FoA 324: Dry Farmed Orchards, Wild and Heritage Apples and Natural Cidermaking with Brendan Barnard of Posterity Ciderworks

Visit our presenting sponsor: www.CalgaryAgbusiness.com

Posterity Ciderworks: https://posterityciderworks.com/

Brendan Barnard Twitter: https://twitter.com/IntractableLion

Posterity Ciderworks Twitter: https://twitter.com/posteritycider

Kris Barnard Twitter: https://twitter.com/KrisMBarnard

FoA 318: The Budding American (Hard) Cider Industry with Greg Peck, Ph.D. https://player.captivate.fm/episode/49237ec9-117d-4d16-9569-0672b5e9aeca

Today’s episode features Brendan Barnard of Posterity Ciderworks. 

To set some context here, a lot of the episodes on this show are focused on efforts to scale solutions: venture capital, commodity crops, hardware and software. And those are incredibly important to continue to find ways to improve our global food system. But I think too often there’s a tendency in agriculture to think something has to have the potential to reach some sort of global scale and FEED THE WORLD in order to matter. If you’ve listened to many of these episodes, you already know that I believe innovation and progress can many different forms. Some will look like solutions that can improve the way millions or billions of people eat. Others, which I equally enjoy, are stories of craft, of skill, of care, of community. Stories that are delightfully unscalable, but no less important. Many times, these are the stories that can teach us the most about agriculture and the most about ourselves. I think we have a story like that for you today. 

It also helps that it ties together a few passions of mine: cider, nature, and value-added agriculture. Today’s episode speaks to several of the seven consumer values we talked about in episode 300, especially the need for a connection to an authentic source. 

Brendan and his wife Kris were living in the bay area working in tech. They had some fruit trees in their backyard and seven years ago Brendan dove headfirst into cider making. Eventually they bought property in Calaveras County, about 140 miles away with a long term plan of eventually starting an orchard-based cidery. Today, that is alive and well as Posterity Ciderworks. Some changes in the timeline led them to start sourcing apples from what he calls feral orchards, which have somehow survived and even thrived for decades with no care. These feral orchards have also spawned wild trees which Brendan and Kris also forage from for their low intervention, fine ciders that really reflect the place they are grown. They make these ciders with no sulfites, no added sugars, no preservatives and no artificial flavorings or colors. All of this while raising a family and starting and expanding their own dry-farmed, non-conventional  silvopastured orchard. We’ll talk all about that, but first just a couple of cider terms to be aware of. 

We will mention abv, which is alcohol by volume. Yes, this is hard cider, not apple juice. The ABV goes up with higher sugar content which is fermented into alcohol. Those sugars are measured in fruit via a system called brix, which is another term you will hear mentioned. Finally, Brenan will talk about racking, which is just moving the fermenting cider from one container to another, which is usually done to get it off the lees, which is the dead yeast and other particles that settle at the bottom of the container. Or to move it to a barrel, bottle, or other secondary fermentation container.