Sometimes it takes someone asking you to look backward to see how far a story has traveled.
The September-December 2026 issue of Uniquely Quabbin magazine includes an article I wrote about the cider history of western Massachusetts, and how my own path through cider began here before leading to Cider Chat®, eCiderNews™ and Totally Cider Tours™. The magazine calls it “From the Quabbin Region to the World of Cider.” That pretty much sums up the journey.
But looking back now, I realize that journey began even earlier than the magazine story tells.
The story really begins in 1994
Long before I was traveling through cider regions in England, France, Spain or Hungary, my own cider journey was already underway in western Massachusetts.
In 1994, I began teaching cidermaking at Greenwood Orchard in Northfield, Massachusetts. The property was later sold and most of the orchard pulled up, though a few glorious trees remain. At the time, Greenwood was known for its magnificent cider apple orchard and its delicious Cider Syrup, made simply by boiling down apple juice into a concentrated syrup.
Then, in the late 1990s, I began what would become a 17-year-long gig teaching cidermaking at New Salem Preserves, a truly museum quality orchard due to the landscape, old trees, and the Pretzels.
Much of the credit for the orchards beauty belongs to fruit pruner Brad Maloney. Brad didn’t simply prune the trees. He worked with their form, bending and training water sprouts into wonderfully twisted shapes that became known around the orchard as “Apple Pretzels.” As the story goes, the term was coined by a group of Vermont-based pruners Brad worked with in his early years.
What strikes me now is how forward-looking that was. Today, bending and training water sprouts rather than simply cutting them away has become an increasingly visible approach to managing apple trees. Decades ago at New Salem Preserves, Brad was already showing what could happen when pruning became as much about working with the tree as cutting something from it.
Those years at Greenwood Orchard and New Salem Preserves were doing more than teaching me about making cider. They were teaching me to look at the orchard itself: the trees, the varieties, the people caring for them, and the history held in a particular piece of land.
I didn’t have Cider Chat then. There was no eCiderNews or Totally Cider Tours. But the foundation for all of them was already being laid.
A region holding onto something older
Western Massachusetts holds an important place in the modern American cider revival. West County Cider in Colrain began commercial production in 1984, helping launch cider’s return after the long disruption of Prohibition.
But cider didn’t suddenly arrive here in the 1980s. Apples and cider had been part of the agricultural landscape for generations. Massachusetts itself has one of the oldest apple-growing histories in the country, dating to the earliest European settlements.
At the same time that a modern cider industry was beginning to reemerge, the orchards around the Quabbin Reservoir were holding onto something much older.
The Quabbin covers 39 square miles and holds 412 billion gallons of water, supplying drinking water to Boston and much of Greater Boston. It exists because four towns, Dana, Enfield, Greenwich and Prescott, were disincorporated in 1938 to make way for the reservoir.
Those weren’t simply names erased from a map. They were communities with homes, farms and orchards.
Prescott, for example, was an agricultural community where the elevation and well-drained glacial soils favored apple growing. Historical accounts describe orchards containing many varieties of apples, and cider and vinegar were among the products made there. When the reservoir was created, an agricultural landscape was profoundly changed.
But the apple story didn’t disappear.
It remained in the surrounding towns, old orchards, surviving varieties and the memories of people who continued tending this landscape.
The Quabbin stories were already here
New Salem became one of the places where I began to see the connection between apples, agriculture, history and the people determined to keep all three alive.
There was Robert Colnes at New Salem Preserves, whose work later became the subject of one of the very first Cider Chat episodes. There was Carol B. Hillman, who brought a neglected colonial orchard overlooking the Quabbin Reservoir back to life. And there were the stories of apples tied to the lost towns and farms of the Swift River Valley, explored years later on Cider Chat in The Lost Apples of Quabbin.
I wasn’t setting out to document a cider history. I was meeting people, teaching cidermaking, asking questions and following one story to the next.
I didn’t know then where those conversations would lead.
Beginning in 2003, I was also writing about craft beer for Yankee Brew News. Every fall, I persuaded my editor to make room for cider during harvest season. It gave me a chance to introduce readers to orchards, cider makers and a beverage still largely outside the American craft-drink spotlight.
Those years also taught me something that continues to shape my work today: cider doesn’t make much sense when separated from the people and places that produce it. You can talk about fermentation, apple varieties and technique, but sooner or later the conversation leads back to the orchard.
By November 2015, those threads came together with the launch of Cider Chat®.
More than 500 episodes later, I’ve interviewed people from more than 30 countries. The premise that keeps drawing me back is simple:
Cider is really about place and every person tending the trees and the orchard itself has a story.
From Massachusetts to the cider world
My conversations with the apple stewards didn’t end when the microphones turned off.
They took me to orchards and cider houses in Canada, England, France, Spain, Hungary and across the United States. Eventually those relationships grew into Totally Cider Tours, giving people the chance to walk through the landscapes and cider houses that first entered my world through a conversation.
And the farther I traveled, the more familiar some of those stories became.
The apple varieties change. The cider changes. The language changes. But cider makers everywhere talk about land, weather, harvests, old orchards, disappearing varieties, family farms and what it takes to keep agricultural traditions alive while also building something economically sustainable for the future.
That is part of what connects an orchard in western Massachusetts to one in Normandy, Herefordshire or Asturias.
“Every cider region started as someone’s neighborhood.”
The timing of the Uniquely Quabbin article felt particularly fitting. As the issue was being released, I was in Normandy, France, leading another Totally Cider Tours group through one of the world’s historic cider regions.
From teaching cidermaking in Northfield and New Salem to sitting down with cider makers across an ocean, the distance can look enormous.
It doesn’t feel that way.
The common thread is still the orchard, the people tending it, and the story of a place.
Read the story
My article, “From the Quabbin Region to the World of Cider,” appears in the September-December 2026 issue of Uniquely Quabbin, beginning on page 24 and continuing on page 52. Read the article in Uniquely Quabbin → https://www.uniquelyquabbin.com/
To go deeper into the Quabbin cider stories, listen to:
- Cider Chat 003: Robert Colnes: Building the Cider House at New Salem Preserves
- Cider Chat 072: The Lost Apples of Quabbin
- Cider Chat 190: Carol B. Hillman: Cider Revitalizes a 1750 Colonial Orchard
Why This Matters to Ciderville
Cider’s story is rarely told from a single place, but it is always rooted in one.
The Quabbin story is particularly dramatic because an entire landscape was transformed. Towns disappeared, farms were abandoned and orchards were lost. Yet the agricultural memory of that landscape didn’t vanish. It survived in surrounding communities, old trees, historic orchards and the people curious enough to keep asking what grew here before.
That same question can be asked almost anywhere cider is made.
What grew here before us? Who planted it? Which varieties survived? Who kept them alive? And what happens to this orchard next?
Those questions matter because cider isn’t simply a beverage category. It can provide a reason to maintain an orchard, preserve an apple variety, keep agricultural land productive and pass knowledge from one generation to another.
For anyone in Ciderville, it’s a reminder to look around.
The orchard down the road may have a history worth asking about. The old apple tree at the edge of a field may have something to tell us. And the person who has been tending those trees for decades may hold a story that hasn’t yet been recorded.
Every cider region started as someone’s neighborhood.
And sometimes following those stories can take you much farther than you ever expected.
Cider Takes You Places™
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