Married couple Kat Hand and Matt Brogan operate Berkshire Cider Project out of Greylock WORKS, an almost quarter-million square foot complex that once served as a cotton-spinning mill just west of downtown North Adams.
“We met in New York City, and as a hobby, we got into cider making," said Brogan. "I grew up in upstate New York, Kat’s family has been here in the Berkshires for nearly 40 years. In either of those places, you can't help but fall in love with apples and orchards and fall. So we were making cider as a hobby literally in our bathroom closet. And it just kind of started taking over, literally, our apartment and then took over her parents’ basement in a number of ways.”
Berkshire Cider Project’s 1,200-foot space serves as both the production facility and tasting room for the business. Despite the close confines, they released 3,000 gallons of 13 different ciders in 2021.
“Everything we create is dry and sparkling, so that is common across the board," said Hand. "Dry meaning, there's no sugar in it at all. So we ferment everything completely so all the sugar is eaten up to make alcohol, which we like.”
There are classic ciders like a dry made with local Berkshire culinary apples like Gala and Mutsu as well as a bittersweet English style with UK-sourced apples. Again, Hand.
“We have a barrel aged cider that we make with our friends at Windy Hill Orchard, which is down in Great Barrington, and again, that's using culinary apples," said Hand. "But for that one, we age in French oak wine barrels, so you get a nice kind of toasty, warm, oakiness, somewhat reminiscent of a Chardonnay but still super bright since apples are nice and acidic.”
It’s through foraging that Berkshire Cider Project lives up to its name.
“As soon as you start finding them or start seeing them, you'll see apple trees all over Berkshire County, in people's backyards," said Hand. "We forage everywhere from the Burger King parking lot to the Mount to really anywhere that people will invite us where they have apple trees or where we find them along the roads. And so then those wild apples bring a whole other kind of characteristic into some of our ciders as well.”
“Every time you plant an apple or throw an apple core by the roadside, you're likely to get a completely new variety of apple that might be good, it might also be inedible, but it might make great cider, which is usually the case as well," said Brogan. "So one thing that's been really fun for us is just finding those apples, and there's lots of folks doing this throughout New England and sort of giving them new names or coming up with new descriptions for them.”
He says the endeavor makes Berkshire Cider Project something of a time machine.
“It also gives us a chance to kind of turn back the clock and go back in history and think about the varieties that used to be grown," Brogan told WAMC. "So, one of the ciders we make is at Hancock Shaker Village, and they have an orchard there that we started foraging from, but there are all sorts of varieties that you just don't see anymore. So it's Newtown Pippin or Golden Russet, there's some Gravenstein, there’s Hubbardston Nonesuch, all these great kind of classic names, that we're able to now taste and also make cider out of and get a little sense of maybe what cider tasted like 100 years ago- But also, you know, bring it into the modern table, which is to say, where are people drinking now? What sort of flavors are they interested in? So we're able to kind of blend those two worlds together through the apple.”
The apples that yield the best cider are often called spitters in the industry.
“They can be super tannic, super bitter, super acidic, not delicious to eat, which is one reason that we don't have a lot of these cidermaking apples left in the States," Hand explained. "During Prohibition, it kind of decimated the cidermaking industry. All these orchards that grew these kinds of apples were chopped down. So a lot of the apples, honestly, that we're finding, that we're foraging, are these apples that have survived, and may actually be these kind of historic cidermaking apples. So it's really exciting when we find a wild tree and we take a bite into it and it tastes terrible, because we know that'll probably make a really delicious cider.”
Foraging allows Berkshire Cider Project to coax rich, unique flavors from the county’s landscape, from those long-forgotten cidermaking apples to wild pears and even a private quince orchard from a local enthusiast. Another means of revealing the hidden character of the Berkshires has been the Project’s successful community cider program. Brogan says it unexpectedly emerged when the business was weathering the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It sort of came out of ideas that people brought to us when they came to our window to buy cider, but then also said, well, I've got a bucket in the car full of apples, do you want them?" he told WAMC. "We maybe hadn't thought of that yet. We had picked some apples on trails or gone to the orchards but never thought about going to people's backyards or going to public parks and the library and places like that.”
“One message we got loud and clear is that people had apples. They had apple trees in their backyard, or they knew roadside apples, and they kept asking us, like, can we can we bring you these? Like, I can't make any more apple pies. What can you do with these apples?” said Hand. “So that really started the community cider project, and we're now on our second year of that. And essentially, we invite folks to bring us their apples anywhere that they find them, and we put those all together and wild ferment, meaning we don't add any commercial yeast to that cider. So again, you're getting kind of the terroir of the community, both from the apples and the yeast that we're using. And it's one of the best ciders that we've made, which is very telling, I would say.”
Just two years into its existence, Hand says Berkshire Cider Project still has so much more to discover about the county — past, present, and future.
“We're excited to have just planted an orchard at Arrowhead," she told WAMC. "And they, again, approached us wanting to kind of recreate Herman Melville's historic orchards, so we just planted about 30 trees there. So we're literally sort of putting our roots in the ground with these local cultural institutions.”
