The 14 years of Prohibition in the early 20th century caused an alcoholic brain drain as droves of American bartenders closed their establishments and moved abroad. With them went the golden age of American cocktails. ReasonPeter Suderman in 2017 brilliantly exposed the backstory behind how the federal government nearly killed the cocktail. But the government’s anti-alcohol rage also nearly killed another product further up the alcohol supply chain: the humble apple.
Apple’s American exceptionalism
Today, the produce section of your average American grocery store is dominated by a small handful of commercial apples. Only 5-10 varieties, such as the ubiquitous Red and Golden Delicious, Gala, Granny Smith and Honeycrisp, rule the country’s apple market. In my humble opinion, aside from the flavorful Honeycrisp (developed via crossbreeding at the University of Minnesota in the 1960s), these varieties are largely bland, flavorless, and uninteresting.
It hasn’t always been this way. In the 18th and 19th centuries, America was home to over 10,000 varieties of apples, more than any other nation in the world. The names were as broad and impressive as the diversity of the species, with nicknames such as Yarlington Mill, Spitzenburg, Northern Spy and Winter Banana.
American apple exceptionalism came long before the Department of Agriculture distributed millions of dollars in annual grants to farmers, and even before land-grant colleges were established to advance the nation’s agricultural knowledge. Instead, it was almost entirely a bottom-up, bottom-up wave that solidified the country’s apple hegemony, with nearly every farm in America’s early days containing an apple orchard and nearly all Americans (nine out of 10) lived on a farm.
To understand the history of the apple you must first understand the history of cider. Now called “hard cider,” American cider’s bona fides ironically far surpasses that of apple pie, with alcoholic cider’s roots dating back to the very birth of our nation. Heralded by some as the “fuel of the revolution,” cider was not only allegedly distributed to both Colonial and British troops during lulls in the action at the Battle of Concord, but helped propel George Washington’s first election to the Virginia House of Burgesses. making sure his constituents were well lubricated. John Adams drank a glass of cider for breakfast before his daily five-mile walks, Thomas Jefferson made cider in his Monticello orchards, and Ben Franklin famously quipped, “He who drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone”.
Given its role as an irreplaceable ingredient in cider, the apple has grown alongside cider as a sine qua non of early American life. It goes without saying that cider is only as good as the apples that make it up, which is why the nearly infinite variety of apples found in 18th- and 19th-century America produced some of the most unique and flavorful ciders the world has ever known. In the words of tour guide Michael Agnew, these early apples were “grown for their tannins and acidity, [and] it produced complex sips with flavors that rivaled fine wine, unlike the sweetened, alcoholic or non-alcoholic jug juice that passes for cider today.
Early Americans consumed an average of 35 gallons of cider per year, in part because it was much safer to drink than water. “Until Prohibition, an American-grown apple was much less likely to be eaten than to end up in a cider barrel,” as author Michael Pollan noted. “In rural areas, cider replaced not only wine and beer, but also coffee, tea, juice and even water.”
Proverbs 27 intones, “If you take care of your orchard, you will enjoy its fruits.” But America didn’t care about her orchards. Just as cider and apple were becoming entrenched pieces of Americana, everything began to change. First, the European revolutions of 1848 spurred a wave of German immigration to the United States. Not surprisingly, more Germans meant more beer, which provided a challenger ready to contest cider’s heavyweight title as America’s favorite alcoholic beverage. Around the same time, the Industrial Revolution led to America’s first major urbanization push, and German immigrants themselves were part of this trend, choosing to settle in Upper Midwest cities like Milwaukee.
This provided a natural competitive advantage to beer over cider, as grains such as barley and wheat were cheaper to grow, easier to transport in urban environments, and less perishable than the apple. “Beer was made in breweries, which are like factories: they’re modern,” says William Kerrigan, author of Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History, he underlined. “Beer seemed like a cleaner, more efficient and modern drink.”
Prohibition comes into play
As cider lost its importance, the bucolic rural apple orchard became less important to the American way of life. But while the apple was already in decline in the national cultural landscape, it was the US government that came into its own Coup de grace to this noble fruit.
With the advent of Prohibition in 1920, not only alcohol but also the ingredients that compose it became public enemy number 1. Smithsonian magazine he says, FBI agents began cutting down acres and acres of apple orchards, “effectively erasing cider…from American life.”
Even if they escaped the axes of the G-men, orchard owners had little incentive to maintain their orchards in the absence of cider. “[Prohibition] caused orchards to stop growing cider apples altogether, dealing our cider tradition – and apples themselves – a death blow,” writes Jonathan Frochtzwajg of Modern farmer.
Whether at the foot of an axe, or under the headwinds of temperance-induced evisceration of the apple’s highest and best economic use as cider’s progenitor, the American apple would never be the same. “Among the causes that contributed to the demise of cider in the United States, undoubtedly the Temperance Movement tops the list,” according to David R. Williams of George Mason University.
By the time Prohibition ended nearly 14 years later, America’s cider and apple culture had been decimated. Part of this is attributable to the fact that mechanized urban breweries were better positioned than during Prohibition, as the factory setup allowed for a quicker transition to other product lines such as soft drinks or ice sales during the country’s dry spell .
A further factor is inherent in the apple itself. Barley and wheat are grown as annual crops, which allows their production to be reduced or increased at relatively short notice, thus allowing breweries to quickly get back into business once Prohibition ended. In contrast, planting a new orchard means committing to a 25-year investment, which, quite literally, takes at least three to six years to bear fruit. “When Prohibition ended in the 1930s, there was neither the desire nor the means to revive the cider industry,” Williams notes.
To the extent that the apple maintains its titular flag as America’s most popular fruit today, it is only in the form of those aforementioned, depressingly tasteless varieties of foodstuff. These modern, homogeneously boring apples are a poor substitute for their pre-Prohibition ancestors. In the 1990s, commercial orchards grew fewer than 100 types of apples, with just 11 varieties making up 90 percent of grocery sales. Over 10,000 varieties of apples are believed to have become extinct since Prohibition.
The apples recover
If the story ended there, we’d probably be forever condemned to an endless conveyor belt of Gala and Granny Smith in the produce aisle. But just as the apple’s fall occurred the moment it reached its peak, its resurrection began only when it reached its lowest point. Because while the government almost killed the apple, the free market is saving it.
As America’s modern craft cider boom took hold in recent decades, cider makers began scouring the countryside for those unique, flavorful, spectacularly named apple varieties of yesteryear. Often called “spitting apples” because they are less sweet than standard grocery store offerings, thousands of heirloom apple varieties thought to be lost are being rediscovered and saved by American cider makers.
Stories abound of Appalachian apple enthusiasts who have saved thousands of “lost” apple varieties and now work closely with craft cider makers. Famed cidermaker Diane Flynt of Foggy Ridge Cider, who many consider the founder of today’s craft cider movement, attributed cider’s modern rise to the fact that it was built “on the backs of these old-fashioned apples… If If I didn’t have these apples, my cider wouldn’t taste very good.”
Flynt, who won a James Beard Award in 2018, recently took it a step further by closing Foggy Ridge to focus solely on apple growing. Other Virginia cideries, such as Blue Bee Cider and Albemarle Ciderworks, helped save the Hewes Crab apple, a favorite of both Washington and Jefferson. The Hewes crab was presumed extinct before a lone tree was discovered near Williamsburg in the 1990s. Other heirlooms are also experiencing a resurgence, such as the Arkansas Black, another beloved cider-making apple.
Slowly but surely, epic names are re-entering the American lexicon: Bitter Buckingham, White Winter Jon, Royal Lemon, Candy Stripe, and Black Winesap. For this we can thank the invisible hand of Adam Smith who, one hundred years later, finally stayed the hand of government.
American recipe from ’76
A patriotic twist on the French 75, this libation celebrates cider’s irreplaceable role in American history.
3 ounces craft cider
2 ounces bourbon
½ ounce lemon juice
½ ounce maple syrup
Heirloom apple slice
Shake the bourbon, lemon juice and maple syrup in a shaker filled with ice. Double strain into a rock glass containing fresh ice; complete with the cider and mix quickly. Garnish with a slice of your favorite heirloom apple variety and reserve the Red Delicious for the fruit salad.
Recipe adapted from Give me freedom and give me drink! by Jarrett Dieterle.