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WineEast Ancient Beverage to Hot New Trend Hard cider sales triple across the United States and Canada in five years By Linda Jones McKee Editor's note: This article is the first in a two-part series about hard cider. The second, written by Chris Stamp, will focus on the nuts and bolts of cider production. W ithin the past five years, hard cider has become one of the hottest segments in the alcoholic beverage industry. Sales of domestically produced hard cider tripled between 2007 and 2012, and today there are more than 150 cider producers across the United States and Canada. There is plenty of room for market expansion, as apples are grown across the country and can be made into a low-alcohol cider in many different locations by both winemakers and brew masters. Recognizing the rising popularity of cider across the country, organizers of the Eastern Winery Exposition opted to include a half-day workshop that followed the main conference in March and addressed many aspects of cider. The different styles of cider, the varieties of apples used and various production issues such as yeast selection and stabilization were addressed by speakers from Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia. Wine East HIGHLIGHTS: View video in the Wines & Vines Digital Edition. Two processes for making ice cider are depicted in this video by La Face Cachée de la Pomme in Québec Canada. mately 100 years of industrial and societal changes that culminated in Prohibition during the 1920s. While there has always been fresh juice from apples (also called sweet cider), Prohibition eliminated the other beverage made from apple juice: hard cider. In the early days of our country, the C • ider production revived during the colonists drank a lot of cider. Apples were 1980s and 1990s. Large-scale producabundant and cheap, and their juice was ers often used apple juice concentrates, sugar, water and various flavors in their easily converted by fermentation into a ciders. hard cider or by distillation into applejack, otherwise known as apple brandy. In coC • raft cider producers use both culinary lonial times, cider was considered to be a and heirloom varieties of apples as healthier beverage than water, which was well as more typical wine-production processes. perceived as containing bacteria that could Vance_Jan11.qxp 11/23/10 9:29 AM Page 1 make people sick. By 1767, the annual D • uring Colonial days, people opted to drink hard cider rather than water for health reasons. In the 19th century, beer became cheaper to produce than cider; then Prohibition drove U.S. cider makers completely out of business. Defining hard cider Historically, there have been four natural intoxicating beverages: wine, beer, mead and cider. Wine is fermented from grapes; beer is made from grain and hops; mead comes from honey; but what is cider? For those of us who grew up after World War II and before the 1980s, cider was a brown, cloudy beverage that had fresh fruity flavors from recently picked apples. And it definitely was not alcoholic (unless a bottle was left in the refrigerator too long and started to get "fizzy," whereupon one's mother always threw it out as "undrinkable"). Our perception of cider was a direct result of a combination of factors from approxiWin es & V i n es JU LY 20 13 77