Colorado craft cideries squeeze top-shelf flavor from local history

In a state with a 150-year history of apple growing, there’s inevitably going to be 150 years of hard cider. 

But the good ol’ days? That’s right now.

Colorado used to produce some of the best apples in the country, and southwest Colorado, in particular, was a powerhouse growing region, Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project cofounder Jude Schuenemeyer said. 

“Our dry climate, our sunshine, cool nighttime temperatures, hot daytime temperatures, all of that works together to produce some of the best quality fruit on the Earth,” he said. But cider was never a real rival to beer. There was no cider equivalent in the early 1900s for Tivoli Brewing or Coors.

Today, he said, is the moment when Colorado’s cider is at its peak. Cideries such as Haykin Family Cider, EsoTerra Ciderworks, Fenceline Cider and others are tapping into a combination of what remains from those early years before commercialization and a small revitalization of the state’s once-proud apple market. “This is the golden age for cider in Colorado. This is the golden age for cider in most of America now.”

The first recorded apple orchard in Colorado was established in the short-lived community of Hardscrabble, south of modern-day Florence, in 1847, Schuenemeyer said. Then the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush happened in the late 1850s and early 1860s, bringing all varieties of settlers, including orchardists.

“People thought they were absolutely nuts to plant orchards in Colorado, that they’d never grow at that altitude, couldn’t possibly happen,” he said. By the 1880s, orchardists were through the experimental phase and growing “some of the tastiest fruit anyone had ever seen.”

The number of apple varieties catalogued in the United States exploded from about 130 in the early 1800s to about 20,000 by the 1900s, he said, many of them thriving around Colorado. Orchards cropped up, from the Front Range to the Western Slope and the Four Corners region. The state’s output at the time was greater than that of Washington state, which now dominates national production.

One of the Colorado craft producers building a bridge from the that bountiful era of apple-growing to its golden age of cider is Jay Kenney at Clear Fork Cider. After starting Clear Fork in 2017 in Wheat Ridge, he saw his partner leave the business in 2019, followed by the uphill battle of staying in business through COVID. 

When the opportunity arose to relocate to a farm between Hotchkiss and Paonia, he reassessed what sort of business he wanted to run.

“I was never gonna be a big commercial cidermaker. I didn’t want to scale up, I like being able to experiment,” he said, and the move to the high country around the north fork of the Gunnison allowed him that.

Now he’s mostly a one-man operation, with a little help picking, pressing and bottling, bringing him back to his home-cidermaking days of 25 years ago. While he had picked some fruit locally when the cidery was in the Denver area, as well as purchasing juice from small operators out of state, he’s transitioned to 100% Colorado fruit.

Kenney estimates his production now is probably less than 1,000 gallons a year, primarily for the local market. He convinced the state to license a tasting room inside of his wife’s bookstore, Paonia Books, where there’s a small morning coffee business and he sells cider a day or two each week. He offers kegs to a few small local businesses, but primarily packages in 500ml bottles. “The commercial cider makers are doing something that requires a lot of volume, a lot of velocity and cans,” he said. “I’m not interested in putting stuff in aluminum cans.”

Clear Fork has about 150 trees on 27 acres at the farm, as well as another 150 trees on a homestead property in Crawford — including some very old and very rare varieties that he’s banked with MORP — and about 350 trees near Cortez. While those three orchards are their primary source of apples, there is a lot of fruit in the fertile North Fork Valley that goes to waste, including apples and pears.

“I pick a lot of fruit and I get it for free, just from people who don’t want to see fruit go to waste,” Kenney said. “I’m really interested in experimenting with apples and pears. It’s really nice not to be forced by market to make the same kinds of cider or perry every year.”

The nose knows ciders

A good cider, based on centuries-old Western European tradition, is a balance of tannins, acidity and aromatics. Very old varieties, Kenney said, often have some aromatics, plenty of acid and rarely any tannins, producing a cider that won’t age as well (similar to more tannic red wine versus softer, less tannic white wine). As he adds to his orchards, this framework has helped guide his choices when selecting apple varieties.

“When I’ve planted, I’ve always planted kind of a mix — tannins, acid and aromatics — with the idea that someday each orchard will give me a full production and I’ll make a blend for each orchard,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet, and it’s probably unlikely … It’s every other year that you get a crop from a particular tree, and it’s unusual to get all the trees working together all the time.”

Further down the Western Slope, the Williams family has been involved in the state’s apple industry for generations — the last of the big family establishments growing, packing, and shipping apples out of the Surface Creek Valley, all using their own vertically integrated capacity that’s been refined over more than a century, according to Kari Williams.

“We’ve been doing it since we froze water on the Grand Mesa from the lake, brought it down, hand-wrapped apples, loaded them into rail cars with blocks of ice, and shipped them out of this valley,” she said.

Her family was there when the valley was home to 1,000-acre orchards, with four juicing plants and seven packing plants. The industry was also full of enough small growers that Cedaredge was home to co-ops that would allow growers to pack, market, and sell fruit cooperatively. They’ve seen a lot of changes to the industry, a lot of farmers leave, and a lot of farms turned into neighborhoods, but have been able to stay competitive based on quality.

“We’re very much in a niche market. It’s the quality of our fruit and the location we grow it at this elevation that allows us to continue to be relevant in this fruit market,” she said.

When she started Snow Capped Cider in 2014, they applied the same environmental considerations and commitment to growing cider apples as to premium culinary apples, and the same premium mindset to the final product.

“There’s a lot more to it than just throwing some trees in the ground,” Williams said. “We’re caring for the trees in such a meticulous way, we’re promoting the growth while still stressing the tree.”

Snow Capped has its own dedicated orchards that are 100% cider fruit, but she also gets the culls — imperfect fruit that can’t be sold for culinary use — from the family operation. Out of 19 million pounds of apples grown in their orchards last year, she estimated that about 30% went to cider.

“Anything we can’t use for grocery — Kroger changes a PO or wants a different size — comes down the line,” Williams said. “I get all of that that they can’t sell, so it makes our family a zero-waste company. I use every bit of it.”

The approach has been paying off, with Snow Capped garnering a wide range of awards in competition against cideries both domestic and international, including the highest medal count ever for a cidery at CiderCraft and Midsize Cidermaker of the year at Glintcap, the biggest judged cider competition in the world. 

“I attribute a lot of it to the elevation and our growing techniques,” she said. “Colorado just has a really unique environment for it … I feel kind of a responsibility, and when I make cider, I’m representing our fruit history in Colorado, and it’s a very proud thing. My entire family’s worked for it, and I want to show the world that what I can do at this elevation belongs on the stage with any fine cider in the world.”

She comes at it from a unique position, though. Along with the family’s Colorado orchards, which are spread out in various locations to mitigate the risk for frost, they’re also a big apple grower in Texas, with an orchard, a vineyard and a winery outside of Lubbock.

“I’m like a kid in a candy story,” Williams said. “We have hundreds of varietals of apples. I really have so many ciders that I made only because I can. If I didn’t have that direct source, I wouldn’t be as interested in making cider, to be someone who has to make it as a startup model and plant an orchard, things like that.”

That’s because she knows it’s not all sunshine and apple blossoms trying to grow fruit in Colorado. Assuming the land, water, and infrastructure are in place — no small tasks — the weather is a very real risk. In October 2020, temperatures dropped to zero overnight, the sudden change killing 30% of the fruit trees in the state, including several million dollars worth of the Williams’ orchards.

“It’s a hard business to make it in. It’s a hard place to grow fruit. Even in May, we’ve got our hail nets out on our apples. A tiny little microstorm that lasts 30 minutes can knock out $500,000 worth of fruit,” she said.

Once an orchard is in place and mature enough to produce regularly, cider apple trees tend to yield smaller fruit with less juice. She said a 900-pound bin of apples, after being juiced, fermented, racked and filtered, might yield 75 gallons of cider. It’s a hard business case to make, which she experienced when she first approached the rest of the family about putting in some cider trees.

“Why would they allow me to plant something that didn’t make money?” she sad. “Cidermakers don’t pay anything for them, they’re disease ridden, they can infect an entire orchard, they ripen fast and fall on the ground.”

Those are some of the hurdles that lead to the loss of diversity a century ago. Almost as soon as the Colorado apple industry was established, a variety of factors began influencing this dramatic narrowing of the gene pool. As people migrated from the country to the city, fueled by the Civil War and industrialization, the homestead orchards that had been a bulwark of diversity were abandoned or converted. People understood crops less and grocery stores wanted fewer varieties — focusing on a small number of varieties that kept well.

Individual orchards that had been home to potentially dozens of cultivars, serving different purposes and maturing at different times to allow for a single homestead family to manage the workload and spread out the weather-related risks, began to be monocropped, Schuenemeyer said.

“By the time the 1920s rolled around, the extension service was saying, ‘Get rid of these (varieties). All you need are delicious, Romes and Jonathan’s. Maybe some goldens in there, or some kind of a winesap,’” he said. “They were looking at that economy of scale. How do you get the most crop to the most people?”

Moths sparked conversion of orchards to “urban” neighborhoods

While that pressure was developing, coddling moths also began to devastate apple orchards beginning on the Front Range in the 1890s. “There were orchards all up and down the Front Range, right within the cities, Lakewood, Wheat Ridge, Boulder, Denver itself, Fort Collins,” Schuenemeyer said. “We went from having these beautiful, pristine crops without any pests or disease to where the orchards were not valuable anymore because the crops were so wormy.”

In many places, the trees were cut out and the land developed. Growers in Larimer County replaced apples with cherries. Grand Junction and the Grand Valley area wasn’t impacted at first, and apples grew to a million-dollar crop by 1910, he said, but by 1920, people were walking away from their orchards.

“A lot of the Grand Valley was sold as irrigated orchard land. Once the coddling moth came in and started wiping that out, those investments just crashed and things went into more urban development,” Schuenemeyer said.

After a century of genetic consolidation, projects like MORP, the Boulder Apple Tree Project, Widespread Malus and others around Colorado (and around the country) are working to push back against the bottleneck in varietals. Jude Schuenemeyer and his wife, Addie, maintain a genetic library of about 200 different cultivars, half of which he said are “extraordinarily rare, some of the rarest on Earth.” Many are unknown but have identifiable graft lines, and may be varietals thought to be extinct.

“If we want to save these, and we want to preserve Colorado’s orchard culture and economy, we’ve got to get these back out on the landscape. These are the trees that have grown here for 100-and-something years,” he said. In some cases, like the rediscovered Colorado Orange, trees are getting grafted and transplanted to be available for orchardists or home enthusiasts.

“Our problem with even something like the Colorado Orange, this year we grafted just under 100 of them. A real nursery would be growing 10,000 or 20,000 or 100,000 per variety,” he said. “We’re trying to do fives and 10s a year to keep these from going extinct.”

A big factor with how they’re able to move forward is that consumers need to drive demand. It’s a slow process to turn a small collection of grafts into a vibrant orchard of heirlooms and cider apples. “Consumers have a big say in this, but they don’t have an instant say,” he said. “Consumers can say, ‘We want apples, we want to drink cider coming from Colorado apples.’ They’re adaptable as can be and they all have stories, even if a lot of them don’t have names, the trees themselves have great stories. Getting consumers aware of that, that these exist, that this is a possibility, that this is a way forward,” Schuenemeyer said.  “This was never about the past for us, it was always about the potential for the future.’”

The Boulder Apple Tree Project has also been logging the genetic material that remains from the homestead era, originally around Boulder County and now more broadly. An initiative that started at the University of Colorado, it’s expanded in recent years to work with community colleges and universities around the state to explore historical fruit trees and cultivars.

Deidre Jaeger, a postdoctoral researcher at CU, said the research is not solely focused on “old” trees or heirloom types. The program is approaching its apple research with a mix of scientific, historic, and educational goals.

On the scientific front, they started with community blitzes around Boulder to identify and begin tracking apple trees. Then they started to tag the trees and map locations, and on an ongoing basis collect biological data, and record the environment and habitat. “That can link with climate change,” she said. “For example, we measure many aspects of the tree’s phenology, or the timing of reccurring biological events such as the timing of leaf emergence, flower emergence, fruit production and timing, those are all things we anticipate may be impacted by climate change.”

Looking at the historical aspect, Jaeger said they’ve had grad students dig into records to learn about the homesteads in the area, as well as researching apples as a source of nutrition, longevity of trees, productivity of the land, and also the establishment apple orchards as a potential indicator for the displacement of native people as white settlers moved westward.

“It’s part of a complex history. Apples aren’t inherently bad, but they do have both positive and negative historical contexts,” she said.

Finally, the education piece is where she’s currently most active, designing research projects for undergrad students and citizen scientists, offering outreach experiences, and organizing K-12 educational opportunities. University students get out into the field and take physical measurements, taste the apples in the fall for sensory information, and see how small-scale community research can contribute to a larger effort.

They also work to preserve historical varieties in an effort parallel to other grafting work. Jaeger said historic logs, including a 1900-era report from CSU indicates that there used to be hundreds of apple varieties in Boulder alone. The records showed mature trees, planted in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

“From some of our mapping efforts and genetic analysis with USDA, we’ve found well over 40 varieties just within the city of Boulder,” she said. “If we can save some genetic material, we can repropagate and hang on to that local diversity, and so students get really excited to be a part of that grafting effort.”

Ciders informed by the past, but made for today

At Haykin Family Cider in Aurora, Daniel Haykin approaches those unique cultivars with a vintners mindset. He’s not working to blend different types of apples to meet a standard of perfection handed down from French and English cider tradition, but to make the most out of an individual varietal, offering exclusively unpasteurized, single-varietal ciders.

“I’m not interested in trying to make a copy of something that has come before. Our take is that each heirloom apple has a very unique character, and we are looking for the most character-rich, and to highlight them, in a way, as they are,” he said. “There are apples that are driven by nothing but aroma and acidity, and we’re happy to capture that character, even if there’s no tannin at all. Just like a white wine isn’t tannic, it doesn’t make it less, it just makes it different, so our goal is to show the spectrum of the flavors within the apple world, not to recreate something that exists in Europe.”

To meet that goal, he works with orchards in Colorado, Washington State, Michigan and Oregon. He’s looking for very specific varietals, often the hard-to-find heirlooms.

“If you’re going to have one ingredient, it has to be the best. When I went looking for basically the wine grapes of apples, what I learned was overwhelmingly those are heirloom apples with fantastically authentic historic stories, many of them anchored in our region or our state,” he said. “It just turns out that heirloom apples were selected for aroma, and flavor, and all of these considerations that are lost in the grocery store. The truth is, the best version of the fruit was from, in many cases, a century or centuries ago.”

To meet those needs, he looks locally first, sourcing whole apples that they’ll press at the cidery, then supplementing it as needed with fruit from out-of-state growers.

Over time, he said, assuming an upward trajectory with the business, they would like to have a small orchard of their own to help meet that need, and more broadly they hope that the proportion of Colorado apples increases as other orchards grow or come on-line. 

“The people I source from in Colorado tend to be much smaller growers,” he said. “There aren’t many large growers that are growing a sufficient amount of American heirloom apples or European cider-making-specific apples. In the latter case, and it’s not a trivial one, your only customer for cider-specific apples are cider makers. There’s no fresh-market solution.”

Very few growers are willing to take on the risk. There’s hope on the horizon with some young orchards being established, he said, but he wishes that more large growers would also step up and grow heirlooms. 

A bright spot Haykin looks to in the Colorado orchard community is Steve Ela, the fourth-generation proprietor at Ela Family Farms in Hotchkiss. When his time came to take over the family business, Haykin said, Ela decided to move away from the “very bad economics” of trying to sell into the grocery market.

“Instead, he started driving a semi truck over to the Front Range every weekend and doing a dozen or more farmers markets from Fort Collins down to Colorado Springs. He found, in that setting, that there was a tremendous demand and It helped him stand out to grow the most interesting heirlooms. When you look at his orchard, he has a dozen or more varieties that originated all over the world, including Europe. Some apples that are hard to pronounce that are some of the most interesting heirlooms ever.”

He’d like to see a greater spotlight on the industry, and wishes MORP’s rediscovery of the Colorado Orange — pulling a once-renowned heirloom varietal back from the verge of extinction — was a bigger deal to consumers. For now, he said, going to the farmers markets and directly supporting orchards such as Ela’s moves the needle in support of heirlooms as much as anything else.

“The best way is to keep these farmers in business, and that’s where you’re going to find Steve. You’re going to find him at Pearl Street, at City Park, all over town in Boulder, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs,” Haykin said.When it comes to other varietals that he’d like to see come back at a commercial scale, the list runs in the dozens at the low end, possibly into the hundreds, including heirlooms, American cider apples, European bittersweets and bitter sharps

“The names become quite extravagant, but for example an English apple named Kingston black, or perhaps a French apple named Reine des Pomme. Literally from each country in Europe there would be hundreds of interesting apples and from the United States maybe a thousand or more,” he said. “Even just to have really interesting heirlooms at all in any volume would be a huge benefit.”