By Sandy Lang
Photos by Peter Frank Edwards
From our January 2025 issue
On a late-January evening at Absolem Cider Company, in Winthrop, wisps of smoke tinged with the sweet-tangy scent of cooking apples rose into the icy blueness. The cidery’s founders, Ryan Travers, Zack Kaiser, and Kevin Sturtevant, wearing headlamps, took turns chopping McIntoshes and Cortlands at a picnic table, arranging them in foil-lined cast-iron skillets, and feeding them into a small applewood-fired smoker. After 10 minutes or so, they transferred the browned, softened fruit to a 250-gallon vat, where it would be mixed with the unfermented juice of Northern Spy apples. Then, they loaded up the smoker again.
The trio was at work on their latest batch of smoked-apple hard cider, a novel libation they dreamed up three years ago, in an attempt to capture the warmth and flavor of smoked beers and spirits like peated whiskey and mezcal. Their first effort combined smoked wild apples from Sturtevant’s father’s Cumberland farm with juice from the same apples and house-made Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah wines — a dry, jammy blend. The following year, they smoked, then juiced, early-season apples, which tend to be very tart, and mixed them with sweet, fermented Winesap cider, a combo that tastes like lightly charred cinnamon applesauce. They liked that vintage, called Spur, so much that they aimed to replicate it with different apple varieties and a slightly different process last year.
Travers, a restaurateur who ran Brunswick’s former Lion’s Pride brewpub, Kaiser, a brewer and cider maker, and Sturtevant, a carpenter, opened Absolem on a 50-acre farm in 2022. Sturtevant, who now serves as sales manager, led the renovation of a 19th-century farmhouse and in-law apartment (where Travers and Kaiser live) and barn, where the three operate their cidery and tasting room. They currently produce about two dozen ciders, ranging from traditional, dry, German-style varieties to fruity wine blends, made with apples from more than 30 local farms.
Typically, hard-cider makers combine freshly pressed, unfermented apple juice with yeast to begin fermentation in barrels or stainless-steel tanks. A few Absolem vintages are produced this way, but most are spontaneously fermented: while the juice steeps in a vat, a potpourri of wild, airborne yeasts settles in and starts turning the sugars into alcohol. The old-world technique imparts a complex layering of flavors that deepens over the four months to two years the cider spends aging in barrels or other containers, and introduces an element of unpredictability. “Depending on the success of any given one of the wild yeasts, you could get a flavor profile that’s banana-y, highly acidic, earthy,” Sturtevant said. “We never really know where our fermentation is going to go, as much as we work on that.” The first iteration of Spur, for example, was too smokey when it came out of the barrel and needed to be blended with fermented cider to soften the flavor. Last year’s Spur, meantime, is citrusy and less spicy than the previous batch, Sturtevant said, “with a really quenching, dry finish.”
The founders kept the smoker going into the wee hours during that nocturnal cider-making session. The long, uninterrupted stretch facilitated their work, and the fire and stillness that settled on the farm’s snowy fields were a balm. “When the rest of the day’s tasks have been completed, it’s this time when we get to sip and blend and think together,” Sturtevant said.
Absolem Cider Company’s latest smoked-apple hard cider, Spur, will be available in its tasting room and for online pre-order this month. 799 Winthrop Center Rd., Winthrop. 207-395-2004.
