Food

C. Jarrett Dieterle | 3.23.2024 6:00 AM

Prohibition's 14-year span in the early 20th century caused a boozy brain drain as droves of American bartenders shuttered their watering holes and moved abroad. With them went America's Golden Age of Cocktails. Reason's Peter Suderman in 2017 brilliantly laid out the backstory behind how the federal government almost killed the cocktail. But the government's anti-alcohol tantrum also nearly killed off another product further up the alcohol supply chain—the humble apple.

Today, the produce section of your average American grocery store is dominated by a small handful of commercial apples. A mere 5–10 varietals—such as the ubiquitous Red and Golden Delicious, Gala, Granny Smith, and Honeycrisp—rule the country's apple market. In my humble opinion, other than the flavorful Honeycrisp (developed via cross-breeding at the University of Minnesota in the 1960s), these varietals are largely bland, flavorless, and uninspiring.

It wasn't always this way. In the 18th and 19th centuries, America was home to well over 10,000 apple varieties, more than any other nation on earth. The names were as wide-ranging and extraordinary as the species diversity, with monikers like Yarlington Mill, Spitzenburg, Northern Spy, and Winter Banana.

America's apple exceptionalism came long before the Department of Agriculture doled out millions of dollars in annual grants to farmers, and even before land grant colleges were established to advance the nation's agricultural knowledge. Instead, it was almost entirely a bottom-up, grassroots groundswell that solidified the country's apple hegemony, with nearly every farm in early America containing an apple orchard—and nearly every American (nine out of 10) living on a farm.

To understand the story of the apple, one must first understand the story of cider. Nowadays called "hard cider," cider's American bona fides ironically far outstrip that of apple pie—with alcoholic cider's roots tracing back to the very birth of our nation. Heralded by some as the "fuel of the revolution," cider was not only allegedly passed out to both colonial and British troops during lulls in the action at the Battle of Concord, but it helped propel George Washington's first election to the Virginia House of Burgesses by ensuring his voters were well-lubricated. John Adams drank a gill of cider for breakfast before his daily five-mile walks, Thomas Jefferson made cider at his Monticello........

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