Our Process
Why we do what we do.
We love hard cider, and think it’s gotten a bum rap.
For 200 years, cider was the beverage of choice in New England, and Maine made some of the best hard cider in the world, helped by one of the best climates for apples anywhere.
In the late 19th century, as America became less rural, and immigrants from central Europe brought strong traditions in brewing beer, cider began to be supplanted. But well into the 20th century there was nearly as much cider as beer consumed in Maine and New England. With the coming of prohibition, most cider orchards were cut down, since the fruit wasn’t any good for eating. When sanity returned to the country (in the form of the 21st Amendment) beer returned quickly, but cider, which requires trees that can take up to a decade to bear fruit, did not.
For most of the 20th century, virtually no hard cider was consumed in the United States. A few pioneers began producing in tiny quantities in the 80’s and 90’s, but until recently most Americans had no awareness or knowledge of hard cider whatsoever.
Beginning a decade or two ago, Angry Orchard and a few other national brands began selling millions of gallons of hard cider annually, in a country that grew virtually no cider apples. While these companies did us a favor by using their marketing power to re-introduce the category to the general public, the fact that there was no available cider apple supply meant that they had to produce a very different product than the hard cider of our forefathers. They used dessert apples, which had very little body and lots of acidity, simply because that was all that was available. They also added lots of sugar…often as much as seven or eight teaspoons per 12oz can.
many folks have decided that cider just isn’t for them.
So for the first decade of cider’s revival, most people came to know cider as a cloyingly sweet beverage without much body or character. As a result, many folks have decided that cider just isn’t for them.
The good news is that the re-emergence of cider as a category has led to a number of excellent small-batch cider start-ups, both here in Maine and New England, as well as in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
The problem, from our perspective, is that all of these great ciders are at price points that mean they can’t be sold very easily on draft or in cans to the mass market. We aim to change that.
At Freedom’s Edge, we set out to make a series of well-balanced, full-bodied delicious hard ciders that, while not cheap, are accessible to a far wider audience, and can be found in bars, restaurants, grocery and convenience stores all over Maine. We’d like to show people that draft cider can be so rich and satisfying that it’s a first choice drink, not just a novelty or an option for those who can’t tolerate beer or wine.
Sure, we’ll offer some ciders, like our Freedom’s Edge Gold, in 750ml champagne bottles aimed at wine stores and fine restaurants. But the thing that really drives us is our conviction that we can make ciders worth drinking without charging an arm and a leg. Try our original blend, or one of our seasonals like our Redfield Rosé or Sweet Mull-et, and we think you’ll agree!
OUR PROCESS
We make all of our ciders at our farm in Albion, Maine. We are a small, family-owned cider maker, so we’ve chosen to outsource a couple of the more capital intensive aspects of production, to let us focus our time and resources on the things that make our ciders special.
Here are the basics of what we do and how we do it. If you’d like to know more, Ned will be posting some videos which give a deeper dive. Until those are available, stop by our facility in Albion and one of us would be glad to tell you more than you want to know!
OUR ORCHARD & APPLE SUPPLY
WHY THE right apples matter
In 2020, we planted 1500 apple trees on seven gently-sloping acres on our farm. Some of these will be mature in another year or two, while some won’t bear fruit for 5-7 more years.
We’ve planted over 30 different varietals, most of which are characterized as bittersweet or bittersharp. The term “bitter” in an apple implies that the apple has a large amount of tannins, which are an essential element for making full bodied cider. If you bite into one of these apples, it will tend to dry out your mouth and you’ll taste some astringency in the back of your palate; it won’t seem juicy in the way a dessert apple will. For that reason, they’re commonly called “spitters,” because if you bite into one you’ll probably want to spit it out.
The term “sharp” or “sweet” refers to whether the apple is relatively high or low in acidity.
The term “sharp” or “sweet” refers to whether the apple is relatively high or low in acidity. A sharp apple may contain just as much sugar as a sweet one, but it may not taste that way because the acidity (which causes you to “pucker” when you bite into it) interferes with your experience of the sweetness.
The other two types of apples, simply called “sharps” or “sweets,” are generally known as “dessert apples,” because they make good eating right off the tree. The sweets, like Honey Crisp or Ida Red, have less acidity and the sharps, like McIntosh or Granny Smith, have more.
In our orchard, we’ve focused on growing bittersweets and bittersharps, since these apples aren’t available from other orchards in Maine. Dessert apples are plentiful around the state, and we can generally buy them more cheaply than we can grow them ourselves. This is because we can use the apples that don’t “grade out,” in the sense that they aren’t pretty enough to be bought by the grocery stores.
The apples we buy, the runts of the litter, taste just the same as the high-grade apples the stores buy, but they cost far less.
Our blend will vary from season to season, and from cider to cider, but in general about 20-30% of the apples in our cider are bittersweet or bittersharp, about 10-20% are “specialty” apples that we choose for one or more of their characteristics (say, high sugar content or rich color or excellent aromatics), and the remaining 50-60% are split pretty evenly between higher-acid sharps and lower-acid sweets.
Right now, since our orchard isn’t producing fruit, we are purchasing our bittersharps and bittersweets from orchards outside of Maine. Our biggest supplier is in Herefordshire in the UK, where there is a rich tradition of growing great cider fruit. We also buy some from New Hampshire and upstate New York. By 2024 or 2025, we hope to be nearly self-sufficient in our bittersweet and bittersharp supply.
Our dessert apples come from a variety of producers around Maine. As we grow, we plan to diversify our supply to as many local growers as possible, provided that those growers meet our standards in terms of having minimally-invasive integrated pest management programs, so that we know our fruit is healthy and free from contamination.
OUR PRESS
BRINGING BACK TRADITION
We have a grinder and two cylindrical bladder presses, which produce juice by filling a center bladder with water from a hose. The bladder gradually expands and pushes the apple pulp against the outer wall of the press, which has tiny holes to allow the juice to drip down into a basin, where we pump it into our barrels or tanks. We’d love to tell you we press all our fruit in this way, but that would be a lie. On a good day, working all day, we can press maybe 300 gallons with these presses, so we’d need there to be more days than there are in the fall to press our entire supply.
Commercial scale presses are extremely efficient, but also extremely expensive, so we ship our apples to our partners for pressing. Even with the trucking cost, we pay a fraction of what it would cost us to do it ourselves.
Our mission is to make first-class cider, using first-class ingredients at a mass-market price point, and one of the ways we are able to do this is by utilizing cost-saving strategies, like outsourcing our pressing, whenever we can.
FERMENTATION & AGING
MAKING BUBBLES TASTE GOOD
It’s really easy to turn sweet cider into hard cider, as you’ll know if you’ve enter left a jug of cider out of the refrigerator for too long. Wild yeast grows everywhere, and under the right conditions it’ll begin to eat the sugar in the sweet cider, leaving alcohol and carbon dioxide as by-products.
The trick, of course, is getting the cider to ferment the way you want it to, so the only flavor left at the end is the flavor of the apple.
That takes a little planning and a lot of cleanliness. If you come visit us at work, you’d think that all we do is cleaning and sanitizing. And you’d be pretty much correct.
We use champagne yeast in most of our ciders. We use it because it imparts very little flavor to the cider, so you can taste the apples, not the yeast.
We mostly ferment and age in steel tanks, though we do use oak barrels for some of the specialty blends at the tasting room. We use steel for the same reason we use champagne yeast: it minimizes the degree to which outside flavors (like the flavors in the oak) influence the taste of the cider. Steel is also less porous than wood, and during the aging process we want to minimize the amount of oxidation that can occur when air touches the cider.
At least once, and sometimes twice, during fermentation we “rack” the cider, by pumping it out into another vessel but leaving the dead yeast (known as the “lees”) behind. This helps ensure that we don’t get too much flavor from the yeast imparted into the cider.
We age for some period of time before blending, depending, primarily, on the level and type of tannins. Dessert apples, which have very little tannin, don’t need to age for very long at all. Bittersweets and bittersharps, on the other hand, can benefit greatly from aging. Depending on the sharpness of the tannins, we’ve found that it may take up to six months of aging before these ciders are ready to be blended.
BLENDING
THE ART OF BLENDING
Unlike grapes, very few apples make a good hard cider all by themselves. Instead, we blend many apples to get the flavor we’re looking for. This can vary from season to season, as different growing conditions can change the characteristics of even the most familiar apple types.
While each of our ciders is different, in general we’re looking for a moderate level of acidity, which gives our ciders their characteristic “brightness.” We’re looking for enough tannin so that the cider has solid “mouth feel” (so it feels substantial in your mouth), but not so much that the cider becomes noticeably bitter. This can be one of the trickiest things to achieve, because all tannins are not created equal…some are “softer” or “harder,” and can react differently in the blend, and can change over time.
We’re looking for nice aromatics and color, and we add apples to the blend that we think will provide this, but we’re not willing to compromise on the flavor profile of the cider for the sake of visual appeal.
We ferment our ciders to dryness (ie, we allow all the sugars in the apples to convert to alcohol), but some of our ciders require a bit of back sweetening to create the “balance” that is the one unifying ingredient in everything Freedom’s Edge produces.
We sweeten using fresh cider, which we concentrate by freezing the juice and then allowing it to gradually melt. The melting point of the apple sugar is lower than the melting point of ice, so the first liquid, which we capture, is highly concentrated. We add a small amount of this to our cider, and then add sulfites to ensure that the sweetener does not begin to ferment in the can.
PACKAGING
CIDER SO GOOD, WE PUT OUR NAME ON IT
Our draft and can ciders are carbonated, by adding CO2 in a vessel designed for this purpose, known as a “brite tank.” Some of our specialty ciders are “bottle conditioned,” which is a process whereby we leave a modest amount of residual sugar in the bottle and allow it to ferment. CO2 is a by-product of this fermentation, and it adds a softer feel to the carbonation, which is an effect we like in some of our more tannic ciders.
Once the cider has been blended, back sweetened, and carbonated, it is ready for packaging. About half of our production is kegged and then brought by our distributors to bars and restaurants, where they may be enjoyed on draft. The other half is canned and sold at over 200 (and growing) liquor stores, grocery stores, specialty stores and convenience stores around Maine.