Finding Lost Apples and Reviving a Beloved Cider

ASBURY, N.J. — Ironbound Hard Cider may seem an odd name for the business Charles Rosen has built here on 108 acres in central New Jersey. The farm, where a new taproom offers pastoral views of the still-ripening fruit, doesn’t appear to share much with the Ironbound, an industrial neighborhood 50 miles to the east in Newark.

Yet they do have common roots, thanks to four very old apple varieties now growing on Rosen’s land.

Rosen, the former chief executive of a Manhattan advertising agency that promoted Svedka vodka and Mike’s Hard Lemonade, wants to reintroduce Newark cider, an 18th- and 19th-century alcoholic drink once famously compared to Champagne.

Newark cider was both a point of pride and big business for the region — requested by name, reportedly lauded by George Washington and produced by dozens of Newark-area cideries with acres of orchards. The secret wasn’t a recipe, but the blending of a quartet of superior apples born in the region: Campfield, Poveshon, Granniwinkle and Harrison, the most celebrated of the four.

As a result of urbanization and then Prohibition, when many of the nation’s remaining cider orchards were destroyed, Newark cider hasn’t been made for at least a century. But after years of planning and planting — not to mention the accidental discovery of two lost apple trees and the investment of what Rosen called “100 percent of all the money I ever had in my entire life” — Ironbound Hard Cider is on the precipice of bringing it back.

Rosen, who already produces 50,000 gallons of more mainstream hard ciders each year, hopes that a taste of Newark’s past can help reboot the city’s future: For three years, he has been recruiting former convicts from Newark for his farm crew. As Ironbound Hard Cider expands, he plans to move its nurseries to the city, and has helped change state laws on cider-making so he can move much of its production there, too.

“I wanted to focus on the most underserved individuals,” he said, though he admitted that he also has a more personal connection to Newark cider. “I live in Montclair, six minutes from Newark,” he said. “Where my house is, those trees were once growing.”

Rosen, 51, who once described himself in an online article as a “socialist, Canadian Jew,” has had many vocations. He came to the United States for law school, then became a movie producer, then moved into advertising, eventually leaving the company he helped found, Amalgamated Advertising, in 2011 with a plan to go into politics or some kind of career in social justice. He was looking for a way to effect change in New Jersey when someone handed him an article about the history of Newark cider in Edible Jersey magazine.

The author, Fran McManus, ended her story with a suggestion: Some of the four apple varieties were already being grown in other states, from cuttings taken from the last old New Jersey trees in the 1970s and ‘80s. By all accounts they were delicious, she wrote, so why not bring them back to the state?

Rosen decided to try. He gathered a team that includes skilled orchardists, bought his land in 2015 and planted several thousand hard-to-find vintage cider-apple saplings.

While he waited for those to grow, he started producing his mainstream ciders — packaged in aluminum cans, the line includes flavors like cherry-cranberry — mainly with apple juice bought from other orchards.

Then he got lucky. In the fall of 2015, a lawyer, Thomas Vilardi, dropped his daughter off to play in her high school marching band, near a former cider mill in Maplewood. “I knew I had seen apples on a tree,” said Vilardi, an amateur orchardist who had spent years searching for Harrisons. “I wasn’t expecting to find a Harrison.”

Vilardi sent photographs of the tree to a cider apple expert, who in turn contacted McManus, who was by then working for Rosen on cider research.

Rosen eventually made his way to the tree, then drove back to his farm with a milk jug full of just-pressed juice, pouring out samples for his crew into paper Dunkin’ Donuts cups.

“We prayed to God that the Harrison was a cool tree, if and when we found it,” Rosen said. “Tasting this juice, we were all, like, ‘Oh, God, this was not only worth it, we’ve hit the mother lode with this thing.”

Another surprise came that same fall, in an email from Wesley Stokes. A manager for AT&T, he had just come home from property he owned in western New York, where gnarled old fruit trees still grow on the lot. He sat down to read a magazine article about Rosen’s farm (also written by McManus); at the end was a description of the Poveshon, the only Newark cider apple thought to be extinct.

“I told my wife, Robyn, ‘I think I have a bag of these apples in the refrigerator,'” Stokes said. He has since traced his trees to old New Jersey families, and so far they are believed to be the real thing.

Dozens of cuttings from both of the newly found trees have since been planted in Ironbound Hard Cider’s nursery, meaning that all four Newark cider apples have now been returned to New Jersey soil. “I think it’s fabulous,” said Dan Bussey, the author of “The Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada,” whose seven volumes describe 17,000 apples like the Poveshon, most of them lost to history. Bussey is now at work on updates to the next edition, which will include genealogy records for a “Mr. Osborne,” a South Orange man who reportedly grew the first Harrison in the early 1700s. (Osborne gave some trees or cuttings to his neighbor Samuel Harrison, who renamed the apple after himself.)

Like wine grapes, cider apples are prized for their astringent tannins and high acidity. Harrisons have both, said Bussey, who has also grown Newark-cider apples. But what really makes the Harrisons notable is their “very sugary, rich flavor.” He hopes that returning the variety to its home will bring out the very best from the fruit.

Cameron Stark, Ironbound’s head cidermaker and Rosen’s business partner, said the Harrisons that Vilardi found have more sugars than any other cider apples he has experimented with.

In fact, even if that tree turns out not to be a true Harrison but a close relative — perhaps a younger plant that grew from a seedling, as some in the contentious world of historic apples speculate it may be — that’s fine by everyone at the company.

“I’ve tasted thousands of grape samples over my years,” said Stark, who got his start in Napa Valley before becoming head winemaker at Unionville Vineyards in Hunterdon County. “You just have to know when something is like, ‘Oh, my God, this is going to be fabulous, don’t mess this one up.'” As the trees grow, he is tinkering with blends of the old varieties, including the Poveshon, which he thinks may have been used in cider to add notes of dark caramel and brown sugar. (Like most hard-cider makers, he believes that the best versions come from mixing apples, balancing out the final product. Traditional Newark ciders used some or all of the four varieties, but always included the Harrison.)

The young Newark cider apples growing at the farm here are not yet as high-quality as those from the tree found in Maplewood, Stark said. But the company, which is using sustainable agriculture methods, hopes to coax ever better fruit from its fields.

The trees are not planted in Newark soils, but that isn’t a deal-breaker for great cider, said Dan Ward, an extension specialist in pomology with Rutgers University and the director of its New Jersey Center for Wine Research and Education.

Back in Newark cider’s heyday, the best apples were said to come from the eastern slopes of the Watchung Mountains, then considered part of Newark. It would have been a great place for apple growing, Ward said — the slopes have cool nights and warm days, which protect the fruit from frost and help accumulate flavor and sugar.

But the area’s most important attribute was probably its proximity to a cosmopolitan population, he said, especially cider-makers with experience in Europe.

The Ironbound farm also has gentle slopes and fertile soils, said Megan Muehlbauer, the Rutgers extension agent for the area. Rosen’s farm is only 10 miles from the university’s apple research headquarters, she said: “He happens to have a prime piece of property to be restarting the cider industry.”

In the next two years, Rosen and Stark plan to add 12,500 more young cider apple trees to their orchards, tripling what they already grow. About two-thirds of the trees will be Newark cider varieties, especially Harrisons, which already comprise half of their plantings. The company has also given some trees to commercial orchards in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York that have agreed to cultivate the fruit and sell it back to the company.

For now, most of the small amount of juice from cider apples that Ironbound presses from its own trees makes its way into limited-edition ciders served in its taproom, which opened Saturday.

Stark’s 2017 Champagne-style Harrison cider — an old-fashioned recipe made with apples picked in Maplewood and yeasts added to the bottle for a second fermentation — is especially promising, aromatic with spark of tart citrus.

It probably won’t be ready for serving for another few months, Stark said. Considering the cider’s extensive history, though, that isn’t long to wait.