An Interview With Spencer Morris, Owner of
Sowams Cider Works, Warren, Rhode Island
Mention apple cider in the U.S. and most people will think of unfiltered, sweet, apple juice — while in Europe “cider” almost always means a fermented or hard apple cider. Sowams Cider Works in Warren, RI, is part of the subculture of cider makers who want to change the perception of cider in this country.
Projections of global sales for hard cider products vary; however, sources agree that hard cider is a growing part of the U.S. beverage market. Whether you have an entrepreneurial interest or want to make cider for family and friends, cider is a lower alcohol alternative to wine, a refreshing accompaniment to meals — and apple varieties yield almost endless variations.
As JWUpro launches a new online cider-making course, Director of Training, Kristin Wakefield and Business Development Manager, Sarah Liew recently visited local cideries to learn firsthand about cider. “We wondered which apples are best for making cider. What flavors and textures distinguish a good apple cider wine? Is there a market for hard apple cider and apple wine?”
Spencer Morris, owner of Sowams Cider Works in Warren, RI and Long Lane Orchard in the Touisset area, approaches cider making in a unique way. Acknowledging there are many ways to make cider, Morris shares his personal approach and offers tips about choosing heirloom and modern apples, single varietals and blends, and provides insights into the cider industry for enthusiasts and entrepreneurs.
The Business
Describing his role in the cider industry, Morris characterizes himself as a ‘farmer, cider maker and bartender.’ “First and foremost,” he told us, “This is a farming operation. The license I have in Rhode Island is called a ‘farmer winery license.’ Each state has their own license for wineries and some of them offer licenses designed to promote agricultural interests.”
Morris and his part-time associate, Meg, handle all of the day-to-day operations. “Meg is absolutely wonderful and very dedicated. We share the same responsibilities in both front facing customer service and behind the scenes production work. I’m supposedly the one that runs the show here and makes the calls, but I welcome advice from the other participants.”
Meg adds, “Working here is fun — every day is different. I work with Spencer up front on the weekend and on Monday and Tuesday we do production tasks. I’m a ceramic artist, so I can work in my studio whenever I am not at the cidery.”
From An Experiment To A Passion
Growing up, Morris’ grandfather had a small orchard in the Hudson Valley; his mom sold apples from their small fruit stand. Uninterested in learning about apple cultivation, Morris didn’t feel called to follow in his family’s footsteps.
Instead, he moved to Rhode Island and earned an architectural degree from Rhode Island School of Design. Morris designed restaurants until, in 1984, he established NitroTap Ltd. He continues today to make beer tap handles for beer and wine and spirits companies, and wine dispensing systems for restaurants.
Honoring The Legacy
After his grandfather passed and his parents retired from farming, Morris began to think about apples and cider. “A family legacy now, my two sisters and I have been trying to figure out what to do with it.”
Morris explains that apples alone are a very difficult economic proposition. “About 15 or so years ago, I was considering ways of adding value to apples as a crop. At the time, hard cider was just starting to show up as a category in the beverage market.
“Wanting to learn how practical it was to make cider, I took my homemade, hobby ciders to family gatherings and parties and handed out as much as I could, trying to get a read on the cider’s marketability. I received enough encouragement that I continued with it. What began as a kind of experiment has turned into a business, and it’s become something of an obsession.”
Learning The Craft
Knowledge about cultivating apple orchards wasn’t passed down to him from his family, so, Morris had a lot to learn. He delved into ‘how-to’ books, which recommended various apple varieties that have historically produced good cider and also recommended new and promising varieties.
“Fifteen years ago, the obvious thing to do was to go to Cornell, because Cornell has a viticulture school – it was the heart of apple knowledge in this country. I attended two ten-day seminars, mostly geared to high volume, industrial production. We were taught techniques to develop a product that was consistent year in and year out, and which would have a flavor profile based on consumer studies. What we learned was interesting, but not very helpful to what I do now.”
Keeping Cider Making Simple
“During my first couple of years, I had to eliminate a lot of the things that had been recommended as standard practice: the use of sulfur emitted by sulfite, filtration, carbonation, back sweetening. These are all techniques used in commercial cidermaking to produce a consistent product out of what is called base cider.
“In this country, the base cider is made with what we call ‘orchard run.’ These apples are mostly geared to grocery store markets and for food processing. With the exception of small producers, in this country we don’t have orchards for cultivating cider varietals. So, typically you play with the base cider, using all those techniques that I just described to create a consistent product.
“People expect consistency in this consumer culture — that’s not a bad approach, just not the one I’ve taken. I don’t want a consistent product. I want something that’s different year in and year out, that creates interest.
“Frankly, what I do is a lot easier than trying to augment a base cider by going through all the processes of filtering, and balancing additives. We press the juice from the apples we grow, put it in the cellar for a year, age it on the lees — which later I take back to the orchard and spread around my trees to restore some of the nutrients we’ve taken off in the fruit. Then we bottle the cider and let it bottle age for another year, without any interventions.”
It’s All About The Apples
Morris declares, “What makes our cider unique is that we grow all our own fruit. We’ve planted about 1,000 trees in our three-acre orchard. The business can only scale really as fast as trees grow. It’s a gradual process. A newly planted tree from rootstock will start producing fruit in about 4 to 5 years.
“Our goal is to have 1,200 mature trees on the property. Currently we grow over 80 varieties of apples, including many regional heirloom varieties and British and European cider apples, as well as disease resistant cultivars like Liberty and Gold Rush.
“By maintaining my own orchard, I can control the varietals I grow and be selective about ones that are particularly good for cider making. The culture — how they’re actually grown, how and when they’re harvested — makes a difference in the quality of cider.
“Commercial apples you buy in supermarkets are often picked before they are fully ripe, because they transport well and can be stored longer. Peak bloom in my area tends to be mid-May, depending on the apple variety. Our harvest ended late November this year — the later harvest apples seem to be better. We’ve had the last six to almost eight weeks of pure sun, which has made the fruit really good this year.”
Sowams’ Trademark
“Cider is traditionally made up of blended fruit varietals,” explains Morris. “You get some sharps, you get some sweets, you get some high tannins — and just kind of mix them all up. In a modern cidery of any scale, they will more often blend batches of juices after they have fermented. If I make a blend, I do it in the press. If I want to experiment with flavors, I’ll plant another type of apple tree.
“Strategically, we’ve made single varietal ciders — one type of apple, one type of cider — our trademark. I look for a range within one variety. I do have a stock blend, made with a dessert apple called ‘Liberty,’ and then different selected French and English bittersweets, which are high in tannins.
“We’ve chosen not to pump filter or force carbonate our ciders and we don’t add sugars or sulfites. Slow-pressed juiced and small batch fermentation produces a superior craft cider.”
The Tasting Room
“The retail or front of house – the tasting room — is the money end of this business. I have never wanted to open a restaurant, knowing how much work it is, so this is second best.
“Making cider is the easy part— the real work is figuring out how to present the product, inform people about the product, try to build a broader base of interest locally, and also participate in the general discussion about what is American cider making. Part of marketing is talking about the history of apples.
“Similar to wine tasting rooms or microbreweries, you have a range of beverages — ours are all varietal dependent. We present four ciders at a time. Today, for instance, you’d have a blended cider, which is probably more traditional in its approach, made up of multiple different apples, trying to create a balance between the tannins, acids and sugars. My ciders are not sweet — they’re fermented completely dry. Qualities other than sugar give my ciders some richness.”
Apple Stories
Important to how he builds the public’s interest in cider, Morris tells his visitors tales. “Every apple has a story that relates to the economic development of this country, the role cider played in the early days, and why it isn’t a principal beverage in this country anymore. We’re trying to restore that story, one little cidery at a time.
“Each apple variety has a unique name, which may come from the apple’s characteristics. An English apple that I grow, and particularly like, is called Brown Snout. If you look at the apple, it’s yellow with a brown snout.
“Or apples can be named after the location from where they originated. Tolman Sweet is an extremely sweet apple with almost no acid and makes an excellent cider. Another apple called Gold Rush is a modern varietal. The fruit’s fabulous and stores incredibly well. Gold Rush makes a fantastic cider — quite sharp and with a wonderful citrusy character.
“One of the best apples historically for making wine is the Virginia Crab, which originated in Virginia as a wild apple, as did most heirlooms. Supposedly it was one of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite single varietals apple. It’s absolutely gorgeous, almost translucent in its orange kind of color, ferments beautifully clean, and very high in sugar, so that you get a pretty substantial ABV (alcohol by volume). We’re bottling 2022 ciders right now, which was an astonishingly good year for our fruit. Those bottles will be reserved for a year before we release them — I think they’ll be at the high end of cider ABV, around 9%.
“We grow heirlooms in my orchard, including one of my favorites, Roxbury Russet, which originated in Roxbury, MA during the 1600s. It’s a wonderful varietal that makes a consistently good cider. These old heirlooms have been around for so long because they are farmer friendly.
“Another heirloom apple is the Rhode Island Greening – most people in Rhode Island don’t know that it’s the state fruit. It’s a fantastic apple, dating back to the 1650s, in Newport County, Rhode Island. It’s a great cider apple and also a good cooking and eating apple.
“Although many North American varieties grown in the middle of the 19th century are gone, there are still living libraries you can source. Cornell is one of them. Private ones, like Tower Hill Nursery up in Worcester (now New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill) is a fabulous botanical garden. They’ve got a living library of about 120 old varietals.
“People ask me, ‘what’s your favorite cider?’ I make 30 to 35 different pressings a year. I tell them that it’s not a fair question. What you like best just depends on your mood. Your palate changes every day — probably every time you eat something.”
Home Brewing Tips
When it comes to brewing your own cider at home, according to Morris, “Most important is hygiene. We’re pretty careful in terms of culling the fruit, washing the fruit, maintaining the glassware in which we ferment the juice. One thing that that I recall from my course at Cornell was that apple juice coming off the press is pretty sturdy. Apple cider after fermentation is much more sensitive to oxidation.
“In my experience, oxidation is not necessarily a bad thing. You’ve heard about letting the wines breathe a little before you drink them — that’s oxidation of the tannins, which can have a very nice benefit, and which happens fairly quickly. There’s a lot of concern about the ferment turning to vinegar, but that takes exposure to air and bacteria over a long time.
“Unless you leave the vessel open and exposed to the air in a warm environment, turning to vinegar is probably not going to happen. You can get some ‘off’ flavors, typically sulfur, from either a hot fermentation, too rapid a fermentation, or a highly stressed yeast.
“The most significant stress on yeasts is lack of nutrients. People think of a fungus as a plant, but yeasts are a living organism, closer to us as animals than they are to plants. Yeasts need all the things we need. If you lack enough nitrogen or protein, your cell walls can’t develop their physical structure. Yeasts need vitamins for the same reason. Some people add a nutrient, like dried yeast hulls, although I haven’t found the need to do that.
“With fermentation, you’re taking fruit juice — in this case, apples instead of grapes — and you’re either introducing a yeast to convert the fruit sugars to alcohol, or you’re allowing the native yeast and bacteria that are in the fruit and coming in from the field, to build its own population and create the fermentation.
“The latter is sort of a wild or natural fermentation. There’s a lot of popularity now with the natural wines, and this is how it’s done. There are many different yeasts that will be in your juice, so it’s just allowing the native yeast to do the job.
“If you choose to go with a selected yeast strain — typically, in a commercial environment — the juice would be sulfured to suppress the wild organisms. You would introduce a single organism — a yeast that has the desired characteristics for the fermentation you’re trying to achieve. Some people are allergic to sulfites, so we choose not to go that route.
“You can search catalogs of different yeasts; more and more of them are cider yeasts that have been extracted from the wild colony of yeasts and are now refined for the purpose of homebrewers or commercial cider makers.
“My best advice is to just keep everything clean, keep air away from the fermentation, and give it time.”
The Cider Industry
“Everyone in the cider industry shares the challenge of getting more people to drink more cider. Cider and its revitalization in this country was positioned initially by large commercial companies as a beer alternative. So low ABV, say 5%, is actually diluted product — bubbly and effervescent similar to beer — and somewhat sweet. Understandably, American consumers think this is what cider is, but it’s much more diverse.
“There are sweet ciders, not so sweet and quite sharp ciders; sours and ciders that are very tannic — almost kind of ‘barnyard-y.’ This diversity creates opportunities to pair cider wines with all different kinds of food. This is why I’m trying to get more of my product on the wine shelf instead of on the beer shelf in stores and restaurants.
“Another challenge is that in the wine industry, you want to position your product in a restaurant or an on-premises business because it gives your product visibility. Ten years ago, most restaurants didn’t carry cider. Today there’s usually at least one cider on the menu, but it’s at the bottom of the beer column.
“So, my interest is in getting it off the beer list, either on its own category or in with the wines, because my product is more a wine alternative than a beer alternative. It’s higher in ABV than sweet, bubbly ciders, but lower than most wines produced from grapes. It’s still and it’s aged for almost two years. Cider wine pairs well with food because doesn’t it overwhelm your culinary interest. You can enjoy a nice, refreshing, couple of glasses, which will also have enough acid to cut a heavy meal.”
An Exciting Future
Morris says, “If you look at cidermaking globally, the U.S. is probably the most exciting place to be because of the diversity in producers and the products that are being produce. Of course, you’ll get great ciders if you go to France. You’ll get a very traditional product, more than likely something they’ve been making for hundreds of years.
“In the US, a place like mine is focused on individual varietals. You can go to another cidery that’ll have fruit juices incorporated, like pineapples or ginger and cider. This would be anathema in other parts of the world, but in the U.S. it’s an accepted practice in terms of a creative venture.
“Even the larger U.S. commercial producers are great advocates for a community of diversity. They support cider meetings, like the CiderCon Convention, which is held in different parts of the country each year. It’s a big commercial hootenanny of cider makers and people who service the cider industry.”
For The Love Of The Fruit
“People coming to my location have a singular perspective about what cider is. They leave here with a whole new view of what cider can be. The challenge for me personally is promoting that understanding of diversity in cider products, so that even if you don’t like sweet cider, you’re not reluctant to go into a place and taste their cider.
“Many people are aware that fruit is the basis of my business — some want to grow apples in their front yard, backyard, or even start a small cider enterprise. For those who want to make cider but don’t plan to plant their own trees, I recommend calling around to orchards that may have some older varietals, or which may have taken a step towards catering to cider makers.
“A lot of folks come here who are making cider as hobbyists. We all share the feeling that we’re the little guy and gal in the business, and that we need to stick together. I tell anyone wanting to make cider not to be put off by other people’s dogma — just go for it. You will learn what works for you by doing.
“Early on, I was told by Steve Wood, one of the early entries in American cider making, ‘It’s all about the fruit. Start with a passion for the fruit, because that’s going to lead you to the best quality product.
“To become a cider maker, first understand what you like by becoming a cider drinker. How do you know how to become a cider drinker? Drink more cider and that’s it!”
Learn To Make Cider At Home Or Start An Entrepreneurial Career
Interested in learning how to produce unique hand-crafted ciders and cider wines? JWUpro’s online, self-paced Cider Making Course — including tips from cider industry experts in Rhode Island — is launching now!
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