Birth of the Craft Cider Movement: Judith Maloney

“We figured this was just the cross-country road trip that everybody takes once in their lives,” Judith says.

But in this back-to-the-land era the young couple wound up buying a piece of land and settling in the town of Colrain, eventually building a post-and-beam house from timber harvested on Catamount Hill.

“We lived way out in the boonies,” Judith says. “Being in Colrain was exciting. It was a community that was rich in what it knew. People there had a lot of skills that I wanted to learn: how to survive the winters, grow your own food, and keep your vehicles going.”

Terry, a Princeton graduate and former Marine, worked as an emergency room doctor for more than 25 years at Franklin Medical Center. Judith, whose family lived in San Francisco and who came from Italian immigrant stock, had connections to the California wine industry, working for a family that owned a vineyard in Napa County. In their San Francisco days, the Maloneys and their friends would make a couple hundred gallons of their own wine every year. But, like other aspects of life in rural western Massachusetts, the couple were in for a culture shock. The granite soils and cold winters of Franklin County, as it turned out, were ideal for growing apples and producing cider, both sweet and hard, but not so great for growing wine grapes. Plus there were cider presses here, with the one at Pine Hill Orchards in Colrain busy throughout the fall and winter months.

“Well, what’s the saying?” Judith says, laughing, “When you have lemons, you make lemonade! It didn’t make much sense at the time to bring in wine from California. The tradition of fermenting hard cider was one of the neighborhood bounties, something that belonged around here, and it gave people pleasure.”

Eventually, the Maloneys started making cider commercially in 1984. West County Winery became one of the first small, artisanal cider producers in the US. In recent years that number has skyrocketed, from around a dozen or so producers to hundreds of companies, as the Cider Renaissance flourished and as people rediscovered a taste for this traditional American beverage.

They also planted apples. “We learned as we went,” says Judith. “Along the way we had our successes and our failures.” Terry sought out apples that were reputed to make interesting and high-quality ciders: Baldwin, Redfield, and various russets, as well as traditional English and French cider varieties. Gradually, as interest in cider increased, a community of growers and cider makers was grewing and coming together.

In 1994, the Maloneys joined forces with the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce and its president, Ann Hamilton, to hold the first Franklin County Cider Day (which in recent years has expanded county-wide, and has increased from one day to three). The first organizers and attendees were mostly home brewers like Charlie Olchowski and Paul Correnty, both of whom continue – more than two decades later – to teach amateur cider makers the ropes and keep the culture of the county’s hill towns alive and well.

“It’s the amateur cider maker who to me is the soul of CiderDays,” Judith says. “It is the union of harvest and drink, of the apple tree and its spirituous potential, of the imagination become real, that pleases me most.”