Prohibition’s 14-year span within the early twentieth century triggered a boozy mind drain as droves of American bartenders shuttered their watering holes and moved overseas. With them went America’s Golden Age of Cocktails. Purpose‘s Peter Suderman in 2017 brilliantly laid out the backstory behind how the federal authorities nearly killed the cocktail. However the authorities’s anti-alcohol tantrum additionally almost killed off one other product additional up the alcohol provide chain—the common-or-garden apple.
America’s Apple Exceptionalism
Immediately, the produce part of your common American grocery retailer is dominated by a small handful of business apples. A mere 5–10 varietals—comparable to the ever present Pink and Golden Scrumptious, Gala, Granny Smith, and Honeycrisp—rule the nation’s apple market. In my humble opinion, aside from the flavorful Honeycrisp (developed through cross-breeding on the College of Minnesota within the Nineteen Sixties), these varietals are largely bland, flavorless, and uninspiring.
It wasn’t at all times this fashion. Within the 18th and nineteenth centuries, America was house to properly over 10,000 apple varieties, greater than some other nation on earth. The names have been as wide-ranging and extraordinary because the species variety, with monikers like Yarlington Mill, Spitzenburg, Northern Spy, and Winter Banana.
America’s apple exceptionalism got here lengthy earlier than the Division of Agriculture doled out hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in annual grants to farmers, and even earlier than land grant faculties have been established to advance the nation’s agricultural information. As a substitute, it was nearly completely a bottom-up, grassroots groundswell that solidified the nation’s apple hegemony, with almost each farm in early America containing an apple orchard—and almost each American (9 out of 10) residing on a farm.
To know the story of the apple, one should first perceive the story of cider. These days known as “hard cider,” cider’s American bona fides paradoxically far outstrip that of apple pie—with alcoholic cider’s roots tracing again to the very start of our nation. Heralded by some because the “fuel of the revolution,” cider was not solely allegedly handed out to each colonial and British troops throughout lulls within the motion on the Battle of Harmony, but it surely helped propel George Washington’s first election to the Virginia Home of Burgesses by making certain his voters have been well-lubricated. John Adams drank a gill of cider for breakfast earlier than his every day five-mile walks, Thomas Jefferson made cider at his Monticello orchards, and Ben Franklin famously quipped: “He that drinks his cyder alone, let him catch his horse alone.”
Given its position as cider’s irreplaceable ingredient, the apple rose hand in hand with cider as a sine qua non of early American life. Evidently, cider is simply nearly as good because the apples that go into it, which is why the almost limitless number of apples present in 18th and nineteenth century America produced among the most unusual and flavorful ciders the world has ever identified. Within the phrases of cicerone Michael Agnew, these early apples have been “cultivated for their tannins and acidity, [and] produced complex quaffs with flavors that rivaled fine wine, quite unlike the sweetened, alco-pop or non-alcoholic juice-in-a-jug that passes for cider today.”
Early Individuals consumed an common of 35 gallons of cider per yr, partially as a result of it was a lot safer to imbibe than water. “Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider,” as writer Michael Pollan famous. “In rural areas cider took the place of not only wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water.”
Proverbs 27 intones: “If you care for your orchard, you’ll enjoy its fruit.” However America did not look after its orchards. On the very second cider, and the apple, have been changing into hard-wired items of Americana, every part started to alter. First, the European revolutions of 1848 spurred a wave of German immigration to the USA. Unsurprisingly, extra Germans meant extra beer, which offered a prepared challenger to contest cider’s heavyweight title as America’s alcoholic beverage of selection. Across the identical time, the Industrial Revolution led to America’s first nice urbanization push—and German immigrants themselves have been a part of this pattern, selecting to settle in Higher Midwest cities like Milwaukee.
This offered a pure aggressive benefit for beer over cider, as grains like barley and wheat have been cheaper to develop, simpler to haul into city environs, and fewer perishable than the apple. “Beer was made in breweries, which are like factories—they’re modern,” as William Kerrigan, writer of Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural Historical past, identified. “Beer seemed cleaner and a more efficient, modern drink.”
Prohibition Enters the Image
As cider declined in prominence, the bucolic rural apple orchard grew to become much less necessary to the American life-style. However whereas the apple was already declining throughout the nation’s cultural panorama, it was the U.S. authorities that delivered the coup de grâce to this noble fruit.
With Prohibition’s introduction in 1920, not solely alcohol but additionally the elements that made alcohol grew to become public enemy No. 1. As Smithsonian Journal recounts, FBI brokers took to chopping down acres and acres of backwoods apple orchards, “effectively erasing cider…from American life.”
Even when they escaped the G-men’s axes, orchard house owners had little incentive to keep up their orchards within the absence of cider. “[Prohibition] caused orchards to stop growing cider apples altogether, dealing our cider tradition—and the apples themselves—a death blow,” writes Jonathan Frochtzwajg of Trendy Farmer.
Whether or not on the foot of an ax, or through the headwinds of the temperance-induced gutting of the apple’s highest and greatest financial use as a progenitor of cider, the American apple would by no means be the identical. “Among the causes that contributed to the demise of cider in the United States, without question the Temperance Movement belongs near the top of the list,” in response to David R. Williams of George Mason College.
By the point Prohibition ended almost 14 years later, America’s cider and apple tradition had been decimated. A part of that is attributable to the truth that mechanized city breweries have been higher positioned to climate Prohibition, on condition that the manufacturing facility setting allowed for a extra prepared transition to different product traces like smooth drinks or promoting ice through the nation’s dry spell.
A further issue is inherent to the apple itself. Barley and wheat develop as annual crops, which permits their manufacturing to be curtailed or ramped up on comparatively brief discover, thereby permitting breweries to spring again into motion shortly as soon as Prohibition ended. In distinction, planting a brand new orchard means committing to a 25-year funding—one which, fairly actually, takes at the least three to 6 years to bear fruit. “When prohibition ended in the 1930s, there was neither the desire nor the means to resuscitate the cider industry,” notes Williams.
To the extent the apple maintains its titular banner as we speak as America’s hottest fruit, it is just within the type of these aforementioned, depressingly bland grocery retailer varietals. These homogeneously boring trendy apples are a poor substitute for his or her pre-Prohibition ancestors. By the Nineties, business orchards have been rising fewer than 100 varieties of apples, with a mere 11 varietals constituting 90 p.c of grocery gross sales. Over 10,000 apple varieties are believed to have gone extinct since Prohibition.
Apples Bounce Again
Had been the story to finish there, we might possible be endlessly condemned to a endless conveyor belt of Galas and Granny Smiths within the produce aisle. However simply because the apple’s fall got here on the very second it reached its apex, its resurrection started solely as soon as it hit its nadir. For whereas the federal government almost killed the apple, the free market is saving it.
As America’s trendy craft cider increase took maintain in latest a long time, cidermakers started scouring the countryside for these distinctive, flavorful, spectacularly named apple varietals of yesteryear. Typically known as “spitter apples” since they’re much less candy than the usual grocery retailer choices, hundreds of heirloom apple varietals considered misplaced are being rediscovered, and saved, by American cidermakers.
Tales abound of Appalachian apple lovers who’ve saved hundreds of “lost” apple varieties and now work intently with craft cidermakers. Famed cidermaker Diane Flynt of Foggy Ridge Cider, whom many contemplate the founding father of as we speak’s craft cider motion, has credited cider’s trendy rise as being constructed “on the backs of these old fashioned apples…. If I didn’t have these apples, my cider wouldn’t taste very good.”
Flynt, who gained a James Beard Award in 2018, just lately took issues even additional by shuttering Foggy Ridge to focus solely on apple rising. Different Virginia cideries, like Blue Bee Cider and Albemarle Ciderworks have helped save the Hewes Crab apple—a favourite of each Washington and Jefferson. The Hewes Crab was presumed to be extinct earlier than a solitary tree was found close to Williamsburg within the Nineties. Different heirlooms are equally having fun with a renaissance, such because the Arkansas Black, one other beloved cider-making apple.
Slowly however absolutely, the epic names are reentering the American lexicon: Bitter Buckingham, White Winter Jon, Royal Lemon, Sweet Stripe, and Black Winesap. For that, we are able to thank Adam Smith’s invisible hand—which, 100 years later, has lastly stayed the hand of the federal government’s apple ax.
American ’76 Recipe
A patriotic spin on the French 75, this libation celebrates cider’s irreplaceable position within the American story.
3 ounces of craft cider
2 ounces of bourbon
½ an oz of lemon juice
½ an oz of maple syrup
Heirloom apple slice
Shake bourbon, lemon juice, and maple syrup in a shaker full of ice. Double-strain right into a rocks glass containing contemporary ice; high with cider and provides a fast stir. Garnish with a slice of your favourite heirloom apple varietal—and save the Pink Scrumptious for the fruit salad.
Recipe tailored from Give Me Liberty and Give Me a Drink! by Jarrett Dieterle.