Stoic Cider

It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all cider.

—Benjamin Franklin

In the early days of this country people made and drank hard cider, fermented apple juice, as an everyday beverage. Even children were given diluted hard cider to drink. As people settled the West, they brought cuttings and seeds from their favorite varieties, spreading them far and wide.

Of the 16,000 named apple varieties grown in the U.S. over the last two centuries, only about a quarter remain, and only 11 varieties are commonly available. With the average life-span of an apple tree at 100 years, many orchards planted by homesteaders are disappearing.

Stoic Cider to the rescue. At the core of Stoic Cider is a passion for these heritage apple trees and the history they embody. The abandoned orchards tell the forgotten story of our region’s early settlers, people with grit and resolve, determined to build a life in the arid Arizona highlands. Homesteads always included fruit orchards of cherries and plums, pears, quinces and apples for fresh eating, storage and, of course, for making cider.

The company was founded in 2016 by brothers Kanin and Cody Routson and their wives, Tierney Routson and Clare Stielstra. Their mission is to save heritage apple stock. Stoic Cider is based on the family farm in Williamson Valley north of Prescott. Their hard cider is made in small batches, carefully fermented, matured and bottled on the farm.

Much like wine grapes, cider apples often have strange flavors, high sugars and abundant tannins. You will not find these apples at the grocery store. You probably wouldn’t even like their unusual flavors. But odd flavors ferment, age and mellow into beautifully sophisticated ciders.

Working to make world-class hard apple cider, the Stoic Cider team uses techniques common in making white wine: wine yeast, long cold fermentations and prolonged maturations that yield complex flavor and structure. They favor dry champagne- and wine-style ciders, rich in aroma and flavor without overwhelming sweetness. Locally sourced prickly pear fruit, homegrown hops, wine grapes and native oak aging casks provide flavor combinations inspired by the Southwest. Each small batch of cider is signature named and handcrafted on the family farm.

The future of Stoic Cider is based in the orchard planted on their Williamson Valley family farm. At this point the orchard consists of 200 mature trees and about 2,000 infant trees collected from historic farms across the Southwest, Pacific and Atlantic coasts and the land in between. There are also trees from Germany, France and England, and a collection of apples from Kazakhstan (where our domestic apples originated) all obtained through the USDA. Every year more starts are added from frequent foraging trips (see sidebar).

Right now, most of the apples and other additions to the current fermentations are collected from historical orchards near Prescott or in Idaho, Washington and the Pacific Northwest. Every year more apples are harvested from the home orchard collection, saving the taste of the past.