Fertilized by Opportunity and Innovation, Cider Is Expanding Its Appeal

Lee Briante makes every inch count to squash misconceptions about hard cider. His intimate Los Angeles bar, Alma’s Cider & Beer, which opened in 2021, is a 558-square-foot jewel box bathed in three shades of blue, decorated with quirky dioramas and a chandelier evoking flying saucers. What you won’t find: farm-core flourishes like plaid tablecloths or faux apples in splintery crates.

“Folks come in for the vibe and the ambiance,” says Briante, the co-owner, adding that Alma’s is a popular date spot. “Sometimes people don’t know that we’re a cider bar.”

Alma’s is one of America’s most well-curated cider bars with more than 100 selections, from a German cider co-fermented with quince to Spain’s enliveningly acidic sidra. “That’s always what I give as a first taste,” Briante says of the cider that’s tart, funky, and disarming for drinkers accustomed to sweet commodity ciders. “I want to stop them in their tracks. And then it opens a conversation.” A person-by-person palate shift helps Alma’s cultivate a customer base crossing over from sour ales or natural wines. Alma’s helps drinkers “discover what cider can be,” Briante says. “We get to be a champion for a beverage that doesn’t always get a lot of love.”

The American affection for cider waxes and wanes with the centuries. Cider was omnipresent in colonial America, where apple trees provided abundant sources of fermentable sugars. Its primacy ebbed in the mid-19th century as German immigrants settled in America’s surging urban centers and brewed lagers. The temperance push and Prohibition sparked the destruction and abandonment of orchards, relegating cider to sweet apple juice suited for lunchboxes. “It was pigeonholed as a drink for kids,” says Alex Doman, the co-founder and CEO of AVEC Drinks, which makes an alcohol-free cider flavored with cardamom.

With hard seltzer decelerating, “people are looking for bigger, bolder products.”—Lee Larsen, 2 Towns Ciderhouse

A decade ago, hard cider seemed unstoppable. Its gluten-free quality made it an appealing beer alternative, led by Boston Beer Company’s Angry Orchard. Rosé-inspired ciders were all the rage. But along came hard seltzer, also gluten-free, delivering 100-calorie cans boasting black cherry “natural flavors.” During hard seltzer’s late 2010s heyday, “people got used to blander products,” says Lee Larsen, CEO and co-founder of 2 Towns Ciderhouse. Cider’s national star waned as Molson Coors eliminated Crispin and Smith & Forge, and Anheuser-Busch sold Virtue Cider back to its founder. With hard seltzer decelerating, “people are looking for bigger, bolder products,” Larsen says.

Cideries are meeting this moment by showcasing fermented apples’ malleable appeal. Cider can be no ABV or high ABV, channeling amari or Latin American aguas frescas. Breweries are producing hard cider to create more welcoming taprooms, while cideries are recasting themselves as fruit-fermentation specialists combatting canned cocktails on store shelves. Fast-growing regional cideries now account for the majority of cider sales, signifying a shift to taste with a sense of place. “Consumers want a flavorful local beverage,” says Michelle McGrath, the CEO of the American Cider Association.

Craft beer distorts the concept of locality. Breweries largely acquire grains, hops, and yeast strains from far and wide. A brewery’s top local trait might be its address. Cideries can easily root in regions like New York state, where Ryan James Burk is shrinking his cider-making scope.

He started at Angry Orchard in 2015 and starred in TV commercials for the country’s largest cidery. But Burk also focused on idiosyncratic ciders drawn from the company’s historic Walden, New York, orchard. The chasm separating Angry Orchard’s scale and Burk’s exacting small-batch cider was tough to bridge. “I would bring that cider into restaurants. And it was at least as good as, if not better than, any other cider available,” Burk says. “And they’d be like, ‘Yeah, but it says Angry Orchard on it. Thanks, but no thanks.’”

He departed Angry Orchard in 2022 and soon began fermenting apples for Occam Cider. Named after the principle positing that simple explanations are best, Burk’s project with his wife, Eva Deitch, centers on New York state ciders produced alongside Lake Ontario and the Finger Lakes. The itinerant model—Occam has no permanent home—will follow a direct-to-consumer club model with no more than 800 members, who should receive initial shipments this fall or winter. “This is very much about what’s happening in New York in a given season,” says Burk. (As Occam evolves, Burk will produce cider in other states and abroad.)

Farms on Michigan’s fertile western shores grow cherries, grapes, strawberries, and apples in the state’s temperate fruit belt. That bounty partly inspired Eeva and Trace Redmond, who are married and worked at Highland Brewing in Asheville, North Carolina, to return to Eeva’s northern Michigan hometown in 2021. This March, they opened Petoskey’s Elder Piper Beer + Cider, using apples from Eeva’s family orchard “that’s gone back to the forest,” says Trace, who calls the trees “feral.” The couple pluck and press the family’s once-forgotten apples—no one’s sure of exact varieties—and roll with every agricultural punch. This year’s pressing has a distinct floral, tropical character with notable sweetness that can be triggered by an imbalance of nitrogen to calcium in the ground. Anagrarian narrative is an additional ingredient. “People are excited about the stories,” Eeva says.

Storytelling exists beyond the soil. Soham Bhatt and Jake Mazar founded Artifact Cider Project, now in Florence, Massachusetts, in 2014 to support Northeast orchards and elevate varieties like the McIntosh, a staple supermarket apple. Bhatt, who is Indian American, now expands his cider-making lens to South Asia. He collaborated with spice company Diaspora Co. on a guava cider sprinkled with tangy chaat masala, then partnered with chef Chintan Pandya of New York City’s Unapologetic Foods group on a hopped cider with mango dubbed Jalsa (Hindi for “celebration”). Made with Alphonso mangos native to Bhatt and Pandya’s shared home region of Gujarat, India, the cider has added hops that replicate biting into bitter mango skin. “Terroir isn’t just this Eurocentric concept,” Bhatt says.

In 2017, José and Shani Gonzalez, who are second-generation Mexican immigrants, blended the concept of aguas frescas, refreshing drinks made by mixing fruit with water and sugar, with Pacific Northwest apples to create La Familia Cider. The Salem, Oregon, company’s ciders contain hibiscus flowers and guava and are sold in taquerias and Mexican restaurants that might not normally carry cider. “Our biggest opportunity is having our cans on a menu alongside Corona and Modelo,” José says.

La Familia underlines the connection between its ciders and culinary Mexico at its Salem cider house that opened in 2020 and shares space with Azuls Taco House. This summer, La Familia will open a second taproom, in Portland, serving quesadillas and nachos, ideal ballast for its tamarind cider. “Our die-hard customers come in with a love for these Mexican flavors,” he says, but “they’re just enjoying them in a cider format.”

Big flavor is a selling point in beverage alcohol, from potent Buzz Ballz cocktails like Sour Apple Chiller to New Belgium’s Voodoo Ranger line of imperial IPAs, including punch-like Fruit Force and Juice Force. Know what else is fruity and juicy? Apples.

“All this innovation is mimicking what cider does naturally,” says Andrew Blake, who in 2013 founded Blake’s Hard Cider on the apple-producing Armada, Michigan, farmstead that his family started operating in 1946. In the early 2010s, craft brewers championed an anything-goes ethos. Blake also bucked cider tradition by blending apples with mangos and habaneros, turning cider into a vehicle for delivering memorable flavor. Over time, Blake saw his company’s core competency as fermenting fruit beverages that compete in alcohol’s fourth category, or beyond beer, that includes hard seltzers, flavored malt beverages, and ready-to-drink cocktails.

Large beverage companies create distinct brands to cater to varied consumer desires. In the last two years, Blake’s merged with Texas-based Austin East ciders and Avid Cider in Bend, Oregon. The combined cideries, collectively known as Blake’s Beverage Company, can target different occasions and drinkers. Austin East ciders recently released Rico Tepache, a take on Mexico’s traditional pineapple ferment, while Avid Cider debuted the Tuesday Cocktail Club apple-wine cocktails in flavors like Mango Margarita. “We can expand what it means to ferment with fruit,” says Blake, the CEO.

Since starting in 2010, 2 Towns Ciderhouse has evolved into a beverage company producing mead and hard tea and seltzer, plus seltzers and canned and bottled cocktails built around strong apple wine. “People aren’t beer drinkers, cider drinkers, wine drinkers, or spirit drinkers,” says co-founder Larsen.“They’re beverage-alcohol drinkers.”

That increasingly means high-alcohol everything. Within brewing, the “imperial” adjective describes a brawnier, boozier beer, often an IPA or stout. In 2010, 2 Towns petitioned the federal government to call its 10.5 percent ABV Bad Apple an imperial cider. “We saw it as a way to bring a bold, complex product to the market,” Larsen says. The cidery spent four years lobbying before the government permitted the descriptor, a legal slog well spent. Today, the imperial category is cider’s biggest driver, and 2 Towns’ Cosmic Crisp imperial cider family accounts for some 50 percent of company sales.

At convenience stores, 19.2-ounce cans of strong beers and cocktail-inspired flavored malt beverages fill coolers. Imperial ciders would slot nicely next to juicy IPAs. But cider above 7 percent ABV can’t legally be packaged in 16- or 19.2-ounce cans and shipped outside a cidery’s home state. “It’s been really tough to sit on the sidelines,” says Colin Schilling, the CEO and co-founder of Seattle’s Schilling Cider, which makes the Excelsior line of imperial ciders. To test the waters, Schilling secured an exemption that lets it sell 19.2-ounce cans of imperial cider in its home state. And early returns have been encouraging. This year, the government is expected to permit imperial ciders in 19.2-ounce cans, shipped anywhere. When the moment arrives, “we’re very ready,” he says.

The opposite end of the ABV spectrum is nonalcoholic cider, a saturated sector. “The joke in cider is, ‘What is dealcoholized hard cider? It’s juice,’” Schilling says. The company instead mixed cherry and apple juices with apple cider vinegar to create the tangy, enlivening Ground Control, a riff on the shrub cocktail. “It’s an authentic throughline back to what we do,” Schilling says.

Many breweries create nonalcoholic versions of well-known beers, be it Heineken 0.0 or Black Butte Non-Alcoholic from Deschutes Brewery. Golden State Cider transformed its flagship cider, Mighty Dry, into Dry & Mighty. The cidery first ferments pressed West Coast apples with Champagne yeast, then sends the cider to another facility to extract alcohol before adding balancing apple juice. “It needed to be a hard cider experience,” says Chris Lacey, the CEO of the Sebastopol, California, cidery. Golden State released Dry & Mighty last March, and initially “people had a hard time grasping what we were doing,” Lacey says. Customers and stores like Total Wine have caught on, but where do you shelve NA cider? “We want to live in the craft beer NA section.”

“We viewed the brewery as the anchor that gets people in, and then we can educate people on what cider is.”—Benny Farber, Benny Boy Brewing

Aligning beer with cider can encourage trial. Husband and wife Benny Farber and Chelsey Rosetter conceived Benny Boy Brewing as Los Angeles’ first brewery and cidery. The couple opened Benny Boy in 2022 with Belgian-inspired beers and bone-dry ciders fermented from California Newtown Pippin apples. “We viewed the brewery as the anchor that gets people in, and then we can educate people on what cider is,” Farber says.

Benny Boy produces multiple cider entry points flavored with elderflowers, chai spices, or watermelon juice, a summertime bestseller. Farber also collaborates with Pali Wine Co. on co-ferments like Orchard Orange, a sparkling ringer for orange wine made by aging wild-fermented Gravenstein apples on Pinot Grigio grape skins. “We also want wine drinkers to come and enjoy themselves,” Farber says. The brewery-cidery connection will deepen next summer when Farber plants eight apple trees outside Benny Boy on a grassy stretch overlooking Interstate 5. In the metropolis, “plenty of people have not ever encountered an apple tree in their lives,” Farber says of the freeway orchard.

Caitlin Braam is well-traveled in fermented apples, serving as president of Seattle Cider and an Angry Orchard brand strategist before founding Yonder Cider in 2020. Her Wenatchee, Washington, cidery runs Pacific Northwest apples through a prism of cocktails, wine, and spirits to create ciders like the Negroni-based Cashmere and vermouth-inspired Mazama. “I can pull more people into the category by talking about something they relate to,” Braam says.

Another conversion tool is Yonder’s Seattle taproom co-located with Bale Breaker Brewing Company. The shared tap list features Bale Breaker’s IPAs alongside Yonder’s ciders, and customers regularly order mixed flights, introducing cider to an audience that might overlook a cider-only taproom. “I thought they would sell more beer and we would sell less cider,” Braam says.

The revenue split has been closer to 50-50, and Seattle’s Stoup and Old Stove breweries also stock Yonder’s ciders. “Breweries are some of our biggest accounts,” Braam says.

One of Braam’s biggest headaches is bubbles, or lack thereof. The federal government’s so-called “bubble tax” levies highly sparkling ciders with duties of up to $3.40 per gallon. Carbonated grape wines (below 8.5 percent) pay $1.07 per gallon, while beer, canned cocktails, and hard seltzers aren’t taxed on carbonation. Many cideries opt for less effervescence to save money. “Our ciders have less carbonation than every other beverage, and sometimes people question whether they’re flat because of that,” Braam says. “People are just used to more bubbles. And I can’t explain to everyone why Yonder cider isn’t as carbonated.” In January, congressional representatives introduced the Bubble Tax Modernization Act of 2024 to lower the tax, but governmental gears are slow to turn.

Another pressing concern is climate. Erratic weather wreaks havoc on harvests, challenging cidermakers that grow apples. Brooklyn Cider House, based at Twin Star Orchards in New Paltz, New York, tends to more than 50 acres of apple trees that supply ciders like the Basque-style Raw. “We lost more than half of our crop last year because of spring frost,” says co-founder and head cider maker Peter Yi. Wineries also contend with cold snaps, but they might hire helicopters to recirculate a vineyard’s frosty air. Wine’s higher pricepoints justify added expense. “People just expect to pay less for cider,” Yi says.

The ciders are presented like fine wine, “but consumers still struggle to see it that way.”—Lee Briante, Alma’s Cider & Beer

The most customers can spend is about $35-$40 on a bottle, estimates Occam Cider’s Burk. “There’s really no high end in cider.” The package size can also limit adoption. While large-format bottles have fallen out of favor in beer, many cideries favor wine’s 750-milliliter bottles. The ciders are presented like fine wine, “but consumers still struggle to see it that way,” says Briante of Alma’s. Revamping perceptions can be incremental. When Larsen started 2 Towns nearly 15 years ago, customers asked him how he got his grapes to taste like apples, or “they tried to give it to their children,” he says. “And we’re like, ‘No, no, no. There’s alcohol in that.’ Consumers have gotten much more educated.”

American hard cider is rooted in history and untethered from tradition, allowing cider makers to plant fresh paths. More than 7,000 apple varieties are grown across all 50 states, according to the US Apple Association. Some are for eating, and others are best fermented—boundless possibilities that can be served any which way. Cider’s new rules are being written in real time. This summer, Yonder will open its own taproom in Cashmere, Washington, and release rosé-like Wenatchee Wave cider in a bag-in-box, packaged still, and sold for summertime thrills.

“It tastes like a rosé wine but it’s 7 percent ABV and naturally pink,” Braam says, the tint supplied by red-fleshed Wenatchee Wave apples. “It’s all these interesting concepts merged into one to break what people think about cider.”