Hmm, about us... but do you really want to know? Seriously, ask yourself what you expect to read here.
We're all familiar with the typical "About Us" piece -- the website cliche, a formulaic blurb designed to funnel your attention toward details fast and easy. I can't provide you with similar information because the true nature of this place mandates the opposite: deep consideration and open exploration. If you really want to know, you'll need to reciprocate the commitment, lest understand nothing about us at all.
Just as a quick example... You won't find rows and rows of vigorous orchard trees, or a clean, modern millhouse like you would at most cideries. Don't get me wrong, we can still upload pretty pictures and provide brief mantras regarding our practices, but to try to wrap-it-up for you would be dishonest. Our farm-focus is literally in the opposite direction, toward the wild unknown. This effort welcomes complications and unexpected results, but most of all, we must accept constant struggle. The glory and the reality of nature doesn't offer conclusions, not even within the cider!
So, for you, Mr. I-Got-Things-To-Accomplish, is it worth your time to learn about the Aaron Burr Cidery? Only if you want to know how one of the smallest producers in the country also became one of the most influential. Ours, is a story of how things go sideways, fall from the radar, then reemerge atop a mountain that was previously obscured by clouds. Our success, is the success of "many versus a select few", "small-over-large", "local", and "real nature." There's a reason no living cidermaker has had more meaningful acclaim from other artists and critical theorists (as opposed to commercial awards), but it's not going to present itself in short order.
Chances are you're open to actual consideration if you're still reading by this point, so for the thinkers of this world, without further ado, here's as introduction to us...
An Introduction
Aaron Burr Cidery is two people, Polly and Andy Brennan. Our cider business, now almost twenty years old, operates out of the Brown Family Homestead which dates back to the early 1800's. It's located in the vicinity of Wurtsboro, New York -- a rugged place, triangulated by the Upper Delaware River, the Catskill Mountains, and the Hudson Valley.
Our goal is to achieve a natural trinity: (1) to sustain the system of home-economics which predates us, (2) to continue to grow premodern (seedling) apple trees, and (3) to make a cider befitting of 1817, when Aaron Burr signed our deed to Mosses Brown.
This date is important. Like painting to 16th century Italy, no place or era has ever been able to match cider's peak in the newly formed United States in the early 1800's. To all, it was the everyday "table wine" thanks to the fact that apples, unlike grapes, are perfectly suited for the Northeast climate and terrain. As with all foods and crafts, however, a certain percentage of artisans emerged to make cider at much higher level, and this activity led to the exponential fine-tuning of the agriculture. This culture faded rapidly by the 1900's, never to be seen again.
Understanding the crash of cider means looking at the many changes to the world since then. They include: The industrialization of America, the scaling-up of agriculture and orchard efficiency, and the mass cloning of apple varieties and rootstocks. Cider's demise has also to do with industrialized beer production and the aesthetic of lab-made wines; But above all else, cider-culture was destroyed by global trade and our modern economic system. These "progresses", which began in earnest in the late in the 1800's (long before Prohibition), continue to the day. We've all inherited this trajectory.
Conversely, we have this linear history to thank for Aaron Burr Cider's mission and success.
In 2008, when Polly and I first envisioned "Homestead Apple: America's Original Table-Wine" (the label of our first licensed cider in 2010), we needed only recall where apple farming had gone and proceed in the opposite direction. But to America's Original Cider actually original, not a recreation, we first had to adapt to homesteader ways in this 200-year-old farm. (In other words, authenticity has to come from within -- the literal definition of "original.")
Later, in 2018, I tried to recap this experience of our first dozen years at the Brown Homestead farm. While writing my book, Uncultivated, I came to realize the aforementioned "three aspects of real cider", that they're actually a trinity. Yes, they manifest in three different forms, but juxtaposed in equal measure, they become "as-one" (like a trinity.) Wild apples, or the seedling trees without modern manipulation, and natural cider, plus local-focused small business all come together to form the backbone of America's historic cider and cider culture. Now, when I write, I try to articulate this trinity, just as our Homestead Cider achieves it in bottle.
To appreciate the whole of Aaron Burr Cider, one must investigate the three components and how they revealed themselves to us over time...
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About Our Relationship to Apples (wild and home-grown)
We moved to the Brown Homestead in 2006 and immediately began "cultivating our garden", as Voltaire would say. Apple growing quickly emerged as our primary focus, logically inspiring me to study pomology from the experts.
However, I had already developed a relationship with apple trees. Ten years prior, in the mid-1990's, foraging apples in abandoned orchards and in the wild had become my pastime, so I had a decade of experience to contrast formal learning against. This helped me scrutinize cultivation, in general, and I had something to contrast it with. I continue to forage for most of our apples, because what I've witnessed when apples are left alone has far greater implications beyond agriculture.
Malus (the apple tree) is one of the world’s most sophisticated lifeforms, both genetically and metaphysically. It is resilient, creative, intelligent, expressive, and supremely adaptive. I've been privileged to taste apples which are truly great, plain bland, weird and ugly, and a seemingly infinite number of other expressions never seen in grocery stores or in modern farms.
It wasn't easy transitioning from a forager to commercial orchardist, then trying to blend the two by way of "uncultivation" -- unlearning the cultivator's biases.
I was influenced by what I studied and heard, but while I waited for my trees to grow, I also continued to forage and witness trees in real nature. This brought me to an inevitable crossroads. Do I want to showcase "struggling" trees (enduring the hardships of nature -- the competition, diseases, bad weather, and random animal damage -- often even dying as a result of these pressures), or do I want to showcase their potential when cultivated -- protected and coddled by a humans? The decision came down to following the apple's request: What does it want?
) wasn't easy. The more I learned, the more I was shocked to realize how much professional growers "do for their trees" (as they'd put it.) And I thought apples were just a gift from nature!
The answer was in the seed.
Humans want predictability, safety, and fruitful abundance. This is ALWAYS what we cultivate for, whether on farms or in cities, but real apple trees (not the cloned ones) were designed oppositely. Parent trees do not coddle their young like humans do, they release thousands of seeds intent to explore the uncultivated parts of the planet. And that is STILL a fact about apple seeds, no matter how manipulated the parent fruit has become, they want to break free from their cages and explore suitability elsewhere.
Thus, when re-thinking our home plantings in lieu of this epiphany, we reversed our initial plans for a cleared, productive orchard, and tried to “un-cultivate” the trees going forward. This involved attempting to assimilate the trees with the larger forest, and today, we have as many seedling trees outside the deer fence as we do planted trees in meadow.
Above all, I want the trees to exhibit independence like wild trees do because when I'm gone, I want them to survive decades -- maybe centuries -- without me. This goal is in absolute conflict with conventional apple production and conventional wisdom, but the fact is, modern apple trees require artificial propping. Once Man steps in and replaces Malus' natural immune system and learning environment, the tree becomes dependent on manipulation. Everything dies, but cultivated trees die exponentially faster than trees that are encouraged to be independent.
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Secondly, About Our Ciders
There were many advantages to making cider commercially in 2011, when we first got licensed, but none greatest than the fact cider had nowhere to go but up. In stores and pubs, American consumers knew only the Magner's or Woodchuck-type of drink (artificially carbonated, flavored, and sweetened.) Only in basements did homebrewers understand what natural cider tasted like, so we simply modeled ourselves after the amateurs. (From my background in art, I cringe at the word, "professional." The need to make money begets formulaic twaddle, never art, so I wanted to maintain "the beginner's mind," the freedom to fuck-up and see where life takes us.)
For instance, when making cider, rather than subjugate extremely unique and expressive wild apples to paved market-expectation (cider is supposed to be “sweet, clean and young” -- which in itself is a crime), and rather than destroy the essence of natural fermentation with chemical treatments, filtration and additives, we went the opposite direction, doing what home brewers always did: Drank the natural progression of cider and adjusted to what nature gave us. .
Mind you, this was before the term “natural wine” became well-known in the marketplace, and our unsightly ciders (the result of sediment from un-disgorged bottle conditioniing (now called, “pet-nat”)), was jarring to many consumers. There were no other wild ferments from wild apples at the time, but the character and strength of the apples were so great, many customers stuck with us anyways. They were on the same ride we were on in the early 2010's, rediscovering what cider could be.
Luckily, there were some American growers who had already introduced European cider apples to Americans at this point, word was already out among wine and food insiders that "eating apples" (like table grapes) were useless in fine cider. This was the exciting environment we stepped into, but we were especially excited by the denser, more acidic, and even more tannic wild American apples growing around us. Naturally, this ld us to experiment with wild choke-pears, crabapples, and to blend our apples with tannic grapes and elderberry too (now called, "co-fermentations" in the marketplace.)
I know such claims to originality sounds self-aggrandizing, but, in truth, we were simply following the nature's compass and doing what thousands of home producers did before us. The history was there, we just needed to avoid larger commercial interests, which brings us to the third leg of our business. Representing real trees in the real world is a MUCH greater honor!
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About How We Operate
A tripod is the most stable stance. Even on un-even ground, we are stand more firmly planted on three legs, rather than two, four or multiple more. De La Soul said it best, Three Is The Magic Number, but only united as one. Think about it: Cider is made from apple trees and yeasts, but there is a third organism responsible for the drink, us. It's our duty to live in tandem to the other two legs, not to direct it or lead, that's thinking of it unilaterally or linear. We are 1/3rd a trinity, thus, whole with the trinity!
As I keep insisting, Polly and I attempt to operate our business “naturally,” but what does that mean? It just means it's our attempt to grow apples and yeast in accordance with our environment. For us, this addresses issues of scale, production methods, marketing, and finance, but it's not a formula for other small farm-business owners to follow. Each must express what it means to live a life connected to nature, whatever that means to them! (That said, I don't believe one can make natural cider, or understand how to be an ambassador to wild trees and yeast, without adjusting their business in tandem. For instance, on an off-year for apples, if a producer needs to make 25 barrels of cider to maintain their business, then the business is not in synch with nature. It's that obvious.)
For me, it's harder to understand the real nature of humans than it is witness and appreciate the real nature of apples, yeast, and cider. It requires intense self-investigation and a discriminating look at the society and economy which predate us. We inherited a perspective, I believe, which fools us into thinking we know who we are, and what "nature" really is. But it's a bias -- a prejudice formed from the inside. We can't separate ourselves from nature anymore than we can separate from ourselves! We have no choice but to reflect from the inside the collective being, and to appreciate that even our artifice (like farming) is part of nature now.
That said, if we don't somehow put ourselves on parallel with wild apples and "uncultivated" orchard trees, then we can not claim to be understand what we represent. The obvious place to start is in acknowledging how wild apples grow, which in my experience, includes being biannual, seasonaly-affected, and limited in production. These are natural occurrences, and they are EVERYTHING modern business models reject (which is why farmers and gene-engineers are trying to trick the trees into producing more-and-more.)
How can our business be more in-tune with the natural ebbs and flows of profitability? How can a farm even survive if there’s no income for a while? Well, maybe I’m showing my age here, but in the 20th century it was assumed ALL new ventures would suffer years of loss before showing a profit. Orchards, especially, had to wait decades. But now, in the age of Shark Tank and outside money injections, modern businesses are expected to "miraculously grow" and show the same superficial strength as a plant propped on Miracle Grow. What did we learn from six years in the red? Adversity builds character. What was good for the trees, was good for us too.
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