Hewes Virginia Crab, Albemarle Pippin and Winesap: the heritage ciders

The orchard that vanished and came back

In 1750 nearly every Virginia farm had an orchard, and the orchard was there for cider. Water was suspect, beer needed barley the colony grew badly, and wine needed vines that kept dying. Cider needed only apples, a press and a cask. Planters wrote in their diaries about the pressing the way they wrote about the tobacco cutting, as a fixed point in the year.

The apple they prized was not a dessert apple. It was a small, hard, yellow-green crab called the Hewes Virginia Crab, named for a Mr. Hewes who grew it before 1750 and sometimes spelled Hughes. Jefferson planted it in the south orchard at Monticello. William Coxe, who wrote the first American book on fruit in 1817, said its cider was "preferred to all others". The trees are small and the fruit is nearly inedible raw, so when Prohibition emptied the cider cellars and the dessert apple took over the market, the Hewes Crab all but disappeared.

What brought it back was grafting. A few trees survived in Virginia dooryards and at Monticello, and from the 1980s onward nursery growers and the first new Virginia cideries took scion wood and grafted it onto modern rootstock. The Society's own orchard on Ironbound Road was planted in 2015 from Monticello-lineage wood and bore its first full crop in 2020. It is forty trees, which is small, and it is why we also buy fruit from orchards in Albemarle and the Shenandoah Valley.

The three apples we press

The three apples the Society presses, with typical must readings

Apple	Origin	Must	Character in the glass
Hewes Virginia Crab	Virginia, before 1750	1.055–1.062 SG	Small, tannic, high in acid. Ferments to bone dry with a citrus edge and a long dusty finish. The backbone.
Albemarle Pippin (Newtown Pippin)	Long Island, c. 1720; Virginia from 1755	1.050–1.058 SG	Aromatic, pineapple and green apple, bright acid. Lifts the blend and gives it scent.
Winesap	New Jersey, before 1800; Shenandoah orchards	1.048–1.054 SG	Spicy, deep red skin, wine-like. Adds body, colour and a vinous middle.
Harrison (for comparison)	Newark, New Jersey, c. 1770	1.060–1.070 SG	The great Jersey cider apple, rediscovered in 1976. Dense, sugary, dark amber cider. Not Virginian, but a cousin we admire.

The blend changes with the year, but the house rule is at least half Hewes Crab by weight. The crab brings the tannin and acid that let a cider stand up to roasted oysters and country ham. Pippin brings aroma. Winesap brings body and a little colour. We do not press dessert apples, and we do not add sugar to raise the must.

Pressing: the cheese and the screw

The Society presses on a double-screw rack-and-cloth press, the type standing in Virginia orchards by the middle of the eighteenth century, rebuilt in white oak by a Lancaster County timber framer in 2016. The sequence is the old one:

1. Sweat the fruit. Hewes Crab is picked in late October and left in shallow crates for a week or two until the skins give slightly. This softens the pectin and lifts the sugar.
2. Grind. The apples go through a scratter mill to a coarse pomace. Fine pulp clogs the cloths and presses muddy juice.
3. Build the cheese. A square of press cloth is laid on a slatted oak rack, filled with pomace, and folded over. Another rack goes on top, then another cloth. Six to eight layers make a cheese.
4. Press slowly. The screws come down a quarter-turn at a time over an hour. Juice runs off the bed to the spout and into a food-grade vessel. A bushel of heirloom fruit gives about three gallons of must; the crab is a little stingier and the Winesap a little more generous.
5. Read the must. A hydrometer in a trial jar reads the specific gravity. A Hewes Crab must runs 1.055 SG to 1.062 SG, which ferments out to around 7–8% abv.

Some of the sweet must is drunk at the spout on the Friday morning of the festival. Most goes to the cellar.

Fermenting dry in neutral oak

The eighteenth-century cellar had no commercial yeast and no sulphite. Cider fermented on the wild yeasts that came in on the skins, slowly, in a cool cellar, over winter. The Society does nearly the same, with one concession: a small dose of sulphite at the press to knock back the spoilage organisms and let the apple's own Saccharomyces take over. After that the must is left alone.

The vessels are neutral oak puncheons. A puncheon holds about 84 gal, and "neutral" means the oak has been used for wine or cider for enough years that it gives no vanilla or toast to the cider. The wood matters for breathing, not for flavour. New oak on a Hewes Crab is a sin.

• Primary ferment runs four to eight weeks in a cellar held near 55–60°F. Slow is good; a hot fast ferment blows off the aroma.
• First racking off the gross lees once the gravity reaches about 1.010 SG. This is also when any malolactic softening begins.
• Dry is reached at 1.000 SG or just below, usually by February. A second racking follows.
• Rest in oak until early autumn, then bottle or cask for the November sittings. About a twelfth of the must is lost to lees and racking along the way, which is the figure the provisioner on the almanac page uses when it tallies apples for your own hard cider.

The finished cider is still, dry, pale gold and tannic. It drinks like a white wine with a dusty finish, and it was the daily drink of the Tidewater gentry and their households alike. Served cool from a stoneware jug beside a plate of roasted oysters, it needs no apology.

Sweet cider and the hearth

Fresh-pressed sweet cider is the other half of the harvest table. The Society serves it unpasteurised and cold at the opening roast and warmed with a cinnamon stick and a few allspice berries at the closing toast. Unpasteurised cider must be drunk within a few days or it begins to ferment on its own, which the colony regarded as a feature rather than a danger. For a modern gathering, buy it from a pressing you trust, keep it below 40°F, and serve it inside a week.

The spent pomace is not wasted. Dried on racks it burns on the hearth with a sweet smoke, and that is what goes on the fire for the last toast on the Sunday.