Working Stiff - Hard Cider

For you weightlifters: a case of 12 bottles of hard cider, 750ml each, weighs in at around 40lbs. Today we bottled a hair over 200 cases, and I packed and stacked about half of those, so let’s call it a 4,000lb day of lifting. Should I be proud?

No, I didn’t think so. I guess I won’t be winning any bodybuilding contests anytime soon…

This, in essence, is the life of small business. The great deciders and conceptualizers, the people with the great ideas and the business plan (you do have a plan, right?), also happen to be the ones who pull off 16 hour days of lifting and carrying and stacking, while soaked to the skin in a 40F bottling room. Since I’m neither a great decider nor a business planner, I get to do the same physical labor without the same reward. And by reward, I mean the threat of knowing that your personal life’s savings and second mortgage are tied into the business, and if one little thing goes wrong you’ll end up homeless.

Good lord, I sound like I’m trying to kill off entrepreneurship.

In any case, I’ve been working at Bellwether Hard Cider Co. for several years now, and I’m getting awfully involved in the business. Surprising? Yeah, it was to me. But there is something uniquely invigorating about being part of a tiny team of people, all working their butts off to scratch out a piece of the market. No slackers, no drones, and certainly no boredom. I would never call it a high-speed low-drag operation, but it’s a fucking blast.

Of course, it helps that I’m making a product that I actually believe in. It’s hard to be motivated when your job is to make and sell crap. Cider, though… damn I love that stuff. It’s good booze, and it’s an old American tradition.

Hard cider making in the US was demolished during Prohibition, which makes it a long time in coming back. Incidentally, the economy went biblically pear-shaped less than ten years after the feds banned alcohol… coincidence? In the New England/Northeast states, hard cider was particularly targeted by law enforcement, probably because it was so easy to make that everyone could (and did) ferment a few barrels every year. So, the fed.gov did what any moralizing government entity would do: deceive and destroy.

The destruction side was fairly simple. Booze was confiscated and poured out, cider presses and fermentation tanks were smashed, and apple orchards were razed. Wait, WTF? Orchards, those tree-fields that supply edible fruit to the people? Yep. In order to keep people from drinking (prohibition = bad idea), the feds sent in crews to cut down the apple trees (destroying food crops = fucking terrible idea). In the years I’ve worked at Bellwether, I’ve had a handful of people who remember watching the destruction with their own eyes.

One old man was part of the logging crews. He told me of his part in the destruction, still ashamed after all these years, especially once the Depression was in full swing and he realized that those old apple trees he had chopped down could have fed a lot of people…

The deception side of the war on hard cider was equally cruel. In the years before the ban on alcohol was enacted, newspapers started running stories about the health problems associated with drinking hard cider. The source of those stories? Not doctors, but temperance believers and their supporters in government. After hundreds of years of making and drinking cider, the feds had apparently discovered that cider would make a man blind, lazy, and impotent. I thought the impotence was a nice touch (oh noes, not the testicles!). There was also an apparent outbreak of a disease known as “cider palsy”, in which cider drinkers would develop brain damage and tremors. Blame it on their alcoholism? Naw, it must be the apples.

Hence prohibition, and the clear-cutting of the orchards.

The rural people in the Finger Lakes, of course, told the feds to get off their lawns, after which they continued to make cider. But the urban markets had dried up, mainly due to the supposed medical problems from cider drinking. So the farmers and the folk had a look-around, decided that they had an abundance of fruit, hills, rainfall, and bodies of water. You know what goes well with all of those? Distilling!

Oddly enough, the land and climate haven’t changed much in the last hundred years. So, even though the ban on making your own distilled spirits is still in place, you can sometimes hear of the pot stills hidden in the hills and woods, passed down through the generations since prohibition.

Good job, feddies. You cocked it up, as usual.

Hard cider is still easy to make, of course. And it’s legal. So now I make a ton of the stuff (yes, I know, many tons), along with the business owners and a couple other hardcore cider lovers. It’s hard work and long hours, just like any other small business. But everybody gets to do a bit of everything, and I’m part of that everybody, so I’m learning a hell of a lot. It’s fun, I get paid, and I bust my ass to make the business grow.

I also get free booze. You can be jealous now.