Apples come from the hills of Kazakhstan. They traveled to America on British ships in the 1600s. As seeds. Funny thing about apples. If grown from seed, the tree will produce bitter apples. You can't eat bitter apples, but you can turn them into hard cider. The American colonists loved two things: representation and getting their drink on. Grapes and hops and sugarcane didn't grow well on the Atlantic seaboard, so wine and the ingredients for beer and rum had to be imported. Apple trees could be grown almost anywhere and you can get 12 to 14 gallons of cider from a single tree in a year.
As a result, the cheapest, most accessible, and most popular adult beverage for the first two hundred years of our history was hard cider. Which they called cider. Non-alcholic cider wasn't invented until Prohibition. In 1700, the colonies were producing 300 thousand gallons of cider a year and the average man drank 35 gallons a year. By 1810, Vermont alone had 125 distilleries producing 170 thousand gallons a year.
George Washington preferred hard cider over beer. Benjamin Franklin said, "it is bad to eat apples, it is better to turn them all into cider." John Adams had a tankard of cider every morning for breakfast. Andrew Jackson, when he wasn't busy killing men in duels, drank cider.
Sarah Palin wasn't the first politician to appeal to Joe Six Pack. To appeal to the blue collar workingman, William Henry Harrison, in his 1840 bid for the presidency, called himself the "log cabin and hard cider candidate."
Cider's most important evangelist came in the form of the American Dionysus, John Chapman. You know him as Johnny Appleseed. Our popular conception of him is wandering missionary, spreading God's word and planting apple trees willy nilly. That's pretty much not how it happened. He did become a missionary later in life, but he got his start in the world as a businessman. Chapman traveled around the US establishing apple tree nurseries and hiring local farmers to manage them. Since the apples from all the trees he planted weren't edible, there was only one thing to be done. Thanks to Chapman, cider production soared.
The sad decline of cider is a complicated story. The 1840s saw a huge influx of German and Irish immigrants who brought with them a powerful love of beer and improved brewing methods (specifically, bottom fermentation which was superior to top fermentation practiced in the US... which produced beer of inconsistent quality before refrigeration and modern sterilization techniques, but that's a whole other story). During the mid-1800s, an apple blight swept across the US, severely depleting the apple tree population. Also, more Americans began to settle and farm the Midwest, which meant more land for growing hops and barley.
The biggest blow to the dominance of cider came with the Temperance Movement, beginning in the 1820s. The movement caught on with Anglo Protestants, that is, the cider drinkers. The Catholic beer-drinking Irish and Germans had none of it. At end of the 1800s, politics were heading toward national prohibition and the new soft drink Coca Cola snatched up the cider demographic. By the time the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933, the American tradition of guzzling hard cider was gone with the wind.
That is, until the 1990s when American hard cider became popular again, thanks to Woodchuck.
The Survey
Since hard cider plays such an important role in our national and cultural heritage, I decided to try them all. I mean, anything worth doing, is worth doing to excess.
Angry Orchard - From the company that brought you Sam Adams. If the creepy man tree on the label doesn't scare you off, the taste will. I tried the Crisp Apple variety first. It tasted like sugar added juice box apple juice. If I wanted something this sweet, I would have made some Kool-Aid. I tried their Traditional Dry variety, but it was still too sweet.
Crispin - A California cider. This was probably my favorite of the ciders. Light-bodied, dry, crisp. It was both refreshing and intoxicating and had a really clean apple flavor. I had it again at Blue, Brews, and BBQ. It also tastes good out of a plastic collectible cup. This will be my go to cider.
Magner's - An Irish Cider. I ordered this at Dublin O'Neil's, Champaign's Irish Pub. It came on ice, which was a little disconcerting, but apparently that's a perfectly acceptable way to serve cider. This didn't have much flavor (maybe it was watered down) and I wasn't very impressed.
Woodchuck - The American cider that brought cider back. This wasn't as juice box sweet as Angry Orchard, but a little too sweet for my taste. By the way, a woodchuck is the same thing as a groundhog, only it has nothing to do with wood or chucking. The name is a corruption of the Algonquian wuchak.
Hornsby's - The one with the rhino. This was Aine's favorite. My second favorite. It was mostly dry, with a lot of apple flavor. This one tasted like actual apple juice from an apple. Not the from concentrate stuff with lots of sugar like they give to kids these days.
So, now you're armed with truth. If you love America, drink some cider.
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