Slow Cider
​by Ian McFaul

Cider, the fermented juice of apples, has been made since humans abandoned the wandering ways of the hunter-gatherer and settled down to farm. Over time cider developed distinct regional variations tied to unique local apples, environment, and culture, such as the natural ciders of northern Spain recognized in the Ark of Taste.

Apples and cider naturally joined European expansion, taking root in North America and other parts of the New World. The incredible genetic diversity of the apple insured an explosion of new cultivars with regional cider cultures growing up alongside them. Always, working with the seasons, using apples at peak ripeness, and fermenting to maximize flavor and complexity was crucial.

As with so many foods and beverages, in the 20th century, the old ways of cider making fell to the pressure of industrialization and mass markets. Instead of embracing the production of cider in its season, industrialized cider became a homogenized product that could be manufactured year round, dependent on the use of concentrate and bulk juice made from apples kept in cold storage. Though the older approach never completely disappeared, industrial cider eventually became the norm.

The reliance on cold storage is a particular problem in the United States. There the vast majority of a limited number of apple varieties are grown in a single area, losing any connection to regional flavor differences. They are often harvested before becoming fully ripe, and have been selected primarily for their ability to withstand cold storage’s harsh environment while maintaining some level of flavor when eaten fresh, though most certainly not when fermented. In Europe, the issue centers more around the practice of adding masses of sugar to the original juice during fermentation, creating a higher alcohol product suitable for long storage that can then be diluted down with water, packaged, and flavored as needed to be sold throughout the year.
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The market for and interest in cider has grown explosively in the last decade, first in the United Kingdom and U.S., and now throughout much of the world. This has been both bad and good for the cider category as a whole. To the good, more consumers are becoming aware of and trying this ancient beverage, and many are making it their drink of choice, at least some of the time. 
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To the bad, however, is that the cider that most consumers are likely to encounter first, and often exclusively, will have been made by an industrial producer, one that uses concentrate or undistinguished bulk juice that has been fermented as quickly as possible (sometimes in as little as two weeks), sacrificing flavor and complexity for a quick turnaround and low price. Needless to say, this type of producer is not interested in apples of regional importance or historic significance.

And yet, there are many small producers that are. They approach cider making the way their forebearers did. They harvest and press apples at the peak of their flavor, then ferment them slowly over many months, often using just the yeasts that come with the fruit or that reside on the cidery equipment. They employ the same sort of techniques used by a small winemaker–careful blending, aging, often on the lees, and carbonating naturally by ancestral or traditional methods. Their universal goal is to select apples of character and coax from them a fabulous range of aromas and flavors, embracing and celebrating their unique personalities.

It is these slow cider makers that are working with specific regional apples, giving growers a reason to plant them, or to keep the trees they already have in the ground. Tilted Shed Ciderworks in Sonoma County, California, for example, was the first modern cider maker in the county to use the Gravenstein apple, which was given Slow Food Presidium status almost 20 years ago, and it is now one of their mainstays. They also craft ciders from Ark of Taste apples such as the Newtown Pippin and Arkansas Black, among many other locally grown varieties. Practitioners of traditional production techniques, their ciders take anywhere from one to three years from harvest to release.

Two other American Ark of Taste apples, Harrison and Hewe’s Crab, are favorite apples of the small regional cider maker, Albemarle Ciderworks in North Garden, Virginia. Both of these apples are American originals whose fame as cider apples went far and wide, until a combination of changing demographics and Prohibition in the 1920s effectively destroyed the American cider market. Harrison, the apple responsible for “Newark Champagne,” was thought to have been extinct until a few remaining trees were rediscovered in New Jersey in the 1970s. Several years ago, Albemarle was one of the first to grow enough Harrison apples to make a commercial cider. They, too, embrace slow and deliberate fermentations and aging, knowing that these methods develop a more delicious cider.​

One can find examples of these slow producers in every country where cider is made: Iduna in Italy’s Trentino-Alto Adige, Find and Foster–Devonshire and Oliver’s Cider and Perry–Herefordshire, both in the U.K., Obstof am Steinberg outside of Frankfurt, Germany, Ramborn Cider Company in Luxembourg; the list can go on and on. They have much in common. They often own their own orchards, and work closely with local orchardists to grow incredible fruit with the fullest flavor. And they share a passion for making cider in ways that are the antithesis of the industrial.
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These slower methods are a more expensive way of making cider, however, and the companies that embrace them can struggle to compete, for the majority of consumers expect “cider” to be of the industrial type, fermented quickly, having minimal character, and being relatively inexpensive. There is a significant need for consumers to be able to easily identify these ciders as different than their industrial counterparts and understand the value that comes with them–incomparable deliciousness. The promotion of a Slow Cider designation may be just the distinguishing factor that would make a difference and help these producers to thrive.

The minimum requirements of Slow Cider and Perry:

         ​• apples or pears sourced locally/regionally, no more than 250 miles from the producer
         • grown with sustainability principles (and use for fermentation) in mind
         • apple and pear varieties often, though not exclusively, of local/regional importance and selected for their unique ability to create  
           wonderful aromas and flavors upon fermentation
         • harvested at or near peak ripeness
         • stored a minimal amount of time before processing
         • no additions of sugar to the juice prior to fermentation or acid/isolated tannins either before or after fermentation
         • fermentation and maturation time is a minimum of 4 – 6 months before product release
         • producer shows a clear commitment to producing cider that meets the other criteria as evidenced by regular ongoing production,
​           multiple examples, etc.

This article was originally published in Issue 12 of Malus. Copyright 2021 Megan Larmer. For a print version, please subscribe!

No More Masters
by Megan Larmer

The apples seemed to float more than hang in their branches. Golden Supremes. Nearly perfect in symmetry and color against a blue September sky. It was a joy to pick them. When I said so, I was reminded that what’s fun for a day loses its charm over sixty hours in a week.
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I was conducting research into cider making, and that day in 2019 my research involved learning to pick apples from the professionals. The crew I worked with was kind and patient as my foot learned its place on the ladder’s rung, my wrists practiced twisting the apples so their stems stayed intact, my ear adjusted to the Jamaican cadences of their instructions and jokes. These Black men with decades of orcharding experience seemed amused by the presence of a white lady with too many questions. They teased back and forth with each other about who was the better teacher, pawning off responsibility for me in a good natured volley. Gus lost. (All the names used here are pseudonyms.) He was older, I’d guess in his seventies, and good humor twinkled from eyes deeply set within the permanent squint earned by a life working outdoors. Gus cautioned me not to overreach and risk falling, good advice generally. My apple picking skills went from abysmal to mediocre, and Gus congratulated me. I replied, “No, no, you’re the master!”

“No.” Surprised by his changed tone, I looked away from the apples and to him. “I’m no one’s master, and no one is mine,” he said. “I’m just a poor man, doing his job. No one is better than me and I am better than no one.”

I stammered, “No­—of course. I just mean, you’re really good at it . . . y’know . . .” I was embarrassed. It hadn’t occurred to me that the word “master” would conjure its natural context: enslavement.
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My ignorance in that moment stung, but was also an invitation to understand the scale at which the racialization of our agricultural system has shaped the development of the cider industry and circumscribes its future. I live in the Hudson Valley of New York. Here, as elsewhere in the U.S., the majority of orchard laborers are non-white migrants and immigrants. While orcharding in other parts of the world is similarly reliant on migrant labor, U.S. apple orcharding does not utilize mechanical picking and so requires that many more hands. The crew I worked with that day were all Jamaican by origin, Black, and male. Most were participants in the H-2A temporary agricultural worker program, also known as an H-2A visa. 

A System Built on Insecurity
The notable precursor to the H-2A program is the Bracero program, instituted in the 1940s to increase farm labor as a temporary war-time effort. Discontinued in the 1960s, the Bracero program paved the way for today’s H-2A program. It operates on the same principle that racialized migrant laborers are preferable to white, domestic, unionized laborers. An entrenched racial hierarchy equates highly valued intellectual labor with whites and devalues the manual labor of darker skinned migrants so that it is difficult to recruit domestic, white laborers for field labor even when it pays a competitive wage. This prejudice intersects with classism to degrade people in the working class, including light-skinned people. The normalized assertion that Black and brown workers are “tougher” and “more hardworking” belies an insidious racism that values these humans for their brute force over their knowledge and skill. Further, it patronizingly asserts that migrant laborers categorically prefer annual migration to settling permanently in the U.S. This second assumption glosses over the inhumanity of the U.S.’s immigration policy towards laborers, instead forgiving its miserable state by pretending immigration is unnecessary to the continuation of our current agricultural system when the opposite is true. According to the USDA, 73% of agricultural laborers in this country are foreign born. While immigrant labor, both documented and undocumented, has historically played a large role in New York state agriculture, the number of H-2A visa workers filing those roles increased during the Trump administration as immigration became more perilous. The legal but temporary nature of the residency of migrant H-2A visa workers increases their dependence on their employer relative to other immigrant laborers, according to labor rights activists at the Worker Justice Center of New York.

The structural resemblance between the romanticized “benevolent slavery” of the Confederacy and the H-2A visa program struck me repeatedly the more time I worked with the crew and learned about the program. Under the H-2A program, the power rests with the landowner to choose the laborer each year. While the crew I worked with were managed by men who had asked them to recommend other laborers so that fathers and sons and friends lived and worked together there, it is not difficult to imagine that a farm owner, statistically likely to be a white man, could choose to disrupt rather than reinforce those social ties. Housing must be provided by the farm owners as well as transportation to shop for food and necessities, which is logical but reinforces dependency on the farm owner, leaving the workers vulnerable. Without the autonomy to choose a new home, it is difficult to complain of substandard housing. One man I worked with told me that prior to coming to this orchard he had worked on tobacco and sugarcane farms. At one of those farms the owner told the white orchard manager that the H-2A visa workers were prisoners in Jamaica and would return to prison when they left the U.S. While imagined, the system this orchard owner described bears a striking similarity to U.S. agriculture following the Civil War and into the early 20th century when Black men imprisoned by racially motivated Jim Crow laws were the cheap labor that kept the Southern plantations turning a profit with almost no discernible change to their business model. It would be reasonable to believe the specter of slavery was not far from Gus’ mind.

Cider Begins in the Orchard
If we’re honest with ourselves, nor should it be from ours. The hierarchy of labor in the cider industry lionizes the maker while keeping the orchard laborers invisible. Though there are exceptions, that maker is most likely to be white. If that maker happens also to be performing orchard labor, his/her social capital rises further. Not so for those who apply their skill solely in the orchard. Their artistry is no less profound. I am as guilty of this as anyone, of applauding the skill of the maker in coaxing the essence of the fruit into the glass while failing to celebrate the skill of the many who cultivated that fruit. While this lack of regard for the agricultural work of cidermaking is global, orchard laborers in Europe are likely to be light skinned migrants while in the U.S. they are most likely to be darker skinned. Our inattention to this inequity in representation and regard means that the U.S. cider industry replicates the racialized hierarchy of slavery and colonization, sustaining the racist legacy of U.S. agriculture.

The crew at this orchard told me repeatedly how much they liked working there. This may have been in part because I was the owner’s friend, but I observed what I believe was genuine good will between the primarily white managerial staff and the primarily darker skinned laborers. I asked Gus if he liked working there. “They don’t treat me like a slave here,” he said. “If they did, I would leave.” The white bosses would have been disappointed with this faint praise, wanting, as they told me, to provide a high quality of life and job satisfaction for the crew. At this orchard it is clear that every person is doing his/her presumed best within a structure that positions them as adversaries. This is what is meant by structural racism. Regardless of the actions and desires of the people within the system, the very structure of that system enforces a power imbalance along racial lines so that the fates of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are subject to the whim of the white people in power. This thwarts the desires of the white bosses who would do well by their crew. Racism harms everyone, if to different degrees. 

The H-2A program, as with many of the systems underpinning the majority of agriculture in the U.S., is permeated with patriarchal-white-supremacist-capitalist logic developed to justify the genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. In this case, the racist belief—so normalized that for white people it is indiscernible in our day to day—is that people with darker skin do not deserve the social, political, and economic benefits of citizenship. Some of those benefits are the stability of permanent residence (if desired), participation in democratic processes, ownership of land, and the profits of their labor. If dark-skinned people deserved these things as much as white people, how could the displacement of indigenous civilizations from their territories be justified? Or removing people from their land to sell them into slavery? This racist ideology survived Emancipation by evolving throughout the Jim Crow era of sharecropping and tenant farming, eventually justifying industrialized agriculture’s unfettered expansion on the backs of a disempowered, poorly paid migrant workforce. This poison is at the heart of agriculture in the U.S., and I believe we are obligated to seek the antidote to it.

I came to cider, like many of us, through apples. I have peddled the story, like many of us, that the virtue of cider is in its agricultural nature. It is a drink of a place and a time. That place is an orchard, a haven for natural beauty and tradition. That time is a season, fecund and ephemeral autumn. It is a romantic story, but romance does not make it entirely untrue. Orchards are beautiful. The skills of cidermaking from tree to glass surely are the admirable product of generations of cultural and technological endeavor. What makes the story nefarious, what brought me into the orchard with Gus that day, is that the story we have been telling is far too simple. It is far too white.

The Whole of the Story
Paul was pointing at a stand of trees. “I’ve worked here eleven years,” he said. “We planted those trees the same time my youngest daughter was born. When I look at them, I see her and when I look at her, I see these trees.” Paul’s daughter lives in Kingston, Jamaica. So that planting is rooted in the Hudson Valley and in the Carribean. Two-thirds of the year Paul is my neighbor, and one-third he is in Kingston with his wife and children. Eleven seasons of growth mirrored in Paul’s homes, in the pattern of migration he’s followed every year for over a decade. The cider made from those trees is the product of both those places and all those years. The cider is multidimensional. Can we tell a story as prismatic as Paul’s? Not if that “we” is only white people. The rich, true story of cider cannot be told without the direct contribution of orchard laborers. Very real barriers stand in the way of this. It is dangerous for an undocumented worker to choose visibility. It is dangerous for an ill-treated H-2A visa worker to speak out. We can only begin to learn these exquisite, complex stories by admitting our ignorance of them.

One man I worked with packing apples said, “I just think the time is over for all these things, these borders and things.” Personally, I’d agree. For now, while our legal structures do not allow all humans to move about or to stay put as furthers their own pursuit of happiness and opportunity, white people, with our privilege and disproportionate power, must look for ways to support our colleagues in the orchards that increases their professional mobility, dignity, and visibility while breaking down the mutually constructed borders within the industry between citizen and non-citizen, pale and dark skinned, laborer and owner. We must leave off our pursuit of mastery and replace it with the pursuit of dignity, for all of us. 

Additional reading:
Minkoff-Zern, Laura-Anne, The New American Farmer, MIT Press, 2019
Worker Justice Center of New York
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Megan Larmer is Senior Director of Regional Food Programs at the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming and an academic. She leads projects that convene food and farming professionals to execute training, collective efforts, and creative projects that further the development of a regional food system in the Hudson Valley. Primary amongst these are the Cider Project, the Food Sovereignty Fund, the Hudson Valley CSA Coalition, and Kitchen Cultivars.  She holds an MA with distinction in Anthropology from SOAS, University of London, where her research focused on seed exchange, first-generation women farmers and food heritage. Megan is currently a PhD researcher in anthropology at the University of Exeter’s Center for Rural Policy Research investigating the social dynamics of the local food movement in the Hudson Valley. 

  This article was originally published in Issue 11 of Malus. Copyright 2020 Melissa Madden. For a print version, please subscribe!

Start By Telling the Truth

by Melissa Madden

This is the third in my series of pieces on the Finger Lakes National Forest in upstate New York for Malus. In the first I sang my ode to the Beauty of Edible Wildness (Issue 7, 2019). In Issue 9 (2020), I focused on the history, the where and how this place went from being occupied by the peoples of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to U.S. government owned land grazed by cows and used by human visitors for recreation.
This piece is about reconciliation and reparations. Why? Because I am goddamn grateful to be a farmer. Because I love wild spaces and I know that I can go to them whenever I wish. Because when I left my own farm, I still had a place of abundance to sooth my wounds and to stay involved in our cider culture. Because I am aware that my love of access to public and private lands for apple growing and cidermaking rests on centuries of theft of lives and land. And because I believe that addressing this theft is a matter as urgent as addressing climate change. 

There are many of us seeking and making cider with feral apples, whether they are wild seedlings or the remnants of old and abandoned homesteads. It’s a romantic scene, the committed and maybe a little crazy cidermaker tramping through the brush in search of hidden gems. It makes for nice marketing copy on labels and websites. In truth those apples we seek are gems, and I am so grateful to find them. The harder truth, though, is that they are there to be found as the result of hundreds of years of broken treaties and the forced destruction and displacement of people and communities that once sustained themselves on this land. The lands that we use for our tidy orchards are similarly tainted.


Telling the Truth
In writing this, I am embarrassed, feeling overwhelmed and inadequate. I grew up in relative comfort as a middle-class white American, and I benefited from being white in a racist system built to advantage white folk. My access to inherited wealth has allowed me freedom to care for myself and develop my interests and passions. The foundation of my inherited ease is tied into over 400 years of land, lives, and wealth appropriated from indigenous people, as well as Black and other people of color. Acknowledging this fact is an essential first step, a Truth Telling, in the words of Dr. David Ragland, co-director and co-founder of the Truth Telling Project and Director of the Campaign for Truth and Reparations (see his series of articles at www.yesmagazine.org/authors/david-ragland). I believe this means on both a personal and institutional level. 

For me, making this necessary acknowledgement hurts every time. Confronting this Truth Telling is hard and frustrating. It will bring on shame and anger. It is still essential to come to terms with our accountability.
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Once you have taken this first step, what next? In 2005 the United Nations passed a resolution outlining Basic Principles and Guidelines for states confronting a need to determine reparations for violations of human rights (the United States abstained). Dr. Ragland, in one of his articles for Yes Magazine, outlined them like this:

      1. Restitution, or return of what was stolen;
    2. Rehabilitation, in the form of psychological and physical support. Consider how the maternal health of Black mothers and the trauma inflicted on Black bodies impacts our daily experience in the White world. But rehabilitation is also for White folks–because it encourages healing from Whiteness, which is an existential or spiritual problem, as it posits White as superior;
   3. Compensation, which must incorporate meaningful transfer of wealth. While some of us just want a check, reparations can’t only be transactional, because those most likely facilitating the transaction–large banks–continue to play an active role in keeping our communities disenfranchised through redlining, predatory lending, and so much more;
     4. Satisfaction, which requires acknowledgement of guilt, apology, burials, construction of memorials, and education about the true history of this nation’s founding sin;
     5. Guarantees of non-repetition, which reinforces reparations as a long-term process that requires systemic and personal change.


Promoting Access to Land
These are important and broad goals that are relevant to Black, indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC), and one place that we as cidermakers and farmers, can start is with the first. Restitution, especially as it connects to land, is a key source of both food sovereignty and wealth-based inheritance. In the Northeast, one organization that is promoting this goal is the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust (NEFOC) whose stated mission is “working towards a collective vision of advancing land and food sovereignty in the northeast region through permanent and secure land tenure for POC farmers and land stewards who will use the land in a sacred manner that honors our ancestors’ dreams . . . .” Executive Director Stephanie Morningstar (Oneida Nation) has outlined an approach for 5 Solutions for Land Based Wealth Distribution. I have listed a few (of many) resources that connect with these goals at the end of this essay.

      • Rematriation-> Land Return
      • Reparations
      • Support for BIPOC-focused Land Trusts
      • Land-Use Easements–cultural use easements for access to food, medicine, ceremonial sites
      • Personhood for Land, Water, Animals, Plants: Rights of Native/Wild Law


Taking Action
In my own reckoning, there is the question of my day-to-day life and the mid-term and longer-term solutions. I am blessed to be welcomed into a community working group for Finger Lakes Land Access, Reconciliation and Reparations. This BIPOC-led group holds Truth Telling as a foundation of progress. We work towards true reconciliation in order to enact real reparations clean from performative actions. In this, working to dismantle my own embedded racism is part of working at “speed of trust” (thank you for this concept to Rafael Aponte, one of our founders).

There are other possible actions. Right down the road from the Finger Lakes National Forest is Redbyrd Orchard Cider. For every bottle of cider they sell, owners Deva Maas and Eric Shatt give $1 to either the Soul Fire Farm Institute (a nonprofit corporation seeking to advance economic independence and racial equity by providing on-farm education and training in community food sovereignty, dismantling racism in the food system, and developing best practices for just and sustainable agriculture) or the Ganondagan State Historic Site, the only New York State Historic Site dedicated to a Native American theme, and the only Seneca town developed and interpreted in the United States.

In a recent email, Autumn Stoscheck of Eve’s Cidery sent me her plan of action, which I have edited a little for space.

"When I first heard the word reparations in the context of addressing America’s brutal and oppressive history of White supremacy I felt overwhelmed. What, in the present day, could possibly be given to African Americans to compensate for the unspeakable crimes of slavery? What could possibly be given to indigenous communities to compensate for the theft of their land and the genocide of their people? . . .
But [feeling] overwhelm[ed] is not an excuse for lack of action. And so even though it’s not enough to make a monthly contribution to the North East Farmers of Color Land Trust, I’m doing it anyway because:
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        - It is part of a personal practice of paying for some of my unearned privilege. White supremacy is one of the most vile of human creations. It feels like hypocrisy to condemn it and everyday reap benefits from it. Paying a tithe, if you will, while it is not a substitute for actively working to dismantle White supremacy, is a material reminder that I am committed to it with more than just thoughts.
      - There are 57,865 farms in New York State, and just 710 of them are owned by people of color. If the 57,155 white farmers each gave $10/month (the price of 2 lattes) for a year, we could buy thousands of acres of land for aspiring young farmers of color whose ancestors have been disenfranchised from owning land in NYS."


What Can You Do?
Specific reparative actions may be different for each of us. If you are cidermaker or farmer, look to some of the resources I’ve listed below to learn about the history of your area and organizations there that are working toward positive solutions. If you are a cider drinker, make a point of supporting companies that are taking actions to advance social justice. If you are able to vote, vote for supporters of these concepts at both the local and national level. Above all, take that first step of Telling the Truth.

Reparations exist within the context of food sovereignty, of health sovereignty. Let us think of reparations as a peace treaty, as proposed by Dr. Ragland. Let us believe that we will all be healed by reconciliation within our communities. Let us not fear potential loss to ourselves, but think of the abundance we might share. This is one of the favorite lessons I re-learn upon each visit to the wild and feral apples of the Finger Lakes National Forest.

A few resources:
        •  Map of Historic Native Lands:  native-land.ca/
        •  Native Land Trust: nativeamericanland.org/
   ​•  Land Reparations and Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit: resourcegeneration.org/land-reparations-indigenous-solidarity-action-guide/
       •  Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust: nefoclandtrust.org/reparations
       •  Soul Fire Farm Reparations Map: www.soulfirefarm.org/get-involved/reparations
       •  Finger Lakes Land Access, Reconciliation and Reparations: www.flxlandreconciliation.com/
       •  National Black Food and Justice Alliance: www.blackfoodjustice.org/
       •  People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond: www.pisab.org/programs/


Melissa Madden lives in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State on Seneca and Cayuga Nation land. She is a farmer, advocate for food security, and eager learner. Her tiny art-cider project Open Spaces Cider (OSC) is foraged and fermented by a willing group of collaborators, focused on access to the bounty of public and marginal lands. OSC is made in service of reparations and reconciliation for stolen land and lives, with an agricultural and access focus. Find Melissa on Instagram: @openspacescider

This article was originally published in Issue 7 of Malus. Copyright 2019 Melissa Madden. For a print version, please subscribe!

On the Beauty of edible wildness: 
prologue and introduction

by Melissa Madden

​I want to take you to a place. It is not on a map; it is not a farm. It is a blurry boundary between wildness and cultivation, neglect and intention. Here live feral flavors. Here live the stories of the humans who came before and how they left or were driven from this place. These tales are written in Fall’s fruit.

To visit this place requires a bumpy drive and a hike, and a certain dedication and a high clearance vehicle. The road washes away with each heavy rain, and today it is bumpy with relics of past construction–a concrete chunk four feet long sticks vertically six inches up into the road. When I can’t find a truck to borrow, I hump my pack in. 

Today, in mid Fall, a golden light filters down through the trees. All over the Finger Lakes there is harvest–grapes, apples, fall vegetable crops, hay, grains. My partners and I carve out time for a visit after work as often as we can. The days get rapidly shorter, and we hike bathed in the wistful sunsets of Fall–goldenrod yellow, pale orange, brilliant rose, deep purple, light gray. Tired and sore as we may be–from this, from other work–we are buoyed by the restful energy of this place. The work of wild gathering is an act of love, and we are energized. 

At the end of the marginal road, old fences mark the fields. We clamber through the barbed wires wrapped around the old fence posts, through the “gates.” These makeshift openings are for the use of seasonal grazers from May to November each year. There are cows in these fields, but they stay back as we enter and rewrap the tangled wire behind us. 

This place is called a “multiuse” space, a place for hikers and enthusiasts, hunters, biologists, cows, and equestrians. Nominally, the land is national forest, accessible to all, but it is leased for use to grazers who send their cows to graze the woods and fields in the warm and shoulder months. Later in the Fall, the hunters arrive. Today we take our turn, dipping in and out with backpacks and tarps.

Once through the fence, the view is broad. The long view reminds me of the Southwest, my first home. Unlike so much of the Northeast, this place is more savanna than forest, large swaths open for grazing with clusters of trees scattered here and there and long hedgerows marking dividing lines. These are the places we seek, where we find unmanaged bounty at certain points throughout the year. 

Now, in Fall, apples and pears adorn the trees. Each season varies, some trees are bare and some are loaded with fruit. Which tree does what alternates annually. This year many of the trees lost their leaves early, an onset of a complex of fungal and bacterial diseases including Marssonia that affect cultivated and wild orchards alike. At this late seasonal hour, the fruit and trees can use a bit more time in the sun, with leaves converting light to sugar. The roots need their winter stores and the fruit, at least for my purposes, needs more time and energy to fulfill ripening. My concern for the orchard is partially wrapped up in my desire to interact with its bounty and press it into something beautiful and expressive. 

For myself and my harvest partners, Fall is a mix of scouting fruit ripeness and orchard health. The cows are everywhere and as we shake the ready trees they circle around us to receive the drops. Nursing mothers, little steers and rambunctious heifers, they each contest us for the apples we’ve come to collect. Harvest is a point of tension between defensive action and gathering. We collect apples from the ground in a traditional approach to cider apple collection, although we shake the trees instead of waiting patiently for the fruit to drop from the weight of its own ripeness. The cows leave us no choice; it is us and our project versus them and their gobbling. We try to wait for our harvest until the fruit is balanced on its own edge of readiness, where the starches are converted to sugars but just before each tree releases its reproductive task for the year and sends the bounty to the waiting ground. We scout, we measure fruit sugars with our refractometer, we tarp, we shake, we haul. And so Fall goes along.

As Winter comes, the cows go home. They do so only after the fruit has dropped all to the ground, and the game is up. The space becomes quiet. The large paddocks are brown long before frost from a mix of mowing, grazing and long developed seed heads on certain grasses. The trees lose all leaves and the occasional conifers–cedar, pine–stand out among the hedgerows along the back end of each paddock. Once the time for bounty passes so does the haste and this becomes a peaceful place of more general inquiry. 

Late Fall and Winter see hunters eagerly crossing the land in groups driving deer. There are homes scattered about the corners of this area gridded by roads and as the days become more quiet, the sounds of living become more audible. Cars roar on nearby roads, dogs bark, and the louder human discussions drift over the fields.  Into the groves, no one comes. The question of possession between cows and ourselves is temporarily settled, and we dominate. Under the trees–leaf full or bare–the air is close. The sky is obscured by the busy branches crisscrossing eight feet above our heads. These are old standard trees, grown to their fullest potential as determined by their rootstocks. I believe most of these are not seedling trees grown up from a successful seed, at least not in the dense groves. Over time and through much work with neighbors and the local Historical Society, I expect to learn who planted these groves, and when, and perhaps even why. These old, strong trees stand twisted, each trunk self-supporting with branches starting four feet off the ground. To climb these requires attention to the many dead branches and split trunks, but most are infinitely climbable and sturdy. These apples and pears are real trees, now untended.

In Spring, bloom comes in scattered form. Some trees bear fruit heavily in one year and offer no blossoms the next, a deep set biennial habit particular to apple trees. Very young fruit, usually in June, will send a hormonal signal to the tree about the current fruit load, and if heavy enough the tree will be fallow the following year. To walk these groves during bloom is to witness and accept this pattern. 

And then comes Summer. A rush towards harvest, heat shining off of the diked ponds where cows wallow and water. This year there were lush leaves on all trees until mid-August, and then with the onset of the bacterial and fungal disease, half the foliage dropped. A visit in July versus August in 2019 was an abrupt change in scenery; most apples had yet to color up to the reds and blushed red streaks of Fall. The groves’ color palette went from a lush green to the deeper grays of lichened, aged branches missing their leaves. The canopy with its sunlight and cleansing wind stayed foliated, the approach to the groves was a study in a vertical line of gray to brilliant, photosynthesizing green.

And so turn the seasons here. There is much that is the same, the annual nuances are where my love lies. Next season, how will these trees accommodate for the early defoliation of 2019? Which trees will bear in abundance in 2020? Whom might I encounter in the course of my own foraging? Because this is a public space, my own hopes for it are wrapped in faith and patience–unlike my farm, this place is not mine to control. 

I write about this place I love as an introduction. Please walk with me here and take the next steps. We’ll investigate why alcohol does and does not perfectly express the abundance of this place. We’ll present our research on levers of territory and possession, and dispossession and displacement throughout history on this landscape. We’ll talk about personhood for human and nonhuman dwellers of this space. We’ll explore wildness and cultivation, and where humans fit in. It’s an opportunity to make the case for free access and true mixed use of public lands. It is a chance to discuss land reparations and how we make them. And through it all, it is a chance to revel in a space available to us all, full of bounty. Each visit for me is one of increasing joy and gratitude for my access to such a place.

I am engaging this place as subject matter beyond imbibables. The National Forest is our Commons. It has layers of history–a home to the Seneca and Cayuga Nations, site of Revolutionary War land grants, subject to deforestation, home of small industry and  the rise of the wine region. Rich with meaning, it suggests questions. 

This is the first in an ongoing series of articles exploring topics such as land rights and access, food sovereignty, cultivated vs feral crops, and systems ecology and interconnectedness through the lens of the GAYOGOH´O:NO´ lands in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State.

Melissa Madden lives in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State on Seneca and Cayuga Nation land. She has owned, farmed and run the Good Life Farm/Kite & String Cider/Finger Lakes Cider House for the past 12 years. She is now a roving small farm consultant, wild-forraged cider maker, and advocate of regenerative agriculture. Find her on Instagram @fromcidertohere.

This article was originally published in Spring 2019/Issue 5 of Malus. Copyright 2019 Olivia Maki. For a print version, please subscribe!

Whose Heritage?
American Cider in Black and White

by Olivia Maki

Jupiter Evans was born in 1743 on a Virginia plantation. We don’t know too much about his life and it is only speculated that his last name was Evans—like so many undocumented stories of slaves. Evans was born into slavery in a time in America where slavery was commonplace, not just in the South but throughout the Eastern seaboard. He was also born in the same year and on the same plantation as Thomas Jefferson, whose father owned Evans and his family. Jefferson and Evans grew up together and played together as children. When Jefferson turned 21, he received Evans as a gift from his father. Evans traveled with and worked closely alongside Jefferson his entire life.
     We know quite a bit about Jefferson. He was a prolific writer and his life was steadily documented. He has been studied by scholars and written about in textbooks. We know that he was the third president of the United States and that he was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. But fewer of us know (or perhaps realize) that Jefferson’s entire life was made possible by slavery. His wealth, status, and political career were founded on the work of slaves. He fathered at least six of his own children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. Jefferson began a sexual relationship with Hemings when she was 13 or 14 and he was 43. Throughout his lifetime, Jefferson owned 607 enslaved men, women, and children. Despite publicly stating that slavery was an “abomination,” he only freed seven slaves in his lifetime.
     And some of us know that Jefferson loved to drink wine, beer, and cider. Evans knew Jefferson intimately and had a few different roles in his household, including as his personal butler. One of those roles was being involved in cidermaking at Monticello, Jefferson’s plantation, a task that is thought to have been reserved for someone trusted and of high skill. When Evans died in 1800, Jefferson said his loss “caused a real gap in his household management.”
     There is a trend in cider to romanticize the history of cidermaking in America, to cite the Founding Fathers as avid cider drinkers, and to talk about the heritage of American cidermaking and American cider apples. That trend fails to recognize the reality behind this history. Enslaved black men, women, and children were the ones growing the crops and making cider, beer, and wine on the plantations owned by many of the Founding Fathers. Many of those slaves brought fermentation techniques and styles with them from their respective countries in Africa.
     Media coverage and consumer-facing marketing campaigns encourage this tired dialogue along with tales of Johnny
Appleseed. Following their cue, many cidermakers and national organizations continue the colonial nostalgia and utilize terms like “Old World,” “New World,” and “heritage” to differentiate styles of cidermaking. The first major example of this was with the national cider competition Great Lakes International Cider and Perry Competition (GLINTCAP) landing on the term “heritage” in 2015 to denote ciders made with “fine craftsmanship...and thoughtful and deliberate choices...with regard to varieties, blending, fermentation, maturation, and even packaging,” according to GLINTCAP Competition Director Eric West. “The terms ‘heritage’ and ‘heirloom’ have similar connotations, and a Heritage Cider often contains varieties that would typically be thought of as ‘heirloom.’”
     In the recent style guide issued by the United States Association of Cider Makers (USACM), they created four standard styles of cider for producers, retailers, journalists, and consumers to use when talking about cider: Modern Cider, Heritage Cider, Modern Perry, and Heritage Perry. But what is “Heritage Cider”? The USACM defines it as cider “made primarily from the fresh juice of multi-use or cider-specific bittersweet/bittersharp apples and heirloom varieties; wild or crab apples are sometimes used for acidity/tannin balance.” Their Heritage definition also points to ciders made in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, and the US. According to USACM Executive Director Michelle McGrath, they looked to the GLINTCAP style guideline primarily as the reason for adopting the term “heritage” and cited the agricultural industry’s embrace of the term with marketing around heritage products.
     The word “heritage” has weight to it. It can encompass history, genetics, and inheritance. You can see it in connotation with land rights, and more recently with both conservative politics and the progressive Slow Food movement. Common themes run throughout these different uses. There is typically a desire to look to the past to preserve the future (especially with white nationalists), or to describe something as having historical significance, or to communicate a rejection of industrialization. In cider, the term “heritage” can mean more than just apple selection, due to its historical connection to slavery. In a time in which more and more white supremacy groups are using the word “heritage” to talk about their birthright over disenfranchised groups, to use the term lightly is to ignore the real and painful connotations that come with it. In a predominantly white industry, how can we encourage people of color to grow apples, ferment juice, start small businesses, and buy cider when the term “heritage” is used so frequently? When our Founding Fathers are referenced so often?
     Ashtin Berry, founder of Radical XChange in Louisiana, recently hosted the first inaugural Resistance Served event in February in New Orleans. This event was aimed at bringing together people in the hospitality industry to talk about the contributions of black and African Americans in food and beverage. Berry explains, “People in cider who romanticize [colonial times] automatically don’t see people of color as their clientele because they are glorifying people who owned other people. And they are choosing to be selective about the narrative that they share. Our Founding Fathers were rapists and slave owners at the extreme and at the minimum they were capitalists who acknowledged the atrocities and human rights violation of slavery but willingly supported its continuation in order to fund the dream of freedom for a select few who happen to look just like them, white and male.”
     “‘Heritage’ is a gentrified word. It’s become such a marketing ploy for people to talk about history in a way that doesn’t make them feel like shit. So when you speak of the Founding Fathers and you want to talk about how that’s your heritage, cool—it is your heritage. Just make sure that you mention slavery and all of the other things that go along with that heritage. You don’t get to piece and parcel it for the parts that make you feel proud and leave out the parts that make you feel ugly,” continues Berry.
     The wine and beer industries don’t dwell on this past, don’t use terms like “heritage” to talk about the history of fermentation in this country—why should cider?
     Krista Scruggs, the wine- and cidermaker behind ZAFA Wines in Vermont, explains, “People in the cider industry haven’t taken the time to really understand American history because if you know American history, you cannot ignore America’s original sin. We want to talk about tradition but not include the number-one thing that America was built off of: slavery. For someone to not understand how offensive it is to talk about Thomas Jefferson in front me, it is just so insensitive. And it should be offensive to everyone—not just people of color. Our history is rooted in that plantation. And when you try to trivialize that or take it away, you’re taking away my history, too.”
Two Virginia cideries, Blue Bee Cider and Albemarle Ciderworks, have each tried to bring light to the history of slavery in cider. Courtney Mailey, the owner of Blue Bee Cider, has hosted educational events highlighting black history in cidermaking but it comes with its own set of challenges.
     “I’ve tried to do programming for Black History Month twice and there was really no point in trying to do more programming because the information was just not there,” Mailey explains, “I was trying to flesh out oral history. Trying to encourage people to bring any stories that they had because the written history is not that strong.”
     Most of the recorded history from colonial times is coming from plantation records, and the majority of that data is around planting records, names, and birth dates but despite Mailey’s best efforts, little else exists to tell the story of slaves. “In our tasting room, we use the term ‘fine cider’; we don’t actually use ‘heritage cider’ as part of our regular conversation with customers,” Mailey says.
    Albemarle Ciderworks has a cider named Jupiter’s Legacy in honor of Evans’s role in the cidermaking process at the Monticello plantation.
   Terminology has a place in cider—it’s useful to categorize ciders for consumers, educators, buyers, and even cidermakers themselves. “The degree of unfamiliarity and confusion about the category is real,” explains Jennifer Smith, executive director of the New York Cider Association. “I find that most of the cidermakers in New York State are relieved to have a term to adopt and relieved to have a way to talk about ciders [their customers] might have had and how theirs are either similar or different. It’s not prioritizing one style over another. It’s giving you a framework to discuss choices that are made in growing techniques, source materials, cellaring techniques, and intended consumption.” Does it need to be the term “heritage”? Smith says no but warns that getting any group behind a shared lexicon will be difficult regardless of its usefulness.
     But despite the good intentions of those who have embraced the term, Berry argues that they don’t get to decide whether or not people of color find it offensive. “The biggest issue in all our industries in beverage is how dismissive white people are when they are told something is racist,” says Berry. “You don’t get to decide how people of color feel about historical references… Why should those people have to relearn a term that has a historical reference because you decided it sounded cool rather than creating a term that didn’t have so much baggage? People who are in this industry—whether it be cider, beer, wine, craft cocktails—need to be cognizant of the terms they use. Words matter.”
     What happens when we look at the word “heritage” through a white lens? We see some of the first American settlers planting apple trees and fermenting juice for the first time—we see a rejection of mass commercial products and an imagined intent on quality. Small batches made from local fruit trees. But if we only look at history and the heritage of any given subject matter through a white lens, we’re missing a huge part of the story. During that same time we imagine those Americans settlers planting cider apple trees, enslaved black people in this country were planting many of those trees, fermenting much of that juice, figuring out which apple varieties make the best cider and which grow best in their climates.
     This issue extends beyond the beverage industry—the agricultural industry is marked by these same issues, too, with marketing terms like “heritage grain” and “heritage pork.” Food justice advocate and community organizer Shakirah Simley explains, “Whose past and contributions are we honoring when we adopt words like ‘heritage’? American food culture gives a lot credence to our European roots, but fails to fully acknowledge the recipes, foodways, techniques, knowledge of the African and native/indigenous people that shaped our land, agriculture, and culinary history. Early colonial cookbooks solidified earliest American recipes but were published mostly by wealthy white authors (who were allowed to read/write). It’s not a mistake that we’ve had very little cookbooks or fermentation guides by indigenous people or African Americans with a very few notable exceptions.”
     After Emancipation, states passed laws making it illegal for people of color to own land, and in the decades to come, these people would be continually discriminated against based on the color of their skin including the ability to get loans, an education, the right to vote, and so much more. We have a shortage of black farm owners, winemakers, cidermakers, and business owners today because they weren’t allowed to have access to land and capital when our white ancestors were. When we celebrate the heritage of third- and fourth-generation white farmers, we aren’t talking about how they got access to the land they are farming or acknowledging those who weren’t given those same opportunities. Wealth and land ownership are intrinsically tied in this country. Heritage and slavery are intrinsically tied in this country.
     “From the table to a restaurant to fermentations, if we don’t take the time collectively to understand our history, even the hard parts, we’re going to keep having this conversation over and over again. And why wouldn’t you be proud to properly honor our history and our traditions? And why would you exclude this huge group of people who contributed to that history?” says Scruggs. “Words do matter.”
We should honor the past—the whole past—and embrace a term that doesn’t whitewash over the racist parts of cider’s history. Other food and beverage organizations have embraced terms like “heirloom,” “orchard,” “good,” “clean,” and “fair” to separate products based on ingredients and integrity. We should create pathways to accurately highlight stories from our past and celebrate diversity in the industry as it grows. I urge GLINTCAP, the USACM, other organizations, and cidermakers to rename the Heritage Cider and Heritage Perry categories. I urge our entire industry to stop referencing colonial times and the Founding Fathers unless they plan on sharing the story of their slaves, who made their lives possible. I also urge our industry to consider making a certification and annual award named after Jupiter Evans. Seeing a cidermaker honored with the Jupiter Award every year, for example at CiderCon, would be a great first step in making this industry more inclusive. I want to envision a future where great cidermakers strive to gain a Jupiter Certification, the industry’s highest honor in quality, sourcing, and transparency in cidermaking. Let’s finally pay tribute where it is really due.  
 
Olivia Maki is the co-owner of Redfield Cider Bar & Bottle Shop in Oakland, California, and one of the voices behind the cider podcast Redfield Radio. In her career building community around food, drink, and agriculture, she has organized educational experiences at 18 Reasons and handled marketing and communications for the Farmers Guild and FarmsReach. Olivia is a senior manager for Bio-Logical Capital, a land investment and conservation company, and previously served as communications advisor for Kitchen Table Advisors and Real Food Real Stories. She has farmed in California and Vermont and worked with apple growers for the past eight years. She is the current Chair for the Cider Category for the Good Food Awards.
 
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Sidebar: USACM Seeks Style Guide Feedback
 According to USACM Executive Director Michelle McGrath, the association’s Cider Style Guide is a living document. “The cider industry is evolving, so we should be, too,” she says. The USACM has updated the guide twice since its first release in the fall of 2017, both times based on the feedback of the cider industry. The association is currently seeking input from cidermakers and industry professionals on existing styles as well as suggestions for new ones. Visit the USACM’s website to offer feedback (ciderassociation.org) by July 31. --Ed.
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This is my first editor's note originally published in Spring 2018 / Issue 1, for some background as to why I decided to start Malus. —Ellen

This project almost seems inevitable. Words and print have been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember. I published my own newspaper when I was 10; I was editor of my high school yearbook; I’ve been a book and magazine editor for over 20 years. But I never thought I’d commit these skills to cider. Until three years ago, as my mom lay dying.
After she passed, I struggled to justify all the time, money, energy, and anxiety I have expended over our cider business. Should I be doing something more significant with my life? But this work has never been just about money. It is personal, political, philosophical. It is how I connect to nature, agriculture, culture, community, history. It is how I’ve learned a lot about myself, my values, my motives. But I wasn’t sure how to adequately express these lessons and experiences. Social media and blog posts weren’t the right formats. Everyone goes on to the next shiny thing online. TL;DR. Trade and consumer publications are more interested in marketing products and ad-driven content. Precisely what I was reacting against.
Not long afterward, my New York–based cider friends Sabine Hrechdakian and Joy Doumis and I hatched a plan to start up an different kind of cider magazine. Neither Sabine nor Joy were able to pursue it further, but the seed had been planted. Then late last year, while I was on a much-needed hiatus from social media, sick of the cheapening and bastardization of cider and apples—and everything, really—I felt the pull to go back to my zine roots, to print, to giving voice to those like me. And so began Malus.
Malus is the genus of apple species, but it also sounds like malice. To be clear, nothing in these pages is malevolent, yet there is definitely an edge. Malus may be provocative. It may touch a nerve. The tagline is “in search of cider’s soul,” after all, and one cannot go about the difficult work of self-discovery without asking tough questions, exposing hard truths, and ultimately revealing great beauty. My hope is that Malus helps deepen the conversation about cider in America.
Malus is a print zine. Even though print is expensive and self-limiting, this format allows readers to spend quality time with the work without all the distractions inherent to our social media–fueled and clickbait-driven lifestyle. It is lo-fi, text-heavy, and subscriber-driven. No product reviews or fluff. The contributors are cidermakers, orchardists, and evangelists.
Malus is a work in progress. Think of this inaugural issue as an op-ed page that merged with a chapbook that crashed into an antiquarian print shop. Subsequent issues may be more journalistic.  It will shapeshift over time, just like cider, and I will let it evolve organically, as wild apples do.
Malus is inclusive. That does not mean that I believe that “all cider is good” or that I will publish every viewpoint. It does mean that I am committed to equal representation of female and male contributors. I need more geographic and ethnic diversity—cider is so white!—so please email me with leads on cider thinkers of color and from the middle of the country.
Special thanks to Sabine and Joy for the early motivation, and to my co–Sonoma Pomona, Darlene Hayes, for her support and for helping me to become less reactionary and more disciplined. I am infinitely grateful to my brilliant, brave contributors who share their talent and passion so honestly. Even if you don’t agree with them, I hope you will appreciate what they bring to the table, and honor them with respect and an open mind.
I hope you enjoy getting to know Malus. I welcome your thoughtful feedback, your letters, and your own stories. --Ellen Cavalli