Our Story
WHAT BROUGHT US HERE
The cider we make and the way we make it aren’t an accident. It’s all part of our craft-y plan…
OUR APPROACH
Purists? Fanatics? Whack-jobs? Decide for yourself. All we know is that growing apple trees and making cider this way feels right.
OUR CIDER APPLES
This is the crux of it: our orchard is the boss of us. And it gives us the makings of some really special ciders.
WHO WE ARE
We’re bashful. Maybe even semi-reclusive. But we’re also real people who are glad you’ve decided to share in our Ciderworks craziness.
WHAT BROUGHT US HERE
In 2011, we bought our beautiful property and set out to plant a unique organic apple orchard. We intended that this quirky orchard would help preserve and promote rare heritage and connoisseur apple varieties. And we figured this collection might provide a starting point for ciders like no others.
We grafted almost all of the trees with our own hands. We - and our farm volunteer helpers and small staff - planted every one of them out into closely-spaced rows over a five-year period. And we built a world-class collection in the process, encompassing a dizzying array of more than 425 different apple varieties that originated in well over 20 different countries around the world.
At a time when most ciders are mass-produced, using cheap apples far better suited to fresh-eating than to cider-making, we set out to do something different. We planted rare heritage varieties that had a long history in cider-making. We planted traditional cider varieties first grown in England and France, some quite rare and all only good in cider. And we planted virtually unknown modern varieties that - for one reason or another - have been ignored by large-scale agriculture.
Seven years later, once our young orchard was starting to produce a decent-sized crop, we launched Ciderworks. Today, we’re proud to share with you the product of these efforts: traditional-style ciders, mostly quite dry, each made from a different combination of apple varieties. Our ciders offer great diversity and authenticity.
Every drop of cider that we make is certified organic. Every drop comes from fruit grown here on beautiful Salt Spring Island.
Great cider starts with great apples. Salt Spring Apple Company’s diverse orchard allows us to make one cider entirely from traditional English and French cider apples, another composed of 100% heritage North American varieties, another with an international selection of apple varieties that originated in more than 20 different countries and on it goes…
By starting with great apples and then doing as little as possible to interfere with the natural fermentation process, we’re able to make authentic traditional-style organic ciders. Every cider we make uses certified organic fruit from just a single orchard. All of them - without exception - located on Salt Spring Island. And we never add sugar - not to control the alcohol level and not to sweeten.
We want you to taste what nature has produced in our orchard. We hope you’ll agree it’s worth the effort.
OUR APPROACH
When we decided that Ciderworks would be 100 per cent certified organic and 100 per cent Salt Spring Island apples and that each cider we made would only use apples from a single orchard, the die was cast: we were going to be a very small cidery. With an orchard property of just over five acres and barely more than three of those acres plantable, we simply weren't going to be big. And by growing organically, we weren't going to be able to produce as many apples per acre as conventional orchards might do by pumping in all sorts of chemical inputs.
We're comfortable with being small and we think the folks who drink our cider will agree that it's better to produce small quantities of authentic, high quality cider rather than large amounts of cider made another way.
Certified Organic
From the day we started our orchard on agricultural land that was not previously in use for farming, we have been dedicated to growing organically. Similarly, from long before we renovated an existing building on our property to create a cidery, we committed to making cider organically.
Because of these choices, we are certified organic both as a grower and a processor. You can read more about our growing practices at our Salt Spring Apple Company website.
From a cidermaking perspective, it means we need to follow strict rules about what we put in our ciders and even what we use to clean our cidermaking equipment and building. And each year, we open our property for inspection by verification officers who carefully check everything we use and everything we do in growing our apples and making our ciders.
For you, this means you can be assured there are no bad surprises lurking in our ciders. They are truly 100 per cent organic.
Single Orchard
When we say our ciders are 100 per cent single-orchard, we mean that every cider we make is made using the juice of just one orchard — always one that’s certified organic and always one located on Salt Spring Island.
In the case of our Flagship Collection and Specialty Collections ciders, every apple and every drop of juice that go into each cider is grown by us in our orchard at 529 Fulford-Ganges Road on Salt Spring Island. This is also where we also make and bottle all of our ciders.
We’re also happy to work with some of the other most excellent orchards here on Salt Spring Island. That’s where we get the fruit for our Single Orchard Collection ciders. Like all of our other ciders, these are 100 per cent certified organic and every one of them is single-orchard.
We sell most of our cider either on the same property where the apples in it were grown or within 100 kilometers of our orchard. If you believe in local food and beverages and if you believe in doing your part to fight climate change, then we're here to help.
The price we pay for this commitment is a limit on how much we can produce each year and vulnerability to the vagaries of nature. When we have a bumper crop, we will make more cider and when the growing season is difficult, we'll make less. For us, that's the reality of organic orcharding and of making cider with our own hands.
OUR CIDER APPLES
It's exciting that interest in craft cider is booming! At the same time, it's a wee bit sobering to know that enthusiasm for cider far outstrips the availability of apples well-suited to use in making it. By that we mean apple varieties that are used solely in cider as well as crab-apples and heritage varieties that have been widely used in cider-making for centuries. Since it takes about a decade for a new tree to be grafted, raised to maturity and fully producing, this can't be corrected quickly. As a result, many cideries are doing their best working mainly with modern dessert apple varieties like Gala, Ambrosia, Pink Lady and good old Red Delicious. This isn't an ideal situation for the cidermaker or the cider drinker.
Thankfully, here at Ciderworks, we're in a different situation from most craft cideries. Since 2011, we have been planting and nurturing an orchard perfectly suited to cider and we now have more than 365 varieties of heritage and connoisseur apples happily growing in our orchard. Of our more than 3,500 apple trees, only 12 are Gala, Ambrosia, Pink Lady (also known as Cripps Pink) and Red Delicious trees. That's right. Just 12. Most of the other 3,490ish trees we're growing are much better suited to cider. And by starting our orchard a decade ago and populating it with great heritage and connoisseur apple varieties, we've put the fruit first, building the foundation for great cider.
Here are some of the 425+ varieties that go into our ciders. For information on every variety in our orchard, see the Salt Spring Apple Company website.
Heritage European Varieties
Heritage North American Varieties
Cider Varieties in Our Orchard
Antoinette
Belle Fille de la Manche
Biquet
Campfield
Hangdown
Severn Bank
Sweet Alford
Vilberie
Crab-apples
Manchurian
Metge
Rescue
WHO WE ARE
Salt Spring Apple Company/Ciderworks is a partnership between Peri Lavender and Brian Webster, with significant contributions from our staff and not-so-effective contributions from Jester the dog, our self-appointed (and elderly) wildlife control officer.
Peri is our cidermaker, apple tree-grafter, financial and administrative whiz and person who just hates to say ‘no’ to good ideas. In her other life (yes, she manages to have an entire other life on top of her Salt Spring Apple Company world), she is a teacher — one who actually likes hanging out with 13-year-olds, in all their pubescent glory.
Brian is our detail-oriented orchard planner, variety-finder, log-cutter and would-be mastermind, making up for a career spent behind a keyboard by stomping around in the dirt and mud as much as possible. He gets his fix of keyboard work by writing most of our promotional materials, cider tasting notes and website text.
Together, Peri and Brian took on the Salt Spring Apple Company and Ciderworks projects in 2011 as learn-as-we-go adventures, learning as much along the way about themselves as they are about growing apples and making cider.
OUR STAFF
Content coming soon.