An interview with Ben Wenk & Hans Edwin Winzeler of Ploughman Cider!
Hello, Cider Exchangers! I’m so excited to share this interview with Ben Wenk and Hans Edwin Winzeler of Ploughman Cider in Adams County, Pennsylvania. I first discovered Ploughman Cider at the inaugural Pennsylvania Cider Fest in 2016, and I’ve been a follower ever since. To me, Ploughman Ciders is an interesting balance of sophisticated and wild, and they often manage to surprise me. The “fruity roundness” always comes through, and I love what Ploughman does with great apples, as well as their experimentation with adjuncts and co-fermenters like wine grapes, chokeberries, hops and spices. To me, Ploughman Cider is fun, even when they are being kind of serious.
I interviewed Ben and Edwin through two separate email threads, and have blended them together because I really like how their musings and words juxtapose and complement each other. I enjoyed their words so much that I really didn’t edit much; if it sounds like one is talking about the other right in front of him, well, that’s why. I hope that you enjoy this interview with Ben and Edwin of Ploughman Cider, and by all means, visit their new online cider store and try an assortment of wonderful Ploughman Ciders for yourself. Also, their cider swag is seriously top notch (you can buy that directly on their website as well).
-Erica Jeter
Erica Jeter: Hey, Ben and Edwin, it’s great to catch up with you. Please tell us Cider Exchangers a bit about yourselves, Ploughman Cider, and your approach to cider.
Ben Wenk: Sure thing! I'm the seventh generation in my family to farm in Adams County, Pennsylvania. I came back from Penn State College of Agriculture and started attending farmers markets with our farm, Three Springs Fruit Farm. These urban jaunts exposed me to interesting ciders, eventually leading us to start making our own, Ploughman Cider, in 2016. I also currently have the honor of serving as Board President of the PA Cider Guild and occasionally make music with Chuck Darwin & The Knuckle Draggers and other various groups in the Adams County area.
At Ploughman Cider, our cider is made by Hans Edwin Winzeler. He and I share a common passion for soils, ciders, apples, and agriculture, and it allows the two of us to cooperate with each other pretty easily. The short version of our approach is that it's meant to feature and honor the things we work so hard to grow on the farm. As you'd expect, this starts with apples, which is our farm's primary crop and our true passion. We want all of the things that people experience in our cider to be generated while the apple is on the tree so that when we harvest it and press it, we can take a hands off approach and give the cider the proper time and conditions to express itself. It's something that Edwin learned a lot about during a 10 month stay in Herefordshire and something I've long appreciated about the ciders I've had from that part of England. But! We also grow a wide range of things on our farm for those farmers markets and you'll commonly see some of these other fruits in our ciders as well. Those styles are commonly a result what's available in excess on the farm, rather than what might be trendy in the marketplace.
Hans Edwin Winzeler: Thanks for the interview! I’m excited to talk about some of my favorite topics, cider, life, and booze. My background is agriculture, from the Midwest, grew up in the part of Ohio with very rich, black, glacial lake soils, very flat and fertile, grain crops for miles around. Didn’t grow up on a farm, really, just surrounded by them and the kind of thinking that goes with that. In college I studied literature/poetry, remember reading a description of soil by Wendell Berry at some point, and got curious about the cultural and agricultural side of soil and the desire to get a job someday led me to the scientific side. I was living in Chicago at the time and I wanted to get back to academic life so I decided to study it. I’ve been working in science for more than 10 years, horticulture first and now entomology, focused on fruit trees, working at Penn State. Penn State was flexible about my work life, allowing me to finish and pursue my doctorate with Purdue while working. About 20 years ago my wife gave me an old book called Home Winemaking the Right Way and I was smitten. I had a lot of time on my hands at the time and began all kinds of basement fermentations. This was when I was in Chicago. I learned so much by making different drinks, some good, some bad. One I really loved was a Boldo Tea Orange Wine – made by fermenting orange juice with some Boldo tea bags. I made a gallon and I thought it was about the best thing ever. My wife thought it was bizarre and refused to drink any. I also made a cherry stout with Kentucky coffeebeans – the kind that fall from the Kentucky coffeetree, which is common in the countryside around here. It was memorable, my friend Tom called it Cherry Nobyl. My wife and I weren’t married when I started fermenting things and the wedding had to be delayed by a year to allow the Seyval Blanc we picked from a Michigan vineyard to age for another year. It was a dry chardonnay-style process, what some people call, Missouri style. I felt it needed another year in glass carboys with some wood exposure; my wife is very tolerant. It turned out really lovely.
My approach to cider making starts with consideration of the fruit and the trees, and it takes time. I can’t make a good cider in a few weeks the way some can. It takes many months. When we started Ploughman I told Ben this would be a limitation for us. We are making a seasonal product that we can only get once a year when the apples are at their peak. We need to crush and press them quickly, and then we need to wait for a long time. The minimum for us seems to be eight months. That’s when things start to taste the way they should, when proper cider begins to appear. I know that probably sounds crazy, not just impractical, and I’m probably doing it wrong, but it seems to work for us. More and more of my fermentations are natural and spontaneous, meaning I am not inoculating them with wine yeast or any yeast at all, and relying on the natural flora of the apple from our orchards to conduct the fermentation from beginning to end. I started doing this in our second season on a very limited basis, and liked it so much that I do it for at least half of our batches now. In many cases this approach adds even more time to the process because the ambient orchard yeasts seem to be weaker and they take more time building up enough biomass to do the work of fermentation. I also imagine that they compete in some ways, adding time and complexity to an otherwise simple process. I like wild fermentations because they seem gentler, leave more of the fruit components intact, I mean aroma and fruit, and add some complexity. I say my approach starts with considering the fruit because the fruit is the most important thing and the most influential aspect of the process. The fruit is the destiny of the cider, really, it’s the most important thing, I know it sounds obvious to say that. Sometimes we get so interested in yeast, fermentation temperature and conditions, aging considerations, and other stylistic choices that we forget that we really have no way of getting beyond what the fruit has to offer. The best ciders reflect the fruit. I’m lucky to work almost exclusively with Three Springs Fruit Farm, our parent company, because their fruit is outstanding. I’ve made batches of Stayman Winesap from fruit from Three Springs next to Stayman Winesap from a nearby farm and for some reason the Three Springs cider turned out much better. The fruit looked better, it tasted better, and it made better cider. I’m always impressed by the aromas and intensity of the flavor of the fruit from here. More and more I try to uphold the properties of the fruit, get out of the way of the natural process of fermentation, and choose and use only the best fruit I can get.
EJ: What do you enjoy most about cider, and the cider industry?
HEW: Well, I am inspired by the mildness of what we are and what we do. This came up very prominently to my mind when I spent 10 months in England working and volunteering with cider makers two years ago. Wine, by contrast, is very intense to me in its flavors and character, and of course alcohol content, even its cultural cache of course; beer is highly controlled, with boiling, mashing, enzymatic processes, and other aspects of the process of manufacturing that involve detailed understanding and decision-making, as well as good equipment. Cider, by contrast, makes itself to some degree, and the process of making it, even though it offers infinite opportunities for intervention, is often best left as simple as possible. Cider will never have the esteem of fine wine, perhaps, but it is just as interesting. The apple isn’t an intense flavored fruit (with some exceptions of course!), it’s mild, almost universally liked and approachable. Cider too, is a mild drink. You can drink twice as much as the amount of wine you’d drink and still be able to function nicely. It’s natural, from orchards.
More and more I’ve begun to think of apple trees as friends. It’s bizarre, I know, to feel a friendship toward a species that doesn’t even have a heartbeat, but somehow I feel it. Somehow I feel that the trees know me in their own way and that they experience life in their own way. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I feel a kinship to them. I also see them as moderate, not particularly temperamental or difficult. After working with apple trees for 10 years I know how the plants will respond to things like certain types of pruning cuts in the months after the cut is made. Compared to a peach tree, for example, apple trees don’t usually have a bad temper, they take their cuts with equanimity.
I think this mildness and good temper is part of the industry at large, or at least part of the people I know in the industry. Maybe some of the mildness of the apple trees themselves rubs off on the people that work with them. They aren’t flashy, don’t have to be the center of things, but have a lot to offer in terms of being reliable and friendly and useful. I know I sound completely crazy talking like this, but it just seems true in some weird way.
Another thing I love about cider is the ritual of Wassail, putting toast in the trees, dancing around acting silly in the middle of winter, the songs people sing to the trees, even the Morris dancers are a lot of fun. All of that is very common in the apple growing areas of England where I was living, but it’s not really known about here very much I don’t suppose, but it displays a kind of richness of the relation between apple trees and people somehow. I think these rituals display something about the relationship between apple trees and people. I know I sound crazy, but I think that relation is real and meaningful.
BW: I feel like cider gets to the real heart and soul of apples. I've lived with and worked with apples my whole life but I feel like I never really knew them until I started drinking extraordinary cider. You take most apples that are eaten as snacks - they have a crunchy texture and lots of sugar. With cider, you're removing both of those things; first by grinding all the texture away at the press and then by fermenting the sugars into alcohol. I feel like this is how you really get to understand apples. I love drinking a cider and thinking, "man! How'd that apple do all of THAT!" And the industry - ya know, I find people fairly down to earth and easy going, which makes it nice. Folks don't take themselves too seriously...most of them, anyway! Most people are very passionate about it too, considering the lengths we all often go to in order to keep the lights on. Take this pandemic, for example!
EJ: Yes, the pandemic: we are adapting as quickly as we can, but it’s simply unprecedented. What new business practices has Ploughman Cider adopted in response to social distancing?
BW: Yeah, it has certainly been a jolt to normal operations around here. The majority of our sales were bars and restaurants so the downturn in our revenue has been huge. Fortunately, we'd knocked out the earliest stages of pursuing online shipping back in the wintertime which allowed us to jump into that game quickly. So, we've been keeping busy packing and shipping cider to consumers all over - we really appreciate the support so far. We've also seen an uptick in our sales at farmers markets, which continue to operate in PA. We've been encouraging preorders through our website. Our little Taproom on Gettysburg's square has also been impacted. We're down to 10 hrs per week, to go sales on Friday and Saturday only. However, it's a problem that's far bigger than our ability to sell cider and I'm happy so many people are taking it seriously, acting appropriately, and staying safe. That said, it's been really hard on us, for sure.
EJ: As an out of state fan of Ploughman Cider, I was thrilled to learn that you all are shipping everywhere. I just placed my second order, and I’m excited to try a few new (to me) ciders and nab a couple of bottles of the 2017 Churchyard (my favorite!). Here’s a question for both of you: What was the first cider that really knocked your socks off?
BW: The first cider that rose above my expectations was the original Strongbow formula when I had a pint at the pub behind my farmers market stand back in 2007. All ciders that came before it were the same experience as drinking soda. The first one that knocked my socks off was 'Farnum Hill Extra Dry'. I'd bought 4 bottles of Farnum Hill and a West County 'Redfield' back from Max's Taphouse in Baltimore and that was the first of that haul that I drank. All of those were very enjoyable, but I wanted to try that one first. Looking back, it was a real epiphany.
HEW: The first cider that knocked my socks off was Tom Oliver’s Posh Scrumpy, or maybe it was Le Pere Jules. Both of these were new to me. I’d never met with a cider with such heft of rich apple tannin, which you just can’t get from apples that aren’t bitter. In this country, of course, we cider makers are in dire need of bitter apples because our horticulture has bred bitterness out of our apples over the years, because people don’t want bitterness in the apples they eat, I suppose. But for cider, as you know, the bitterness lends body and gives some rich apple flavor that you can’t get any other way. Also, bitterness, like acidity, counterbalances sweetness. Both of these ciders were perfectly balanced. They were both quite sweet, Tom’s from added sugar, I believe, and Le Pere Jules from the keeving process, but the effect was the same. The sweetness would have been insipid if it hadn’t had that backbone of bitter apple to balance it. It wasn’t thin cider, as some of ours are, thin and razor sharp with a keen acidity to balance the sweetness, as we sometimes do in this country. Instead, it had that low rumble of bitterness that lingers on the palate. The sugar and the bitter apple gave both of these drinks such body and presence and lingering finish that it really expanded my concept of cider. The flavor went on and on and was so intriguing. I’d had good ciders before, but these were something new. I didn’t know cider could do that. Later on, of course, I discovered the playground of all cider and apple lovers, Ross-On-Wye cider and perry company, where I could taste 50 or so different single-variety ciders that are fermented with minimal intervention – what an education that was! Just learning the flavors that apple could have, the nuances and the modes of flavor were really vast, and I saw that the apple was not one thing with one flavor, but hundreds of things, with a lot of variation.
EJ: This is making me thirsty. Here’s another: tell us about your current favorite apple or favorite apple & adjunct combo for cider making, and why do you love it?
BW: I'm a Spitzenburg guy! I think the quality of this apple, as grown in our orchard, is outstanding for fresh eating and for cider making. There's also always a part of me that feels like my favorite apple is the one I haven't tried yet. I wish there was a little more tannin in the Esopus Spitzenburg but there's a particular fruitiness and acidity that I really enjoy.
HEW: My current favorite apples to use are Stayman Winesap, Frequin Rouge, and Dabinett. I also enjoy GoldRush for its acidity. Frequin Rouge is probably the most bitter apple I know, really harsh and hard bitterness with very little acidity. Dabinett apples are bitter but really luscious and balanced. They have just enough acidity to fill the mouth, enough bitterness to linger like coffee on the tongue for a while, and lovely and aromatic, a real pleasure. Stayman Winesap has surprised me because it’s not particularly a cider apple, but it really brings some good flavor through after fermentation and aging. I hadn’t expected it to do that, but it is one of my favorite apples that we have a lot of. I’d take as much Dabinett as I could get, as much Frequin Rouge as I could find, but since I don’t have nearly as much as I’d like, I can use Stayman and it is good. It’s local, has a long history around here, and it really has something unique to offer. That’s why we make a single-variety Stayman. I’m really pleased with it, it’s been a surprise for me. As for adjuncts, give me hops in cider. I love it. People think hops was made for beer, but they’re wrong. It belongs just as much with cider as with beer, perhaps even more so. I really love what it does with cider. I also love chokeberries. We get them from our back yard and from a farmer we know in New Jersey. Put a single chokeberry in a smoothie and it stains it deep purple and gives it a grip on the palate. It does the same in cider, brings all the big tannins you could want, adds the fantastic color, and has an aroma like freshly fallen snow.
EJ: So when you all aren’t drinking Ploughman ciders, whose (or what) are you drinking?
HEW: When I’m not drinking Ploughman I’d drink as much Little Pomona, Tilted Shed, Bear Swamp, Eden, Eve’s Cidery, Big Hill Ciderworks (our neighbors!), Oliver’s, Aaron Burr, Ross-On-Wye, and other real raw all-juice ciders as I could get my hands on. When I’m not drinking cider I like to drink bitters, Amaro, Enzian, maybe some hot chocolate or black tea with fernet branca, Islay whiskies. I prefer to be challenged by my drinks rather than lavishly pleased. An alcoholic beverage shouldn’t be too easy to drink, hiding its poison, so to speak. It should taste challenging, like something a child would avoid. I can’t stand mud-slides, for example, they are totally wrong. I have some connections in southern Germany where I drink Ebbelwoi with relish, give me Possman Speierling or any other real speierling. I’ll take hefeweizen and dry Riesling too, though the hefeweizen is more of a soft drink - it almost tastes too good. At home my wife and I drink black tea all the time, day and night. If we could we would inject it.
BW: Like most folks under self-quarantine, my home drinking consumption is up a little bit. I think that's fair to say at this point. If I were out selling cider in the market or out to dinner, I tend to drink beer - saisons, ales. But it's amazing when I'm drinking more and drinking with food how much better I feel drinking cider. I was really lucky to have backhauled a really nice stash of Tilted Shed cider from CiderCon 2020, which has come in handy. Our friends and neighbors at Big Hill Ciderworks would be another, as would Eve's Cidery, Eden, South Hill, Farnum Hill, Albemarle Ciderworks, Redbyrd, and Black Duck.
EJ: Traveling to different cider regions is a real inspiration to me. Do you have a favorite experience in your cider adventures?
BW: I've been to England twice now, and both times it was exclusively for cider purposes. I couldn't choose between trip one or the other, but they're both filled with amazing experiences and amazing people who have furthered my wisdom and understanding of apples and cider. It provided a great vision of ways I'd like to see my own rural community embrace apples and cider. I guess I could say the same about Franklin County Cider Days and my first trip there in 2018. Either of those places should be in the travel plans of any cider enthusiast. And at which time it is safe to travel, I'll likely be going back to both places soon, if things go as I hope they might.
EJ: Edwin, you recently took a 10 month cider-related sabbatical in the UK. That sounds like the perfect dream. Tell us about your experience over there?
HEW: When I was in England I worked for Tom Oliver. I spent some days mashing and pressing Butt pears on his belt press. It was hard work, but I got to say I spent the day squeezing butts. My daughters thought that was funny. Tom once asked me if I had unlearned enough. This was the perfect way of putting it. I came to England to work in the cider industry. I thought I knew things and then I began looking around, meeting a lot of people. People showed me everything about how they made me cider. There was nothing to hide, everyone was so open and friendly. It was a great moment of unlearning, that is, I unlearned what I thought I knew and I began to learn not just new things, but new ways of knowing. Unlearning was the first step. I’m still unlearning every day, looking around and seeing that things aren’t the way I thought they were. I worked also for Mike and Albert Johnson at Ross on Wye. I was the guy digging the apples out of the water bath, throwing away the bad apples, putting the good apples into the grinder. All day long we unloaded apples into the water bath. Beautiful loads of Foxwhelp that smelled just like strawberries, loads of Dabinett, loads of Michelin. That was my real education, seeing the apples, smelling them, learning their names and flavors. I consider that my job as apple washer was the most important one, digging out the bad apples and making sure they didn’t get in the cider, passing on the best apples. That was the most important job, probably the one most people don’t want to do. Working for Ross on Wye was the most comfortable I've been in cider. That's where I learned how to belong to the process. They were so kind to me there, accepting me without any reservation, I belonged there without question, good work there, good cider people.
EJ: “Unlearning” - I love that. Now that you are back in Pennsylvania and at Penn State, what research are you up to?
HEW: These days I’m involved in the Spotted Lanternfly research. It’s a new invasive insect from Asia that’s moving through the Pennsylvania landscape. Efforts to understand it and find ways of stopping its spread are taking some of my time. As for cider I’m in production mode, rather than research. Which isn’t to say I’m not learning, I’m just learning through experience rather than through setting up formal trials. I’m also learning that any cider, like Heraclitus’s river, is never the same twice. You can’t step in the same river twice and you can’t taste the same cider twice. This fact, the way perception is constantly shifting depending on context, expectation, experience, not to mention that batches are constantly changing through oxidation/reduction and so many other processes, makes blending a continual challenge and thrill.
As a scientist I try to find ways to quantify and formalize results, which is not the way cider making works. Cider making is art and it requires an entirely different mindset. I became a better cider maker when I stopped relying on measurements, numbers, and concepts to make cider, but started trusting my senses. I’m still learning, and I think I’m learning more through a non-scientific process than I would learn through setting up formal trials, though I do set up trials as well, I just rely on them less and embrace an ultimate sense of skepticism about what I think I’m learning. Uncertainty is such an important part of learning, the concept of honoring the uncertainty inherent in any knowledge may be a more important approach to learning for me than the concept of “accruing” knowledge, as though knowledge were like acorns you could put in a bucket.
EJ: Very well said, Edwin. I’m going to need to sit with your words, and probably reread them from time to time.
May I switch gears for a moment? Ben, in addition to cider, you and I share a deep love of music, which is by nature very social. How are you staying connected with music and other musicians right now? Who and what are at the top of your list for when live music with a band and an audience is a thing again?
BW: You got that right. It's been pretty tough, right? I feel like I've discovered a lot of great independent acts from towns all over the US by happening upon their live streams on one of 30-odd Facebook groups that has been aggregating such things. Me and my bandmates keep checking on each other, which has helped. My songwriting partners and friends from high school - we're starting to get some creative energy built up which I think would be a great outlet for me to get back into writing while gigs are shutdown. I've been teaching myself Travis picking! A local member of our community started a series similar to AV's Undercover video series, so I'll be contributing something fun to that pretty soon. What I'm looking forward to the most, whenever it's safe and we're able to gather, will be when our Adams County community gets together to honor the late John Prine. It's hard to grieve in isolation.
EJ: Oh yes, so many of us will be feeling John Prine’s loss for a long time – from here on out, I’m sure. I plan to hear you and your friends make music together when we’re able to be social again – I was hoping that would be part of my annual summer road trip through Adams County. I recently accepted that my annual girls’ trip is not going to happen in 2020. Let’s just say: I’ll get there as soon as I can, and I can’t wait to visit the Ploughman Cider tasting room on the downtown square in Gettysburg. Before we part, do you have anything else you'd like to add?
BW: As per usual, I've rambled on long enough already! I do love The Cider Exchange and the community that's been built there. I love seeing what folks are drinking and why the like it. No matter when you might be reading this. I've put a perpetual "one time per user" coupon code for The Cider Exchange to save 10% their first order from us with coupon code 'TCE'. Stay healthy and stay safe, cider friends!
Ploughman Cider - The Cidery
1606 Bendersville-Wenksville Road
Aspers, PA 17304
Ploughman Cider - The Taproom
14 Lincoln Square
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania 17325