T
he tree wasn’t all that special. It was
just too damn big.
ABRAM GOLDMAN-ARMSTRONG (LEFT) AND IZAAK
B U T L E R AT C I D E R R I O T | J E N N I F E R P L I T Z KO
Back in 2004, Nat West’s friend and neighbor
in North Portland, Norris Thomlinson, had
a large and craggy tree in his backyard that
produced an unholy wealth of apples. “Backyard apples,”
West describes them. “No good name for them—green,
small, scabby. Maybe Gravenstein, that’s my only guess.”
They tried everything to keep those apples from going
to waste in Thomlinson’s backyard. They made pies, pre-
serves, dried apples, applesauce. Still, there were too many
apples: 500 pounds of apples.
Finally, West had an idea that changed his life. “I
thought, ‘We could turn it into juice,’” he says. “I knew you
could make alcohol out of apples.”
Within a few harvests, he was making hundreds of gal-
lons of cider a year. He came to be known as the guy with
free cider, holding weekly Wednesday potlucks for up to
50 people. By then, he had left that crabby tree behind and
started picking from abandoned orchards on the edge of
town.
Those parties were also focus groups. “Every week I
tried out a new flavor, a new yeast, a new type of apple,”
West says. “They didn’t complain too much about free
alcohol, but I could read between the lines.”
When West fi nally started Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider
in the basement of his house, in the summer of 2011,
few were talking about cider-making in Portland. That’s
because it barely existed. Cider was mostly the province
of Anglophiles, out-of-town wineries, and people with
orchards. Craft cider juggernaut 2 Towns Ciderhouse, in
Corvallis, had just barely kicked off its training wheels.
Four years later, the Portland area is home to 13 cider-
ies, whether in a Mount Tabor garage or an Oregon City
industrial park. It’s amazing how fast Portland has become
the Big Apple of the national cider scene, but it has. Our
city is hard at work creating the American cider scene to
come. We have the apples, we have the cideries, and we
drink more cider than anyone else in the nation.
Ask anybody: Portland is Beervana. You
can look at our 2015 Beer Guide, distributed with select
issues of this week’s paper and otherwise available at local
beer bars, for confirmation. We have more craft brewer-
ies than any city in the world, and as of last year, we drink
more craft brew than suds from the two largest macro
makers combined.
But for all of Portland craft beer’s success, cider is
growing four times as fast. The overall numbers remain
small, at about 5 percent of the beer market in Portland
and only 2 percent nationally, but cider sales have grown
by over 50 percent each year since 2011, rocketing from
$39 million to $219 million nationwide.
“No one expected this boom in cider to happen as
quickly as it has,” says Alter Ego’s Anne Hubatch, who also
owns Helioterra urban winery.
No city in the nation drinks as much cider per capita
as Portland, according to January 2015 Nielsen data. We
drink almost as much cider as Los Angeles, which has six
times as many people. We drink more than all of New Eng-
land combined.
Beer isn’t the competition. Rather, cider makers cite
Portland’s beer scene as the reason for cider’s fast accep-
tance. West says it’s the No. 1 reason—and not just because
of beery hopped ciders like Nat’s Envy, a collaboration
with Barley Brown’s Brewpub that we today named our
2015 Cider of the Year (see page 14).
“Craft beer is huge,” West says. “I’ve always felt that
cider is the sister to craft beer. Across the country—we
can’t look at other markets and say, ‘How is cider doing?’
We just look at how craft beer is doing. Where craft beer
goes, cider goes.”
Craft cider is about where craft beer was two decades
ago, when Budweiser still stalked the Midwest largely
unchallenged. Although two Oregon cider companies—
Widmer Brothers’ Square Mile and 2 Towns—are among
the top 10 best sellers nationwide, 90 percent of the cider
market is controlled by macro-ciders: Woodchuck, Angry
Orchard, Strongbow and offerings from Anheuser-Busch
and MillerCoors.
But as of this year, Portland is the only U.S. city where
Angry Orchard, which sells over half the cider in America,
is not increasing its market share. “It doesn’t come as a
surprise,” West says. “It’s a bit of a canary in the coal mine.
We’ve been doing cider long enough in Portland that we
see through the thin veneer of fake apple.”
Instead, craft ciders are ascendant. From about 10
cideries in the entire Pacific Northwest in 2010, Oregon
and Washington now have more than 70 licensed cideries,
about a quarter of the nation’s total.
To Pete Mulligan, co-owner of Bull Run Cider and
president of the Northwest Cider Association, our love of
craft is fundamental to our state’s character: “You have to
look what’s happened in the past 10 years with craft beer
and Oregon wine. It’s the willingness to check out new
things. We support entrepreneurs, and we are entwined
with where food comes from and where it’s made.”
Portland also has access to apples. Most
of the apples fueling Portland’s cider boom come from
across the Columbia River. Washington is the No. 1 state
for apple growing—it grows over half the apples in Amer-
ica—and one of the largest apple processors in the nation
is in Hood River.
Local cider makers have a bounteous supply of the
cheap, fresh dessert fruit found in every refrigerator
crisper: Jonagold, Honeycrisp, Red and Golden Delicious,
Gravenstein and Granny Smith.
But one thing we don’t have is traditional cider apples.
In England, France and Spain (see page 15), cider makers
prefer apples that are too bitter to slice up and eat, tannic
as an old Bourdeaux Superieur.
Sharp and bitter-sharp apples are grown in a few places
in Oregon—the old White Oak Cider farm in the Yamhill
Valley, Wandering Aengus’ orchards near Salem—but not
enough to fi ll the demand for cider.
CONT. on page 14
Willamette Week FEBRUARY 25, 2015 wweek.com
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