Until Prohibition, New Jersey was renowned for its hard cider. Meet the makers bringing back this historic drink with native apples and modern flavors.
WATCH: How Ironbound Hard Cider was born
Ironbound Hard Cider founder Charles Rosen describes what motivated him to create the brand.
Jenna Intersimone, MyCentralJersey.com
On the 108-acre Ironbound Farm and Ciderhouse in Warren County, founder Charles Rosen pours a glass of hard apple cider. It’s amber and lightly effervescent, and though it’s bone dry on the tongue, it tastes of ripe apple and pear, with hints of peach acidity and a subtle, earthy farmhouse funk.
It’s exceptional, this glass of Ironbound’s Newark Cider. Fit for kings… or something like that.
“This is literally the cider that George Washington drank,” Rosen says.
Indeed, hard cider has deep roots in New Jersey. Early colonists drank it and other fermented beverages in lieu of water due to health concerns (they lived to like 35, mind you), Newark was home to some of the country’s first and largest cider operations, and the cider we produced here won fans around the globe. But due to urbanization, Prohibition and changing consumer habits, New Jersey effectively exited the cider industry. That is, until about 10 years ago.
In the last decade, five cideries have opened in New Jersey. They’re making hard cider in often scenic production facilities and on family-friendly, inviting farms, and they’re using the Garden State’s agricultural history to introduce good cider to a growing number of people.
The renaissance is due in large part to a state law signed in 2017 that allows for the creation and operation of hard cideries here. Before then, anyone wanting to make cider would have to run an orchard, too, and get a winery license — a restrictive framework through which only two cideries in the state were able to navigate. But just as a 2012 law change ushered in a new wave of craft breweries in New Jersey, the gates are now open for cider. Three have opened since 2019, and more are in the works.
While we can’t reasonably expect to see the hundreds of small cideries that operated here before Prohibition, the handful of cideries that have opened are embracing our unique history with the drink.
“What I’ve noticed is that people who are from New Jersey are aware and proud of the things that come from New Jersey,” says John Coates, who opened Burnt Mills Cider in Bedminster in 2020. “In a state where you’ve got so many good things coming out, that vein of thought has been the impulse behind [much of] what we do.”
New Jersey’s apple cider history starts in Newark
That Newark Cider at Ironbound is much more than the sum of its parts. That is, yes, it’s a complex, refined and ultimately delicious drink, but also in that glass is, at the risk of sounding grandiose, the history of industry in New Jersey.
The cider that won George Washington’s acclaim, and which Ironbound has replicated, was made in Newark of three apple varieties: the Canfield, Graniwinkle and the much-appreciated Harrison, which was a prized apple used in many of Newark’s early ciders. It also almost went extinct.
Fortunately, a fruit collector from Vermont found a Harrison apple tree at an old cider mill in Livingston in 1976. Clips of the tree were sent to Thomas Burford in Virginia, who had helped restore species at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and who nursed Harrison saplings to health.
Enter Charles Rosen some 40 years later. He’d built a career as an advertising magnate launching now-household beverage brands like Mike’s Hard, Svedka and New Belgium. Living in Montclair, he’d also started a workforce development and urban renewal company in Newark that employed formerly incarcerated people, veterans and those with developmental disabilities.
About two years into that work, Rosen learned about Newark’s cider-making history; it was prized for its quantity and quality of apples and its location near ports made it suitable for cider makers to set up shop there. Inspired, Rosen found a former vineyard in Bedminster that had lain fallow for about two decades and built Ironbound Farm and Ciderhouse — a regenerative farm, cidery and restaurant that grows, harvests and forages much of what goes into its ciders and foods.
Rosen, an affable doer who claims to sleep only two or three hours a night, made Ironbound the first retail cidery in the state since before Prohibition. To provide the base apple juice for Ironbound’s cider, Rosen planted thousands of Harrison apple trees on the Bedminster farm, but also gave thousands more Harrison (and other apple varieties native to New Jersey) to growers in New York and Pennsylvania. It took years to regenerate Ironbound’s soil, plant and replant trees and wait for them to fruit.
“We reestablished the Harrison apple not just in our state but in the region and now there are ciders kind of popping up around using the Harrison apple because it’s this stellar apple,” Rosen says. “It took a long time to do this, so thank god the cider’s good because that would suck.”
At around the same time in 2014, Melick’s Town Farm, which had long been growing apples in Oldwick and Califon, got into the hard cider game, distributing cans of cider crafted from apples grown on its orchards that the family has tended over generations since 1725, and selling them out of their farm stands. Together, the two cider makers were the first to revive an industry long dormant in New Jersey.
More cideries appear after laws change in New Jersey
Ironbound and Melick’s made their hard ciders under winery licenses. That’s because there were no cidery licenses available at the time, which meant if anyone wanted to jump into the cider-sphere, they’d have to produce the fruit themselves (among other restrictions). That effectively limited the regrowth of the cider industry here as not many people have the land and means to both grow cider apples and operate a whole cidery.
That is, until 2017, when Christian Annese and others helped pass a state law allowing for licensed cideries and meaderies.
In the early 2010s, Annese was diagnosed with a gluten allergy, so beer (and all gluten-containing foods and drinks) was out. He was skeptical of cider after trying overly sweet and syrupy versions, until a waiter in a Philadelphia restaurant accidentally brought him a French cider instead of a mainstream one he’d ordered.
“It came out in a Champagne bottle with a caged cork,” Annese says. “I saw it comes from a farm in Normandy 400 years old, and I had it and it was one of the most complex drinks that I’ve had. It had funk, all these characteristics from all these cider apples you’ve never heard of before. I immediately fell in love with that.”
But artisanal French cider was (and is) expensive and hard to come by. So he started homebrewing cider. (Even after, as it turns out, he was misdiagnosed and not gluten-intolerant at all.) The mayor at the time in Somerdale suggested he bring some of his home ciders to give out at a town festival. Within two hours, 20 gallons of his cider — regular, pumpkin and raspberry varieties — were gone.
“That lit the fire under us to seriously consider this,” Annese says. “Once we decided we wanted to do this, we realized there were a bunch of roadblocks on the state side. We had to change the laws here in New Jersey, so that started a big process.”
That big process included four years of legislative vote rallying, led by Annese, Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt and a few other champions. There were false starts and opposition from other beverage makers in the state. Concessions had to be made, but eventually the law was passed and signed in 2017.
Since, Beach Bee opened in Long Branch in 2019; Annese opened Armageddon Brewing, which makes ciders and mead, in Somerdale in 2020; and Coates opened Burnt Mills the same year.
Coates is an example of how the law enables the industry’s growth. He was a financial analyst in Manhattan before opening his cidery. As it is for many in the food, brewing and now cider-making world, the move to open Burnt Mills was an investment in his passion and happiness. But his affinity for apples started in, let’s say, an atypical way.
“I grew up in Vermont. When I was five, my friend who lived next door and I were walking in the back woods and there was this wild apple tree,” Coates recalls. “And my friend picked up a log and threw it at the tree, and there was a beehive, and he hit it. So we were both hospitalized from 29 bee stings. So I was told never to go around there as a kid but I couldn’t stay away because it wasn’t a crab apple tree, but the apples were tiny. And I’d go back and pick them and I’ve never had an apple like that. It haunts me to this day. It was amazing.”
His pursuit of the white-whale apple is evidenced on the creative and tasty Burnt Mills tap list, and his woodsy origins are reflected in the laid-back atmosphere at the cidery. Coates, who viewed himself as a “quantitative” thinker, has been surprised how much he’s enjoyed working with his hands and with people. And though there’ve been headaches — space constrictions and building permits — he’s thankful he had the opportunity to open a cidery in New Jersey.
“It turns out I like shaping something for the ground up,” he says.
New Jersey cider is poised to grow
Cider is a unique case in the beverage world. It’s more popular globally than here in the U.S., but market researchers still expect it to grow from a $1.82 billion market nationally in 2023 to $2.16 billion in the next five years.
Part of the slow growth is due to our late start with cider laws, but also our connotations of hard cider; I have fond memories of chugging Woodchuck back in the day, but I wouldn’t seek that out now. And Angry Orchard, which dominates the hard cider market, well… let’s just say each of the cider makers in New Jersey I spoke with used it as a strawman for the overly saccharine stuff their craft products are decidedly not.
Too, cider makers need to compete with the likes of craft beer and hard seltzer. Rosen thought he had a slam dunk in conceiving Ironbound, but take it from a beverage pro like him: sometimes there’s too much crap to compete.
“We have this deep, deep connection to New Jersey history and really a balance of our two fundamental pillars of Jersey, which is the Garden State as growers and a manufacturing center to feed the rest of the nation,” Rosen says. I was like, ‘Here we are a Newark-based company, coming out here to be a regenerative farm, bringing back this historic apple, while building community with the most marginalized members of our community. … We’re gonna kill it.’ Well, guess what? White Claw. And nobody’s climbing over a pallet of White Claw to get a four-pack of Ironbound.”
But therein lies the opportunity. Craft cider producers in New Jersey are banking on the fact that enough people will support local businesses and appreciate the improvement of quality that comes from craftsmanship and locally sourced ingredients. At a place like Ironbound, almost everything comes from within steps of the taproom. Take the Gooseberry Ginger cider, a warm, bright sipper.
“You’re getting bright, bright acidity from the gooseberry and a subtle warmth from the ginger that we’re growing. So you’ve got this big apple but it’s super dry because there is less than a gram of residual sugar,” Rosen says.
The smaller scale of New Jersey cideries also allows them to experiment with flavors, too.
“When we’re trialing new flavors, we’ll have four different things and we can zero in pretty well on our target through trial and error usually,” Coates says, adding that they’ll often put those trials on tap to gain customer feedback. “Sometimes we’ll do small-batch stuff. We’re not afraid to fail.”
The Apple Cider Donut cider from Burnt Mills was one such success — staff members requested it, head of production Scott Weyant brewed it up and now, Coates laughs, “It’s what the kids are drinking. We can’t keep it in stock.” As the name implies, it’s pretty sweet, but with vanilla and caramel, it’s also delicious and it somehow retains the bready essence of an actual cider doughnut.
Annese at Armageddon doubles down on baking inspiration with some of his flavors. He still favors the drier, funkier, French-farmhouse style of cider that got him hooked, but layers in flavors inspired by his baking and cooking passions.
“[Ideas] can come from watching the Great British Baking Show or watching cooking shows to find different flavor combinations,” he says. “A lot of the recipes we started out with are based on things I cooked myself. I cook and bake myself and I equate this stuff to: if you know how to cook and know how flavors play together, you can work with that and get creative.”
Since Ironbound has a winery license, it can also make and sell products like fortified cider. One of its most astounding cider-adjacent ventures is Cider Royal, a slightly higher proof blend of Harrison apple cider and highly distilled applejack (which has its own story as New Jersey’s first and the country’s oldest commercially sold spirit), a favorite cocktail in the colonies.
“Everything you’re tasting in it is just the Harrison apple, but fortifying it allows us to stop the fermentation earlier so you get a much fuller, robust apple or butterscotch,” Cohen says.
Whether or not you’re into the history of cider in the state, eager to support regenerative farming, looking for a wild fall flavor or just want to try something new, New Jersey’s growing cider industry (there are two more cideries in the works) welcomes all takers. At the end of the day, Coates says, all that matters is that folks who visit a local cidery have a good experience.
“I think it’s great that there is a tradition here and I’m glad there are producers out there continuing that tradition. But that’s not what really drives us, we’re just trying to make a good product, good value and help people relax.”
Matt Cortina is a food reporter for NorthJersey.com/The Record. Reach him at [email protected].
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Publish date : 2024-09-23 21:26:00
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