. The cider makers in Maine who are using apples that are well suited for cider, are themselves creating their own orchards. Those will take some number of years to get off the ground. One of the big debates is, how quickly do you grow things? You can graft your apple trees onto what's called dwarf fruit stock, which will produce a crop of some kind in three to four years. But that tree is only going to live to be 25 years old. Or you can graft on the standard rootstock. That tree will live to be 200 years old, but it won’t produce fruit for almost a decade. The question for growers becomes—do I establish an orchard? If I established an orchard, what do I graft onto? Do I need the fruit now? Do I want it to sustain me into the future?
It's a hard decision, especially if you're trying to produce a certain amount, or you have a certain market share that you're trying to maintain.
Some people are doing a bunch of dwarf root stock and other people are not, for example, Shacksbury did something really neat where they found apples through the Lost Apple Project, grafted them onto dwarf rootstock just to see how they would do, and then could use that information to guide next steps. There's been some attempt to get commercial orchards to grow more cider fruit. That's been met with mixed success because there isn't necessarily the demand there needs to be, because a lot of people who are making cider with cheap dessert fruit, just leftover fruit from local orchards, like Macintosh and Cortland and stuff, they don't think there's anything wrong with that. They aren't seeking out actual cider fruit. People are buying their cider, they just mix it with blackberry or something and people are happy and everything's fine. I don't think that orchardists themselves have gotten the message that there actually is demand that they could be meeting.
If people keep demanding it, I think that will change what people grow because a lot of these orchards are not that profitable based on what they're growing now. They would obviously be able to fetch higher prices for something like cider fruit. If there was demand, that would be great because right now, a lot of orchards in our state survive by not necessarily apples, but also offering hay rides and donuts.
It’s a tourism model of an orchard, whereas you could actually charge $2 or $3 a pound for traditional cider fruit that might actually be really helpful to growers.
Margot: What has to be done to get that message across?
Sean: I think that gets me back to Cider Club. It's hard to know what you don't know. I appreciate that more and more people are interested in cider in Maine, but I would love for them to simultaneously understand what options there are in terms of making it. Part of the goal of this group is to be that type of space where you get to try different types of things, to understand why things taste different, and expose yourself to more information. I think having more of a dialogue will help.
We need a campaign of sorts to change the conversation. Part of the reason we've been doing Cider Club is to get in front of the right people. People who work for distributors are also critical in making change, in terms of who gets picked up and distributed. That will only help too.
Margot: It sounds like an industry-wide issue, right? Because on the one hand, people don't know about the quality of cider apples and that they could be making a more terroir driven product. On the other hand, there aren't enough cider apples on the market for folks to actually use.
Sean: Right. It's a definitional problem too. There is a Cider Association of America and they're kind of a big tent. There's some schism there about what cider is and what it's supposed to be, and definitionally what the word means, beyond the fact that cider, over the last several decades, has been defined as a non alcoholic sweet drink. Not only does it have to overcome that, but we also have to overcome, like, is the thing I'm drinking with cherry and blackberry and salt in it with a little bit of apples that you're calling like a gosa cider—is that cider? I don’t know. I would say no. It's absolutely a national issue and one that a lot of people are wrestling with.
Margot: Is there any ecological difference between growing cider and dessert apples?
Sean: Kind of—there are classes of apples that grow well in England and France and Northern Spain. We have our own history in the United States, where people have been making cider for over 400 years on a local level. We also have a couple of American cider varieties that were known to be cider varieties, hundreds of them that mostly have been lost. No one's growing them or just refining them, which is really exciting. One of the issues is that European fruit might not grow well here.
Generationally, we have, up until and including now, people attempting to grow European fruits with mixed success. That may be turning some growers off from growing cider apples because they're like, well I tried all these English fruit, it did terribly in my orchard, the disease pressures we have here kill those trees, and I don’t want to do that.
You've got people again, like Cornish, like Rocky Ground, and even Whaleback, who are choosing different tacks of foraging. They’re taking what they find out in the fields and actually growing those apples in their orchards and creating a new American cider fruit that maybe are better acclimated to our climate.
And Andy Brennan, for example, from Arron Burr Cider is doing this extensively. I don't think he grows any traditional fruit. I think everything he grows are all things that he’s found. What is happening now that's very different than even 10 years ago is growers having found something in 2010, grafted it five, six years ago, and now it's fruiting and suddenly that'd be new cider varieties that they maybe have found have worked great in their orchards, that 20, 30, 40 years from now will become the kind of fruit that people grow by default, instead of the English fruit or the French fruit. So it's as if you have thousands of new varieties that are all being tested simultaneously at different orchards.
Out of that will emerge ones that are good for cider and grow well. Then suddenly we'll have this whole new wealth of new cider fruit. That to me is more exciting than just growing French apples in the United States. It's way cooler that we have our own Maine cider apples. I think that’s pretty awesome.
Margot: Where are those cider apples coming from? Are those the apples that have just have been lost over time?
Sean: Well, partially. Historically, you've got people going out. In fact, someone this fall thinks they found an apple thought to be lost over several hundred years. New Jersey was kind of the center of cider making United States, and there's all sorts of New Jersey apples that were thought to be lost, that people are finding.
The really important, but also crazy thing to think about with apples is that if I plant a Macintosh seed, I will not get a Macintosh apple. With apples, generally every seed has a tremendous, differentiation from its parents in terms of genetic material. So all of the Macintosh trees today, for example, are not from planting seeds. There was an original Macintosh tree in Canada, 140 years ago. To replicate that, you can't plant the seeds of Macintosh, so what they did was they took cuttings off that tree. So basically every variety we have is a clone of some original tree. Every time you throw an apple outside your car window, and some deer eats it and poops and the tree sprouts up, that is a genetically unique tree that has never existed before.
[This is an absolutely mindblowing aspect of apples to me. Learn more about apples extreme hetrozygosity here.]
It could be amazing. It could be awful. It could be something that grows really well or terribly—it’s all over the map. We're blessed with thousands of wild trees that are all unique. Some subset of those are bitter, which is what you want in your cider fruit and are sweet, making them great cider apples because they have the sugar to ferment and the bitterness in apples translates into the tannin.
That's what almost all dessert fruit lacks. Dessert fruit is acid and sugar. So when all the sugar ferments, you're just left with this acidic drink. What people like Rocky Ground, Cornish, and myself are doing is going out, pulling off the side of the road, trying hundreds of pieces of fruit off different trees and identifying trees that actually are good for cider. Then a subset of these people are going back to their orchards and grafting those varieties in. Then if those grow well in an orchard setting, only a subset will—a tree that loves being on the side of the field might grow great, but then you get to the orchard and it's completely unhappy.
They bring it back. They start growing. It grows. Well, they tell all their cider friends about it. The more people graft it into their orchards—suddenly you have a new variety. It’s amazing. There are literally tens of thousands of unique apple trees in Maine, some of which could be the next best apple for cider.
Margot: That is so cool. I mean, you’re literally building new genetic material for cider making, through the community working together. That's so cool.
Sean: Matt Kaminski, basically what he does all fall is rides around New England to find trees that are good for cider. He goes back in the winter, gets scion wood for people to graft, and then popularizes discourse as kind of a cheerleader for those things. He finds them, sends them out, people start growing, and we're off to the races. Suddenly we have this new variety.
Margot: Are you trying to grow Cider Club or are you comfortable with where it is?
Sean: Our goal is to continue to attract people who are in some way involved in the beverage insider world. People who work at restaurants and run bars, people who distribute, people who produce, so trying to get those types of people to come so that we can have this conversation.
I expose more people that may have decision-making power to what cider can be in hopes that it drives them to tell other people about how they feel about it. So that's the goal. Growing in the sense that more people who have a say in what we drink get exposed to more great ciders.
—————
You can support Sean Turley’s work by following him on Instagram. If you’re in the beverage industry in Maine and want to join in on Cider Club, send him a DM. Get involved in the Maine cider scene by visiting and supporting cider makers on The Portland Food Map list.
The next paid issue of The Fizz will feature two interviews up and coming Oregon-based winemakers. Hit subscribe and for $5/month, you’ll get these exclusive interviews and tasting note posts on local wines. You’ll also be helping me record more information about exciting winemakers, American history, and help me pay my interviewees who aren’t making wine for their own label. 15% goes to St. Francis House.
If you share this piece with a friend, it would mean a lot. Thanks for reading! You can follow me on Instagram here.