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History · c. 1630–1800

Cider in colonial America

Why did colonial Americans drink so much cider?

In short

Because apples grew where barley and hops did not. Seedling apple trees established readily across the northern colonies, needed no malting floor and no imported ingredient, and produced a keepable alcoholic drink from a crop the farm already had.

Cider became a household staple, a farm product and, in places, a medium of exchange in an economy short of coin. It was drunk by the whole household, weakened with water for children, and concentrated by freezing into applejack where winters allowed.

The agricultural logic

Beer was the drink the English settlers expected and the drink they had most difficulty reproducing. Barley did poorly in the early New England soils and climate, hops had to be established or imported, and malting and brewing required equipment, fuel and skill that a frontier farm could not easily spare. Grain that did grow well was more valuable as food or as distilling material than as beer.

Apples asked for none of that. A pip planted in a fence corner produced a tree; a tree produced fruit within a decade; and the fruit, milled and pressed, fermented without intervention. The whole process could be carried out with a mill, a press and a cask, and the result kept through the winter in a cellar that was cold anyway.

The consequence was a landscape of farm orchards across New England, the mid-Atlantic and the upper South, most of them seedling trees rather than grafted cultivars. These orchards were planted for drink and for vinegar, not for the fruit bowl, and their character follows from that purpose.

Cider in the household economy

Cider functioned as a farm product in the fullest sense. It was consumed by the household, given to hired labour, exchanged with neighbours, and in places accepted in payment of debts, wages and even parish dues. In an economy chronically short of coin, a barrel of cider was a store of value that could be moved and traded.

Household consumption ran across the whole family. Cider watered down was given to children, and to servants and labourers as the ordinary drink of the working day, in the same way small beer functioned in England. What that meant in terms of alcohol depends entirely on the strength of the cider and the degree of dilution, neither of which the sources usually record.

Figures for per-head annual consumption in colonial America circulate very widely and are worth treating with care. They generally derive from a small number of estate inventories, diaries and later estimates, extrapolated across a population that was neither uniform nor well counted. The defensible statement is that cider was consumed daily and in quantity by ordinary households in the cider-growing colonies; a precise national figure is not something the evidence supports.

On consumption figuresSeveral confident gallons-per-head figures for colonial cider drinking are repeated in popular writing. They rest on thin and unrepresentative bases, and CiderHQ describes the pattern of consumption rather than publishing a number it cannot support.

Applejack and freeze concentration

Where winters were reliably cold, cider left outside in a cask would freeze in stages, and the ice — being mostly water — could be removed to leave a stronger and sweeter liquid behind. The practice is usually called jacking, and the product applejack. It required no still, no licence and no fuel.

Distilled apple spirit was also made, particularly in New Jersey and the mid-Atlantic, and the two products are frequently confused in later writing. Freeze concentration and distillation produce different things: freezing concentrates everything that is not water, including acids and any fermentation by-products, while distillation separates by volatility.

The technique has an unbroken descendant in modern ice cider, though the modern Quebec product is made deliberately, under controlled conditions and from juice concentrated before fermentation rather than after. The continuity is one of principle rather than of practice.

The named varieties that survive

Most colonial orchards were seedlings, but grafted cultivars selected for cider and for the table were identified, named and propagated through the eighteenth century. Harrison and Campfield from New Jersey were cider fruit in the specific sense: grown for the drink, and reputed to make a cider that could be sold. Hewes Crab, a small acid fruit of Virginia association, was valued for juice yield and keeping.

Alongside them ran the dual-purpose and table fruit that also went to the press — Roxbury Russet, Newtown Pippin, Esopus Spitzenburg, Rhode Island Greening, Golden Russet, and later Baldwin. Several of these were exported as fruit and became reputable in England, which is a reminder that the colonial orchard was not only a drink orchard.

A number of these cultivars were lost from commerce during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and have been recovered since, sometimes from single surviving trees. That recovery is one of the foundations of the modern American revival.

How this developed

Certainty is marked on each entry. Where the popular account runs ahead of the evidence, that is said rather than smoothed over.

  1. Early seventeenth century

    Apples arrive with settlement

    Seed and grafted trees are brought from England and northern Europe and planted on farms across the northern colonies.

  2. Later seventeenth century· probable

    Cider becomes the ordinary drink

    Farm cider displaces beer as the household drink in the northern colonies, for agricultural rather than cultural reasons.

  3. Eighteenth century

    Named cider cultivars identified

    Harrison, Campfield, Hewes Crab and others are selected, grafted and propagated for the press.

  4. Eighteenth century

    Applejack made by freezing

    Freeze concentration of cider is practised where winters permit, alongside distillation of apple spirit in the mid-Atlantic.

  5. Popular retelling· contested

    Gallons-per-head claims

    Confident figures for colonial per-capita cider consumption rest on very limited evidence and are repeated far beyond what their sources support.

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