For this month’s Member Spotlight, I take you all to the Finger Lakes; a region in New York State known for its incredible orchards, hidden gems of apple cultivars, and their wide array of cider. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Autumn Stoscheck of Eve’s Cidery in Van Etten, New York. Autumn had an igniting energy about her as we spoke cider. It is this infectious positive energy that reminds me why cider is growing in the adult beverage category. One thing she said that still resonates with me was: “apple farming is tough in both nature and climate, so we must be tougher”.

“Apple farming is not for the faint of heart. You take the unpredictability of nature, combine it with climate chaos and then try to make a living off of it. You have to love stress and risk at least a little bit.”

When Autumn was 19, she took a leave of absence from Cornell and got a job at a local U-pick orchard where she fell in love with orcharding. She began to wonder if she could figure out a way to make a living doing it. At the same time she was also waitressing in the evenings after working on the farm where she was introduced to the world of fine wine. A cover on a 1999 issue of Fruit Grower’s News, detailing grower Steve Wood’s efforts at bringing traditional English cider apples to his New Hampshire farm sparked an idea to bring these two interests together with dry, orchard-based cider. In 2002, Autumn opened Eve’s Cidery. Eve’s Cidery began as a way to use surplus fruit at the U-pick orchard but soon evolved into a much larger project of planting and growing over 50 different varieties of apples grown specifically for the purpose of fermenting. Today, Autumn and her husband Ezra, along with friends, family, apprentices and employees farm 20 acres of certified organic apples and ferment them into an array of ciders with a focus on natural cider making. Eve’s is distributed across New York and NYC, as well as in a half a dozen other states and in Scotland.

When asked where she would like to see her cider, she simply replied: “I’d like to see my cider as an everyday pantry staple. Just as you might always have some beer in the fridge or a bottle of wine in the cellar, I’d like my cider to be the example of a dry, local, orchard based libation that you serve to friends”