Citizen Cider | The Making of Burlington, Vermont’s Popular Hard Cider

Relative to, say, beer or wine, cider is not a major player among alcoholic beverages. It makes up just about 4 percent of the market, though that’s up from 1 percent in 2014 (and the number of cideries has doubled since 2015). For cider makers, it’s been a battle simply to get people to understand there’s a difference between fresh apple juice and the hard stuff. To get a sense of cider’s growth, consider the story of Citizen Cider: The Burlington, Vermont, company began in 2010 as an experiment among friends. Justin Heilenbach, Bryan Holmes, and Kris Nelson all liked cider and decided to start fermenting test batches in Holmes’s basement. And they had complementary skills: Nelson was a wine salesman, Holmes was a chemist, and Heilenbach was a farmer. Within a year, they were fermenting 5,000 gallons of fresh juice from Happy Valley Orchard in Middlebury. Citizen Cider sold its first keg in 2012 and within four years was selling close to 600,000 gallons of cider; today, the company is opening a second Burlington facility to keep up with demand. From the outside, that looks like fast growth, but the view from inside is quite different. “It took a long time to get here,” Heilenbach says. “Internally, we refer to time in ‘cider years.’ There are three or four cider years in one standard year. It’s getting a little better now, but early on, it probably felt closer to seven or 10.” I recently spoke with Heilenbach to learn more about Citizen Cider’s story, why New England is the best region for cider making, and how cider plays into the future of Vermont tourism.

Having lived on both coasts, I’d argue that while good apples and good cider are produced all over the country, there’s something truly special about New England apples. Do you agree?

Absolutely! I would even go so far as to say that our West Coast competitors and colleagues would agree. They recognize a couple of things. First, the apple industry out [west] is young, but the history and culture around orcharding in New England is as old as New England. People here have many generations of oral history within their families around cider. It’s part of why people are drawn to the craft cider movement. Like a lot of things in food and beverage, people are trying to connect with history by consuming something. That really underpins craft cider. We also see this culture in the Upper Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic, and New York, but the first American apple trees were planted here.Secondly, in New England, there’s a large commercial apple crop of varieties not grown anywhere else. There’s a terroir, because apple varieties grown here won’t taste the same if they’re grown in the Middle Atlantic states. We see these distinctions in our cider. The West Coast guys are super-jealous of that, in a healthy way. They have a much bigger crop, a huge crop, but it’s more homogenized. It tends to be early apples, which all have less character, and they have a shorter shelf life. Plus, you need cold nights to get really good ripened fruit. They have that in the Columbia River Gorge, but the majority of that crop is super-commercial. They grow Red Delicious, Yellow Delicious, Honeycrisp, Fuji. I have year-round access to apples that have a real place in cider, like Ida Red, Monroe, Rome, Northern Spy, Rhode Island Greening. I can buy them in abundance.

I see more American cider makers working with traditional British and French apples that are too bitter or acidic to eat but lend structure and tannins to cider, making them more complex and winelike. Should New England orchards be planting more of these varieties?

That’s the million-dollar question in the cider community — and in the growing community, because the risks are much higher for them. A grower needs to commit hundreds of thousands of dollars and years on their land to replace commercial apples with varieties that are only good for cider. I’m an active voice in the agriculture community, and our growers are asking us what we think about this. I think you’re going to see something similar to what happened with wine. In the 1970s, there wasn’t a sophisticated American palate for the grape varietals that produce more sophisticated wine. Now there is. You can also look at beer and see the same thing. In the 1990s, the people drinking craft beer styles were such a niche group compared to the whole, but here’s a curious core of consumers and buyers who want to push the boundaries all the time. They’re driving that process. You’ll see some similarities in cider, but it’s going to happen over 40 years, not 10. Steve Wood of Farnum Hill Cider has led the movement to bring these apples to New England. We’re friends and I love to argue with him, because it’s a healthy argument. My personal belief is that I don’t really believe the direction that cider will go in is going to mimic that of Western Europe. Just planting Western European cider varieties is not necessarily the right direction, or the most successful one.

How do you explain the rapid growth of Citizen Cider relative to other local brands?

What we’ve done is come into the market in the middle. There wasn’t anybody in the middle. It was either high-end stuff or alcoholic soda pop from the mass-market guys. The middle is super-interesting, and there’s a lot that can be done with the current crop and with creative people pushing the boundaries of cider. Now, our challenges are more around making hundreds of thousands of gallons taste the same year-round. We have more control over our growth now. We open markets when we’re ready and invest in those markets in a controlled way, so we know what the outcome’s going to be. In the early days, everything was a surprise.

So with the long history of cider in New England and the quality of the apples, shouldn’t cider be the dominant beverage here? Apples grow more readily all over New England than grapes. And we don’t produce enough grain here to supply all the breweries.

You’re touching on why the craft cider category can live on for another 100 years. This is a new journey for consumers, who have only come to really know cider in the past decade or so. But I say this to customers all the time: You can make great beer on the moon if FedEx delivers. It doesn’t matter where you are, because most brewers are working with commodity grain crops. In many cases, the grains aren’t traceable to a single farm. They just need to know the moisture content, color grade, the sugar content. With wine, I just don’t think the value you’re going to get out of a wine made from New England grapes is ever going to compete with Western European or Californian wine in terms of dollars. And it comes down to dollars because consumers are choosy. A $20 bottle of wine from New England is always going to get the doors blown off it by a wine from those regions. With cider, you have a crop that’s extremely well suited to our northern climate. You have the culture and history. If we do a good job, some of the best ciders in the world should come out of New England, the Upper Midwest, and perhaps the Pacific Northwest.

You have a background in farming. How does that play into your role with Citizen Cider?

I’m working with Stan Pratt, the owner of Happy Valley Orchard, to start grafting trees to figure out which apples are the absolute best for New England cider. We’re working with high-density small rootstocks; we’re doing it on old standard rootstocks. Call me in 10 years to see how it works out. But my dream is to have an orchard that is super-appropriate to New England. You can tell after a few years which trees are comfortable here and which aren’t. They start to show their characteristics. Do they grow straight up and never feather out? Do they fall over? Can they handle a drought? How do they handle pests? It’s harder and harder to make a living growing apples, and cider can help remedy that. For example, Stan has a USDA apple poster from the 1960s, and you can see that what was considered a “Super Fancy” apple in the 1960 would only qualify as a utility apple today. The expectation put on growers by large grocery chains is not reasonable, logical, or good for the farmers, the land, or anyone else. They want the rock-hard Red Delicious kinds of varieties that can sit on a warm shelf for two months and not change. No one would spray their apples as much as they do if they weren’t trying to meet those standards. So with cider, we’re trying to create a viable alternative for some portion of the apple crop where growers don’t have to do that. 

Can you envision a future in which people tour New England cideries in the same way they visit wine country in California?

Yes, but that’s not our particular focus now. Food and beverage tourism in in Vermont is already strong. People come here for maple, for cheese, for beer. It’s terrific. This small state cranks out so many great regional, national brands. That lopsided per-capita production of good brands is the result of being physically close to a lot of urban centers. And people want to come and see what we’re doing. We’ve debated franchising Citizen Cider tasting rooms. Right now, we just have one tasting room at our Pine Street location. But it’s a tricky business. I sometimes use the example that there was a chapter in Ben and Jerry’s history when they were mostly in the business of opening scoop shops, until they realized the power of their operation was to make great ice cream and get it into every retail store. Right now, I feel the same way about it. The amount of time and energy that goes into brick-and-mortar retail operations compared with getting into a wholesale operation… if you’re front-of-mind for a Hannaford buyer, we’ll never do that much business in our own retail shop. On the other hand, once we open our new facility on Flynn Avenue, we want to be able to invite people to come here and see the whole process. So we’re working on that now. There’s certainly more people who are really curious about our process. Have you ever tried Citizen Cider? Let us know!

SEE MORE: In Search of the Best New England Hard CiderHow to Talk Like a Real Cider ExpertBest Apple Orchards in New England