“About Us”… but do you really want to know? Because there’s nothing quick-n-easy about Aaron Burr Cidery.
Bucolic photography and well-crafted blurbs (the main components of any business website) don't show what makes a homestead operation different. It requires deeper consideration (and time not given in marketing) to start to see the interconnectedness of an actual home operation. For a home-cidery, in particular, it requires abandoning what you think you know (or were told by the “experts”) in the following three categories: (1) running a business, (2) apple trees and apple farming, and (3) the nature of cider and wine.
These are the same three components I detail in my book, Uncultivated, 2019, but I'll try to cover them in brief here. Combined in equal parts, they form a perfect anchor for home-cideries, just as a tripod forms the strongest footing. The trinity strives opposite the direction of a "specialized" farms or businesses which seeks to superimpose manmade goals over the natural landscape. A true homestead business must compromise, we must acclimate and learn from what is there.
So again, if you were looking for a conventional "About Us", go to our website and get the glancing most consumers what. This essay is in service to the opposite, and besides, it would dishonest of me to sell you the short version.
And if made it this far, I hope it'll be self-evident how Aaron Burr Cider, one of the smallest producers in the country, became one of the most noteworthy in the industry. It all comes down to the aforementioned nature-facing trinity which has been ignored (if not, outright rejected or despised) by modern entrepreneurs. For us, it's about living in the business, in the orchard, and in the wild, not running the show like puppet-masters.
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First off (and always first), let's talk about the apple trees behind our cider, mostly in the wild, but also home-grown. They have a story that simply MUST be told, and frankly, I don't think' I ever had a choice to keep quiet about them. They are THAT unique.
Once I realized what cultivated apple farms do “for” their trees, I felt obliged to showcase the full potential of Malus Domestica which are left to their own devises. Believe it or not, the genus, Malus, is capable of making it’s own decisions, and the results unfold exponentially. As I started foraging apples in mid-1990's, I've been a witness to the great, the ugly, the bland, and an true infinity of other possibilities. We don't have a vocabulary suitable for real apples.
In truth, Malus is one of the natural world’s most sophisticated lifeforms, both genetically and metaphysically. It is resilient, creative, supremely intelligent, and independent. One just needs to spend a day in the Sullivan County/ Catskills to see first-hand thousands of apple trees defying everything pomology academics and professional orchardmen say about them.
Initially, I saw those trees as “struggling” just as the professionals do (enduring the hardships of the wild -- the competition, diseases, bad weather, and bad luck, etc.), but that has more to do with being a human rather than brainwashed my academia. I was seeing the tree threw human eyes, and we are a creature that coddles our young. Unbendingly, we cultivate for our advantage. We want predictability, safety, and abundance (which is ALWAYS our objective, both modern cities and on rural farms), but real apple trees (not the cloned ones) are designed oppositely. Apple seeds are built to explore and interact with the infinite possibilities of the wild and uncultivated parts of the planet. And that's a fact, no matter how manipulated the parent fruit has become.
Thus, when re-thinking the home orchard in lieu of this epiphany, we reversed our initial course, the one paved by professional and academic recommendations, and now we aim to “un-cultivate” our apple trees. This involves attempting to assimilate, re-wild, and be "hands-off" our once-obedient orchard.
Above all, I want the trees to exhibit independence like the wild trees because when I’m gone, which won't be long, I want them to survive decades without me. This is the greater product. I know, having now seen it first-hand, that the apple tree's long-term health is destroyed in the hands of Man (manipulation.) Once a farmer replaces Malus' nature immune system, the tree becomes dependent, illiterate, and all-around helpless in the process of assimilation. (which includes chemical, but also "organic" treatments, and especially mono-cropping and protections (like isolation from “outside” pressures), the apple tree loses it's God-given intenlligence and resillience. (
. (*More on how to “un-cultivate later.))
But about the other legs of the tripod? OK, second, our cider…
Our ciders came to command commercial importance in the early 2010’s because of their novelty in the market place. As small home-producers (a fraction of the size of even “micro-wineries”), we modeled our activities to mirror the thousands of other home/basement cidermakers throughout the Northeast. In my opinion, their cider is/was superior in every way, likely because the freedom to pursue unexpected results. Just as in the art world, amatuers rightly mock the professionals for beinf formulaic.
For instance, rather than subjugate the aforementioned wild apples to market-expectation (cider is supposed to be “sweet, clean and young”), which in itself would be a crime, and rather than destroy the essence of natural fermentation with chemical treatments, filtration and additives, we did what pre-modern homesteaders did and embraced the opposite. The result was unfamiliar beyond home-brew culture (mind you, this was before the term “natural wine” became well-known), and our ciders appeared “unsightly” due to sediment from un-disgorged bottle conditioning (now commercially called, “pet-nat”.)
As far as apple selection, we had only wild fruit available to us so we developed an obsession with tannin (for ageability) and it led us to experiment with wild choke-pears, crabapples, and co-fermented wine grapes. Again, these claims to originality might sound self-aggrandizing, but we were simply following the natural compass which thousands of pre-modern homesteaders followed before life was “made easy” by contemporary formulas.
This brings us to the third leg of our operation which we also try to maintain “naturally.” This includes issues of scale, production, marketing, and finance. This is surely the hardest aspect to see the “natural path” in, because it involves a discriminating look at ourselves, our society, and the modern economy, but our lives are not put parrellel to the way wild apples trees live, then the trinity is broken with wild cider and the loop is broken.
The obvious place to start is in acknowledging and honoring Malus’ seasonal, bi-annual, and limited production. These natural occurances are EVERYTHING modern business models reject (and why farmers are engineerings and tricking their trees to produce 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 it used to be that ALL new ventures had to suffer years of loss before showing a profit. Orchards, especially, had to wait decades. But now, in the age of Shark Tank and money outside money injections, businesses are expect to miracly grow and show the superfiscial stregnth of a plant propped on Miracle Grow. What we learned from six years in the red was, adversity builds character, just as it does with wild trees. Easy money, fertilizer, yeast nutrient… these are all the same in my opinion, they rob us of character. And so, to “look toward nature” (rather than double-down on artificial inputs), we have decided that being tiny, often biannual, and able to adjust to “what is” is the correct path. If a small winery or cidery has to produce, say, 20 barrels minimum to survive, I’m sorry, there’s no way you can say you’re business is in tandem with natural trees.
