Colorado craft cideries squeeze top-shelf flavor from local history (Colorado Sun)
Gabe Toth
December 3, 2024
Beer built the culture of fermented beverages in Colorado, but cidermakers are looking a future informed by apple varieties of the past
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.”