Welcome to Spirit Tree Estate Cidery

EARLY HISTORY 
As long as humankind has collected and/or cultivated apples (thousands of years) they have fermented the fresh juice to produce Hard Cider.  By fermenting the juice to produce an alcoholic beverage, humankind was able to preserve the juice until the next harvest.  This alcoholic beverage was usually safer than the local water source.  Plus, if it was made well and consumed in small quantities, you felt better when drinking it.  By the dawn of the Roman Empire, the favourite beverages of its citizens were cider (hard cider), wine and beer.

By Victorian times in England, cider was the most important beverage.  Labourers working in the fields were able to guarantee that a portion of their wages were paid in cider.  In exchange for working  in  the fields, a labourer was given cider at lunch with their meals and at the end of the working day, along with a paid wage.  English Lord’s had to make sure they produced a good quality and quantity of cider each year to attract the best labourers and quench their thirst.

NEW WORLD - North and South America 
With the discovery and settlement of the New World, French and English settlers brought with them their taste for and knowledge of cider.  When a settler arrived at their new home the first thing they did was clear the land for farming.  The area picked for a house to be built was then staked out and before a nail was hammered, apple seeds from the Old World were planted to start an apple orchard beside the coming house.  The reason being it would take nearly 15 to 20 years before those trees would be producing a quantity of apples.  It was usually the next generation of the family that would see that harvest of fruit. 

Throughout North America, apples and cider were an important part of everyday life.  A culture and heritage evolved where by each fall all the neighbouring families in an area would work together to quickly harvest all the apples on each farm.  The fruit was either placed in burlap sacks to be pressed into juice later, immediately pressed into juice, or gently packed in wooden barrels for local towns, cities, or even other countries.  Most of the fruit was kept on the farm to be pressed and fermented into cider for the year and stored in barrels in the house cellar.  This tradition still takes place today on some  small farms all over the world, wherever apples are grown.