Beer and hard apple cider have a lot in common. Both are practical means of storing the food and economic value of agricultural production (grains and apples); both have long, even ancient histories; both are able to be produced at home as well as commercially. Both beer and apple cider appear rather similar in the glass, and both are good with food. Pasteurized apple juice is often also called cider, but it has no alcohol content.
Being a Milwaukeean born and bred, beer has been my traditional beverage, but of late I have been giving hard cider a closer look. Hard cider was a major beverage in early America, and by all accounts more of it was drunk than beer, while wine was a relative rarity for all but the wealthy. Apples were grown far more for cider production than for eating, and specific varieties were grown for cider, many of which were hardly usable for any other purpose.
It wasn't until grain was produced in far greater quantities with western expansion that beer became more important than apple cider, and the popularity of the later declined. We often forget that there was what seems today as excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages in our nation's historic past, when water supplies were often unsafe. Beer and wine were safe to drink, whereas water often was not. There certainly was much abuse of distilled beverages such as whisky and gin.
The temperance movement of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, which culminated in prohibition, drastically cut production and consumption of all alcoholic beverages, including cider, and the latter never really recovered until recently. During those times farmers were actually encouraged to cut down their apple trees to discourage the making of cider.
Hard cider has always been popular and available in Great Britain, much more than in the United States, but the popularity of cider has soared in the US in recent years, and represents a significant new market. It looks like a good opportunity for Bayfield apple growers as well.
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