The Rise and Fall of American Cider Culture

If you’ve done any reading on hard cider as a category, you’re probably familiar with the drink’s basic history. It comes up regularly and goes a little something like this: Cider is one of the oldest alcoholic beverages, with roots in the ancient world. It rose to prominence in Europe, mainly Western and Northern Europe, as well as England, where it became the daily drink of choice for most (the UK remains the world’s largest cider consumer, per capita). As Europeans colonized the Americas, they brought their cider culture (and in many cases, their cider apple trees) with them to the new world.

The drink and adjoining culture took hold here, with families throughout the colonies fermenting their own, unique ciders. This continues for a couple of hundred years until Prohibition outlaws the production and consumption of alcohol — bands of raiders (government employees or vigilantes, depending on who you talk to) roamed the country, burning/chopping down cider apple orchards and effectively ending cider culture in America. It’s only been in the past 20 or 30 years, or so, that cider has seen a comeback, propelled by surges in the craft and local movements. It sounds like a good story and is largely accepted. But there’s a problem. That bit about Prohibition? It isn’t true.

Temperance: The Beginning of the End

Mark Turdo, the historian and cider aficionado behind the Pommel Cyder blog

When I set out to write this piece, what I had in mind was a casual History 101-type article on cider. Looking to lend a bit of authority to the piece, which I thought others lacked, I searched out sources and experts to cite. One thing led to another and I found myself on a Zoom call with Mark Turdo. Turdo is an independent historian and cider aficionado, bringing the stringent academic approach of his work to the cider history field via Pommel Cyder, his blog where he explores all things cider and cider history. What I learned from him about the history of cider in America flipped everything I thought I knew right on its head. The biggest surprise? That prohibition did not kill cider.

A version of Rush’s temperance thermometer

“There’s always a clear bad guy in the story and I don’t think prohibition is the bad guy here,” Turdo told me. “Everything that’s said about the ‘end’ of early American cider culture doesn’t pan out when you really research it. When you really look at what the sources are saying, it’s different (than the popular story).” According to the popular history, and backed up by Turdo, cider was the American beverage from the onset of colonization. “There are European visitors to America, particularly to the mid-Atlantic, that talk about how ‘cider is in every house’. And they say it with a little bit of shock, they’re not used to seeing it quite that way. They point out that beer is around, but it’s mostly in the cities… but cider is made and consumed everywhere. It’s omnipresent.”

Then, shortly after the end of the American Revolution, the idea of temperance, the ideological forerunner of Prohibition, begins to gain a foothold in American society. Initially, the movement urged moderation in drinking. “Benjamin Rush, surgeon general of the Continental Army, actually created a temperance thermometer, a visual,” said Turdo. “At the top are all the ‘good’ drinks: water is at the very top, cider is up there, small beer, which is a low alcohol beer, is up there. Then at the bottom, you have the lard liquor, what we would consider cocktails — [temperance says] those are all bad for you.”

The temperance movement progressed for several decades, organizing nationally in the 1820s, and ultimately shifting ideologies from one of moderation to one of teetotaling, of the complete eschewing of alcohol consumption. This shift is fueled, Turdo’s research shows, by a rise in binge drinking in the post-Revolution generation. What seems to have happened is that Americans were suddenly presented with tremendous freedom of choice, froze up at the prospect, and turned to drink. By the 1830s, the temperance movement has a new outlook on cider. “Cider goes, in the temperance mind, from being ‘its fine in moderation’ to ‘it’s the gateway drink to harder stuff’,” says Turdo. This shift is evident in the movement’s artwork, which began to explicitly mention cider as a drink to be avoided around this time.

Beginning in the 1840s, as the temperance movement gathered, an increasing number of farmers began to adopt the philosophy. According to Turdo, “Farmers begin to realize that maybe they don’t want to be part of this trade, they don’t want to make cider. You get the sense that there are a limited number of temperance farmers who replant their entire orchards to non-cider fruit, fruit to eat or to bake with.” It’s this practice — and possibly one other story, described below — that likely gave rise to the myth of widespread orchard destruction during Prohibition.

Long before prohibition, cider was already losing market share. In an issue of the Pennsylvania State Agricultural Journal issue from the mid-1850s, per Turdo, it is written that “there was once a time that every farm filled their cellar with cider but no more.”  “Temperance seems to be about the time that cider loses its place as America’s number one drink,” said Turdo. “As the 19th century goes on, beer replaces cider as it becomes a widely accessible, fairly inexpensive beverage. Partly because it can be mass produced — cider is an agricultural product, it’s based on seasonal availability. It seems that cider was losing share to beer, as well [as to temperance].”  

Prohibition: When Cider was Actually Legal

Newspaper announcing the ratification of the 18th Amendment

Contrary to the myth, it turns out that cider was actually legal under prohibition. In fact, with restrictions on all other alcohol production, cidermaking and consumption actually had a bit of a boon under the 18th Amendment. “Prohibition is when things get really difficult to untangle,” says Turdo. “The amendment is adopted in January 1919 and is supposed to take effect in January 1920. But all the law says is that it’s illegal to produce, transport, and sell alcoholic product. The law is actually less than a page long — a beautiful, calligraphically written page which says very little about what’s going to happen.” This obviously created a great deal of confusion for people, particularly for apple growers. Technically speaking, when apples are pressed into juice, that juice begins to ferment almost immediately. In response, the government passed the Volstead Act in October 1919, detailing all the rules of Prohibition.

“Under the Volstead Act, it was illegal to produce cider,” Turdo explained. “But you could still ferment. You had to get a license to produce cider, but you’d have to finish by fermenting that cider into vinegar. [The act] also pointed out that you can’t have a liquid that’s more than .5% ABV.” Suffice it to say that farmers were still confused — pressed apple juice would reach that alcohol level within two to three days. Farmers across the country were worried they’d end up in jail no matter how hard they tried to follow the rules. In response to this continued confusion the government issued what’s called a Prohibition mimeograph, which officially prohibited cider production. “Cidermaking is illegal, you can’t do it, full stop,” says Turdo. But less than a year later, in October 1920, the government reverses course with a second mimeograph: “This one says, interestingly, that you can make cider at home. You can make 200 gallons a year. You can’t sell it or transport it, but you can make it.” Within a year of coming into effect, cider production was legalized under Prohibition and, after years of decline in popularity, is once again something that is part of people’s lives.

“What I cannot answer,” Turdo mused, “is, once the amendment is appealed, why does cider not take its place again? Why does cider not become more popular? Once Prohibition ends and people go back to producing normally, alcoholic cider never gains a foothold.” His working theory? “What does gain a foothold is sweet, non-alcoholic cider. The reason I think this grows after Prohibition is that Prohibition forced farmers to adopt sanitation, sterilization, and pasteurization methods. And I think that’s what built our modern market for these things.”

A newspaper clipping (Republican Star and General Advertiser, July 21, 1829) mocking a Connecticut farmer for chopping down his apple trees in the name of temperance

What about the story about orchards being destroyed en masse? Turdo, who has been researching the topic for 25 years, says, “I have yet to find any example of an orchard being decimated that way. I found one reference from 1867 in Pennsylvania, of an orchard being chopped down in the night. But what’s interesting is they left a note and the contents of the note make it seem like it was revenge for something else,” unrelated to Prohibition. “I can’t find where anybody went in and actually chopped down somebody else’s property,” he continued. “And that would be illegal, but there’s no court cases about it. I haven’t found [an instance] where a temperance or prohibitionist went in and destroyed someone else’s property.

Changing Tastes, Changing Times

Though we like a nice, clean story — good guy, bad guy; cause, effect — the fact is that the demise of cider as America’s Drink can’t be blamed on one single factor. The popularity of temperance, particularly when it caught on in farming communities, hurt its popularity, but so did the rise of cheaply produced beer at industrial scale, the increased accessibility of modern food sanitation and preservation techniques, and plain old changing tastes. We can’t say which of these factors was the final blow, the deciding factor. But one thing we can say for certain is that it wasn’t Prohibition that killed it.