History: Hard Cider in New England Before we had widespread
refrigeration, before anyone needed to make a distinction
between “sweet” and “hard” cider, all cider was hard. Throughout
much of the 18th and early 19th centuries, it was the most
common beverage in New England. Cheap and easy to produce from
local seedling apples, the fermented, sometimes fizzy, juice was
more popular than ale, kept longer than milk, and in many places
was safer to drink than water. Farmers routinely steeped their
apple mash and pressed it a second time for less-potent
“ciderkin” for their children, and paid their farmhands partly
in drink. Larger landholders planted named apple varieties
specifically for cider: a mix of bitter, sweet, and tart types,
including Gilpin, Smith’s Cider, and Esopus Spitzenberg, among
others. Most dooryard cider was run-of-the-mill, but through
trial and error, some growers refined cidermaking to an art. But
the temperance movement, founded in Boston in 1826, drained away
some of the demand in the 19th