Rustic. Funky. Traditional.
These are the kinds of words often used to describe farmhouse-style beverages. Much like the word “farmhouse” itself when applied to drinks, they’re evocative but lack clear definition. In brewing, farmhouse is more state-of-mind than specific designation, applied to styles as varied as saisons, wood-aged, mixed-culture beers, and kveik-fermented raw ales.
It’s not so different with cider. Even without concrete guidelines, “farmhouse” has appeal—and it just seems to work. When producers use it, certain characteristics—and consumer expectations—tend to emerge.
“When you say the word ‘farmhouse,’ a lot of experienced drinkers know exactly what that means to them,” says Brian Wing, cofounder and cidermaker at Green Bench Mead & Cider in St. Petersburg, Florida. “A lot of people think funk. … Funky flavors, barnyard, farmhouse—exactly what it says.”
Farmhouse ciders tend to be dry but balanced, with an easy drinkability and distinct fermentation profile. From there, forks in the road proliferate. There may be funk (or not). They might be fermented with wild or native yeasts, or strategically inoculated with specific strains. Alcohol content varies. Brettanomyces may or may not be present.
“What’s ‘farmhouse’ for one person is not ‘farmhouse’ for someone else,” says Brian Fairfield, head of quality assurance at Graft Cider in Newburgh, New York.
Graft is known for applying a craft-beer sensibility to their ciders, aiming to bridge the appeal of both. One of Graft’s core products is Farm Flor, which they describe as a “dry and tart oak-aged farmhouse cider.” Fairfield says they modeled it after Spanish ciders—which tend to be very tart, if not sour—while softening its acidity for American drinkers.
While farmhouse ales tend to be inspired to some degree by European brewing traditions, cider’s somewhat looser interpretation lets Graft and other cideries play with the verbiage. “A lot of times with beer, it’s like, ‘Here’s the category, this is what this style is,’” Fairfield says. “And for a lot of cideries, it’s like, ‘Well, this is what we say it is.’”
Using words familiar to beer enthusiasts is one way to help them decide whether they’d like to try a new beverage. “That’s really the only reason we’re using the term ‘farmhouse,’ ... to identify a character that hopefully the customer can start to narrow down,” says Khris Johnson, head brewer and co-owner at Green Bench Brewing, the beer side of the business. “It’s trying to build an expectation for what they’re getting into when they order that specific thing.”
Some cider styles hark back to beer in ways that relate to the senses, as with similar mouthfeels, carbonation, or finishes. However, at Graft, Fairfield says “farmhouse” is a more direct avenue between the two beverages because of fermentation profiles as well as certain flavors.
So, if farmhouse beer remains open-ended, what makes a farmhouse cider?
Product Versus Place
There are at least two schools of thought when it comes to farmhouse ciders.
To some, “farmhouse” is literal—it should denote a beverage made on a farm. Apples, after all, grow on trees, and those trees tend to be on farms. Cidermakers aligned with a more traditional approach may consider only ciders made with apples grown, pressed, processed, and packaged in one place—sometimes labeled as “estate” ciders—to be worthy of the farmhouse designation. Also, there’s an argument to be made that a typical consumer would expect that meaning.
A second perspective is less about where it’s made than about how the final product is perceived. Can a cider that captures the rustic character associated with farmhouse ales qualify as a farmhouse cider, no matter how or where it’s made?
Johnson says that he has had—and will continue to have—many debates about the virtues and pitfalls of each viewpoint with other producers. “Is the setting what we’re talking about?” he asks. “Or is it the character? We could have philosophical debates forever.”
As an urban brewery and cidery, Green Bench occupies a unique space. Situated well below most viable hardiness zones for commercial orchards in the United States, Green Bench sources their juice from hundreds of miles away. Yet they ferment it naturally—the farmhouse way.
Wing says he expects some pushback when he uses the term, but he wonders: If his ciders meet the same quality standards as those made on a farm, and they act as a conduit for curious consumers to continue exploring cider, then what’s the problem?
“If I bring in great heirloom juice from New York, put it in a barrel, and let it naturally ferment, I’m doing the same thing that you would be doing on a farm,” he says. “I can use modern techniques and processes to end up with a beverage that I think fits in that category—that tastes like it could have been made in those same old-fashioned ways.”
Photo: Matt Graves
Unpacking Rusticity, Funk, and Terroir
Not all farmhouse beverages are funky, but almost all get described as “rustic.” In cidermaking as in brewing, there are specific ways to evoke that less-than-specific impression.
“‘Rustic’ is an interesting word because it suggests some sort of primitive process,” Wing says.
Brewing farmhouse beer can be more hands-on, with countless opportunities for a brewer to intervene—including ingredient selection, mash, boil, and fermentation—to achieve a specific, desired outcome. However, if a cidermaker’s goal is to make a similarly “rustic” drink, the natural elements and apple variety play larger roles in the end product than technique.
Cider apples—another loosely defined and debated term, incidentally—often contain elevated levels of tannin, differentiating them from sweeter and more palatable eating apples. Like bitterness in a hop-forward beer, those tannins can contribute a more rustic character to cider.
“I think tannins when I think of farmhouse,” Fairfield says. That balance between acid and tannin, coupled with a dominant fermentation signature, is what he believes defines the soul of farmhouse ciders.
Wing goes further. He says that while farmhouse is “barely defined for cider … there’s sort of a general idea out there. Generally, you’re talking naturally fermented with wild yeasts and bacteria—whatever’s on the apples when you press. Minimal intervention, usually long fermentation, long aging, no pasteurization. Usually no filtration in those cases, either.”
Farmhouse doesn’t necessarily mean funky, and vice versa, but these terms both tend to emerge when cidermakers ferment using wild yeasts on the fruit rather than pitching. As with “rustic,” the word “funky” is vague—but it at least hints at what consumers can expect while communicating another typical trait of a farmhouse-cider experience.
Descriptions from cidermakers can be telling. On its website, traditional estate cidery South Hill in Ithaca, New York, describes its Farmhouse as “rustic, complex. Bone-dry, unfiltered, unrefined, low or no sulfur. Natural wine. Not for everyone! Funky—a love-it-or-hate-it cider.”
ANXO Cider in Washington, D.C., makes Happy Trees, a “dry, tart, and funky cider,” using the native yeast found on Albemarle Pippin apples grown nearby in Virginia.
Drawing even nearer to beer parallels, Potter’s Craft Cider in Charlottesville, Virginia, bottles a product called Farmhouse Saison. It’s a cider made from Rome and York apples, the juice inoculated with a Belgian abbey yeast strain—rather than wild-fermented—to produce a fruity ester profile. It’s another variance in the seemingly infinite range of farmhouse possibilities.
At Graft, Fairfield says that Farm Flor gets what they call a “hybrid pitch”—they allow the natural yeast and bacteria to propagate, but they also pitch a wine yeast. By adding that yeast, they can complete fermentation in about two weeks, or about half the time it would take if left to its own devices. That helps with turnover time, but it also helps to provide a more consistent product—a necessary quality when working on a larger scale.
Finally, when it comes to esoteric terms worth dissecting, “terroir” is another high on the list—and it’s more important to cider than it is to beer.
Precious few brewers can source all the raw materials they need from one locale, let alone one farm. Cidermakers, on the other hand, can often source everything they need from one location. That gives them an advantage when it comes to creating geographically specific farmhouse ciders—even for urban producers who implement old-fashioned methods.
At Green Bench, Johnson says, they’ve been developing a house culture for years, using it on both the beer and cider sides of the business.
“In a lineup, you’ll be able to drink our beer and be like, ‘That’s a Green Bench beer,’ because we’ve developed a house rustic character,” he says. “To me, that’s the heart of ‘farmhouse.’ Everything we do is an agricultural product. So, no matter what, [even] if we didn’t want to be, we are tied directly to terroir.”
Capturing a sense of time and place cuts to the heart of a farmhouse-drink experience. Breweries such as Jester King in Austin and Scratch in Ava, Illinois, pride themselves on using as many local and foraged ingredients as possible. Cidermakers such as Left Bank in Catskill, New York, and Runcible in Mosier, Oregon, aim to do the same—just via different avenues.
Two Beverages Under One Farmhouse Roof?
There’s no agreed-upon definition of what makes a farmhouse beverage, nor is there ever likely to be one.
However, Wing says that while beer and cider remain markedly different drinks, the farmhouse connection forms one of the clearest inroads between the two beverages. And given their closer connection to a primary ingredient, cider can actually encapsulate more of those variable farmhouse characteristics than beer can.
“In the right hands, apples can be super-delicate and super-complementary to all of that, and let that fermentation character really, really shine through in a way that sometimes doesn’t happen as much in beer,” Wing says.
Fairfield agrees, and he says he would encourage anyone who enjoys farmhouse ales to explore farmhouse ciders as well.
“There are enough similarities that people are attracted to [farmhouse cider], but there are enough differences that [keep people] coming back because they can’t get that in beer,” he says. Farmhouse cider can provide a perspective that’s different enough to surprise and fascinate. “Just try a couple,” he says.
No matter which camp you fall into—funky or clean, beer or cider, place or product—you might be surprised at what you find in the next barn over.