our craft

LOCAL

You hear that a lot these days, and with good reason.  Everyone can agree that buying, selling, visiting or supporting local businesses helps our neighbors and our communities.  But it’s even more than that; using local products enhances sustainability – the farther something ships to you, the more resources are used to get it there, so using local products reduces our impact on the environment. And using local goods actually helps stamp a “Made Here” character onto your product, sharing the pride you have in your community with the rest of the world. 

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At PHCC we will only use produce made in this great state.  Apologies in advance – that means no Mango-Pineapple or Coconut-Key-Lime cider from us.  But it does mean all the awesome flavors that come from this Mitten are considered fair game…

 

farm

We are located on a working farm.  We are surrounded by fields.  We make Hard Cider to the music of crowing roosters and quacking ducks.  Our village and our township are straight-up Heartland USA. 

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The Porters have been working this land since 1919, bringing incredible, nourishing apples and other produce to the community for four generations – with dependence on the weather, the market and a little luck here and there like all farmers.

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Places like this are getting rarer and rarer under decades of pressure from “one-stop-shop” convenience, giant mega-farm competition and cheap imports from around the world.  We believe it is crucial for small communities to have places like this, growing and hand-making beautiful products for our families, thrive again, and we are hopeful that our presence can help grow a renewed focus on small farms.

 

craft

Like everything else, there is more than one way to make Hard Cider.  Some of them are easy, some are hard.  Some are more manual than others.  Some make OK cider, some make good cider and a few make great cider.

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Our goal is to make AMAZING Hard Cider, and we only see one way to get there -- by being very picky, paying attention to every variable, following a proprietary and difficult small-batch process and handling each small batch like our life depended on it,  

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Amazing hard cider can only start with excellent Sweet Cider – and anyone who has been to Porter’s Orchard knows they make the best in the area.  By careful evaluation of the fresh cider and thoughtful blending with Heirloom apple varieties we create the perfect template for our small-batch craft fermentation process. 

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Fermentation is carried out with minimalist additions and intervention to let the natural flavors of that great Sweet Cider shine in the final product.  Most Hard Cider companies ferment all the natural sugar out of the juice, leaving a bone-dry cider which is then back-sweetened with white table sugar to make it drinkable.  While long fermentations and aging can add some interesting complexity to these ciders, we feel the full fermentation and addition of processed sugar dilutes the bright freshness which comes from a great apple.  To capture that pure apple essence, at PHCC we leave a predetermined level of residual natural sugar in the Hard Cider, which actually emphasizes the full, authentic fruit flavors and aromas.  That sounds simple, but it is actually far from it.  Finding the exact moments to move each batch from process to process under these conditions takes a lot of discipline, constant attention and intuition.  But we feel the result is a superior product that is impossible to duplicate the “easy” way.