NOTE: this piece is a work in progress. It's unfinished (particularly towards the end)
The typical "About Us" piece has become a website cliche, a formulaic blurb designed to funnel your attention toward the appealing aspects of the company, fast and easy. The actual nature of this place, however, mandates the opposite approach: open exploration and deep consideration. So, if you really want to know about the Aaron Burr Cidery, you'll need to reciprocate the commitment. Settle in.
To give you 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 of our farm and provide you with feel-good mantras regarding our practices, but it would be dishonest to steer you toward a bucolic conclusion. The truth is, our focus is literally in the opposite direction: toward the wild unknown. We must scrap our aesthetic ideals, welcome complications and unexpected results, but most of all, we must accept constant struggle. Nature is messy, the truth is messy, but the glory of Aaron Burr Cider is that we don't box these things out to appease demand.
So, for you, Mr. I-Got-Things-To-Accomplish, is it worth your time to learn "about us?" Well, if you want to know how one of the smallest producers in the country also became one of the most influential, then there's no other choice but to follow the slow-unfolding path. Ours, is a story of how things go sideways, fall from the radar, then reemerge atop a mountain that was previously obscured in the clouds. Our success is the success of "many versus the limited few", "local", and the acceptance of real nature (not farmed nature.)
The following pages are intended to introduce you to the practices that have made us notable among food activists and cultural critics. So, without further ado...
Background Information and An Introduction to Our Mission
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 is a very small farm dating back to the early 1800's. We are in the vicinity of Wurtsboro, New York -- a rugged location, triangulated by the Upper Delaware River, the Catskill Mountains, and the Hudson Valley.
Our goal is to achieve a natural trinity: (1) to contain business within a home-economic system, (2) to continue to grow premodern apple trees (seedlings), and (3) to make a cider concurrent to 1817, the year Aaron Burr wrote the deed for Mosses Brown, our original homesteader.
Why 1817? Because no other 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, in part, to the fact that there were no other options: Apple trees, unlike grapes and grains, were perfectly suited for the Northeast climate and rocky terrain. Everyone grew apples.
As always, a certain percentage of artisans will emerge to nerd-out on any food or craft, but given that cider was "our everything" between 1700 and early 1800's, this activity led to an exponential exploration of apple-agriculture. By the mid-to-late 1800's, however, circumstances turned against localism and self-reliance, and Americans began living in urban communities, living specialized lives that didn't include agriculture. The "high art" of cider faded rapidly by the American Civil War.
Understanding the crash means scrutinizing the many changes since 1817. It was inevitable with urbanization and the advent of long-distance transportation that industrialized beer production would rise. Later, during the more hygenic 20th century, an aesthetic for lab-made wines emerged victorious as well. What Americans "looked for" in a drink radically shifted, but the biggest blow to cider came from the scaling-up of apple farming. Industrial farming involved chemical sprays, the mass-cloning of varieties and rootstocks, and a drastic shake-out of growers. Now less than 2% our population grow apple trees
It was hubris to think we could escape the current of "progress", but at least the trajectory of apples was clear. By 2006, the year Polly and I moved to the Brown Homestead farm, we only needed to investigate and follow the trail of breadcrumbs back 200 years. Could it be as simple as undoing each decision effecting apple agriculture?
In 2008, we published our business plan which included "Homestead Apple: America's Original Table-Wine" (the name of our first licensed cider in 2010,) but our journey backwards hadn't even really begun. Later, it dawned on us that we'd have to do more than just grow old "cider apple varieties", we'd also have to use apples grown in the old way (explained later,) AND even live as old homesteaders ourselves! Afterall, to make America's "Original" cider actually original (not just a recreation,) then all the greater elements had to also be authentic. (As a reminder: the etymology and literal definition of the word, original, means "to come from within", as in birth.)
Later, in 2018, I tried to recap the experience of our first dozen years at the Brown Homestead farm while writing my book, Uncultivated. It was then that I finally understood that the aforementioned trinity, the "three aspects of real cider", were a single being! Yes, they manifest in three different forms, but enacted in equal measure, they become "as-one", like a trinity. Wild apples (and/ or seedling trees without modern manipulation), natural cider, and local business (limited in scale by location) had come together to create America's historic cider culture, the future of the high cider will again need to realize this form!
So now you know what we're trying to create, and you'd be forgiven to turn away now, but the truth is, we haven't even begun to talk about what the trinity (as a larger vision) and why it's monumentally different than the components of modern cider. today. The rest of this "about us" essay will be dedicated to the three aspects (apples, cider, and business) following our relationship to them...
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Our Apples (wild and home-grown)
When we moved to the Brown Homestead in 2006, making cider and planting apple trees was among the first things we did. I was an utter novice to professional orcharding, but not to the apple harvest. Ten years prior, in the mid-1990's, I began foraging in abandoned orchards whenever I wanted to connect to nature and this decade remains vital. It's what inspired me to become a farmer in the first, but it was especially important in helping me sift through the fact-versus-fiction during my apple education. It took years to see that "the experts" had anthropocentric bias ("agricultural glasses") and, really, they didn't know the "real apple tree" any better than I did. The truth is still out to explore, and always on a new case-by-case basis!
Genus, Malus (the apple tree), is that it's one of the world’s most complex lifeforms, genetically but also epigenetically. You can look that up in science journals, but I've seen it first-hand. It's resilient, creative, intelligent, expressive, and supremely adaptive. Of course, I was influenced by what I studied, but while I waited for my trees to grow, I also continued to forage. I was heading for a crossroads.
Do I proceed "as a farmer" and showcase the tree's potential under cultivation (protected, coddled, and guided by humans,) or would I rather spotlight the trees' God-given instincts: showcase how it endures the hardships of nature (the competition, diseases, bad weather, and random animal damage -- often even dying as a result of these pressures), learns from all this, then reemerges triumphant with something profoundly beautiful to say about life? No question, follow the tree!
I had to re-visit my orchard strategy in lieu of this epiphany, reversing my initial vision of a cleared, productive orchard. To “un-cultivate” trees that were planted (cloned and protected as all orchard trees are nowadays), involves attempting to assimilate them with the larger forest. This met with results I couldn't bare, because, like in the wild, many died off. So in the end, I adopted a hybrid approach by dividing the orchard with a deer fence: half are still cultivated trees, while the other half are left to their own devices.
Above all, I want the trees to exhibit independence like wild trees because when I'm gone, I want them to survive decades without me -- maybe even centuries. The experts will tell you the tree needs to be "healthy" in order for this to happen, but I've emphatically witnessed just the opposite. If a tree cannot learn from the wild, if only knows a farm environment, then a cultivated tree will die exponentially faster than one who's already survived struggle. My goal as a farmer: encourage the tree to realize its own connection to the world (and besides, the cider will be infinitely more expressive!)
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Secondly, About Our Ciders
There were many advantages to making cider commercially in when we first got licensed, but none greater than the fact cider had nowhere to go but up. In stores and in pubs, American consumers knew only the Magner's or the Woodchuck-type of drink (artificially carbonated, flavored, and sweetened.) Only the basement homebrewers understood what real, natural cider tasted like, so we simply modeled ourselves after the amateurs.
For instance, when we make cider, rather than forcing one-of-a-kind apples to comply with market-expectation (cider is supposed to be “sweet, clean, fresh and young”), we simply did what home brewers have always done, drank the natural result of fermentation (without chemical treatments, filtration, additives, etc.)
Mind you, this was before the phrase, "natural wine," had become popular, and our ciders were particularly unsettling because we didn't disgorge the bottle conditioned sediment either (now this type of drink is popularly called, “pet-nat”). We had to do a lot of explaining at farmers markets, and on the bottles themselves, but the strength and character of the apples always saw people through.
There were no other natural ciders at the time, particularly from natural (wild) apples, but a revival of "cider-varieites" had preceded us. The early 2010's were exciting because we were part of league of off-beat growers intent on introducing America to European cider apples varieities. Like table grapes versus wine grapes, the measage for the U.S. was: if we're going to rebuild a fine cider culture, we need a new type of apple.
Beyond that, we found ourselves alone in our support for wild apples in the marketplace. To me, nothing beat the density, and the higher acid and extreme tannin of American seedling trees, but it was solely our mission until, again, the stregnth of the apple saw people through. And developing a love for weird flavors and extreme tannin led 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.)
This all sounds like self-aggrandizing, I know, but the truth is, we were suspicious of commercial success and simply following nature's compass, doing what thousands of home producers did before us. The history was there, we just needed to avoid making a business formula out of it, and make a drink that represents the (natural) apples we use.
This brings us to the third leg of our business: Representing real trees in the real world.
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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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