Kimberly Kae does it all for the trees. That much is clear, following her through the orchards, where she greets them like old friends. Remarking on the raggedy appearance of one sapling, she holds its branch tenderly. “I’ll be back tomorrow to prune you,” she promises. There’s much work to do. Spring for the cidermaker promises the mammoth labor of new plantings on top of regular orchard maintenance, not to mention all that’s to be done in the cellar. For Kae, who’s run Metal House Cider with her husband, Matt DiFrancesco, since 2015, this year is a different beast entirely.
Last spring, Kae and DiFrancesco moved their family from Esopus to New Paltz, leaving behind their home of over a decade, along with the small orchard that sits on the property and the corrugated metal barn—the titular “metal house”—that’s served as their production space since the very beginning. They continue to manage the historic orchard down the road at the former Rosemount Estate—900 trees or so, which they’ve tended for the past eight years with permission from the owner. But, with space constraints on the production side and dreams of a larger home orchard, it was time for something new. Like shedding a too-tight skin, bidding adieu to the old metal house signifies a poetic moment of revolution for the small-but-mighty cidery: It’s time for Metal House to grow.
The New Paltz property—18 acres on South Putt Corners Road—comes equipped with an established orchard, an old Dutch barn complex, and a beautiful farmhouse, the basement of which they’ve converted into a functional cellar. The locus of Kae’s ambition is the orchard, where she’s already begun pruning the existing trees and mapping out new plantings. Fifty new trees this season, she says: Oxford, Golden Russet, Gold Rush, and some crabs. The land, an apple orchard for three generations now, has been conventionally managed. The vision is to expand the orchard while simultaneously converting the land to holistic farming: organic sprays, biodynamic preparations, companion plants, and silvopasture (an agroforestry practice wherein livestock graze in the orchard to promote biodiversity and soil health). Kae hopes it will be a model for other farmers seeking to dispense with conventional practices amid a changing climate. She fantasizes about leading tours through their orchard and production spaces: This is what holistic farming looks like, she’ll tell people, from the tree to the bottle. “You need to know what you’re doing in the cellar, of course, but the orchard comes first,” Kae explains. “Good cider comes from well-grown fruit.”
From Scrumpy to Sparkling
As for the cellar, Kae and DiFrancesco’s mastery has come a long way since their earliest experiments. Moving from Brooklyn to Esopus in 2009, seeking a “more engaged experience with the ground,” they quickly turned to the 45 neglected apple trees on their new property for inspiration. Borrowing an old cider press from a neighbor down the road, they made a scrumpy—“a real funky, farmhouse kind of a cider,” Kae remembers. They fermented it quickly, left it unsparkling, and siphoned it into old beer and vinegar bottles. “We thought it was pretty good,” Kae admits. It’s been trial and error, alongside borrowed wisdom from the likes of Autumn Stoscheck of Eve’s Cidery and DiFrancesco’s own father, a retired Finger Lakes vintner, that’s pushed Metal House far beyond the rustic slapdashery of their first eager attempts.
Metal House ciders are made with hand-harvested and hand-selected fruit, and there’s not an inch of automation in their production line. Passing through a homemade rack-and-cloth press in the fall, the juices ferment naturally, then rest through the winter. In the spring, the cider is blended, and sugar, nutrients, and yeast are added to encourage a second fermentation in the bottle. This stage, tirage, lasts from six months up to several years. When the bottles have reached the desired flavor and effervescence, Kae and DiFrancesco disgorge them by hand—a rigorous labor of removing the lees while leaving the rest of the cider in the bottle, not unlike pulling a tablecloth out from beneath a teetering tower of china.
This process—Methode Champenoise—is associated with the finest sparkling wines. While not unheard of in cidermaking, it’s far from standard practice. The result is a cider with a refined stateliness; the bubbles are mouth-filling and uniform, the flavors balanced and well-tempered. These methods require glass bottles with a crown cap, fitting for a cider more rightly imbibed from a Champagne flute than a can or a pint glass. The likeness of their product to a fine wine was perhaps what called the attention of Field Blend Selections, a distributor working otherwise exclusively with winemakers, who picked up Metal House last year.
But proven methods do not preclude experimentation. “I want to reach for something that’s classic,” Kae explains, “but I want to play with it as much as we can, given the fruit we have.” In this spirit, echoed in the caption of a recent Instagram post—“genre be damned”—Metal House has increasingly dabbled in unusual blends and coferments. The 2020 Pearlina is a blend of wild pears and Esopus Jonathan, Idared, and Rambo apples; the 2021 Bam Bam is a coferment of Cabernet Franc skins and local Jonamac. Recurring cuvees coexist with one-time oddities, depending on the availability and quality of fruit in a given season. Kae’s staunch commitment to using holistically grown fruit encourages playful innovation with whatever’s available, while discipline in the cellar allays the risk of either waste or a subpar product. These, for Kae, are one and the same. If the product is flawed, the tank is getting dumped—no small cost for a tiny producer. “I think this comes down to being a really harsh critic about what we put out,” Kae says. “We wouldn’t release an experimental something that failed even part way.” Asked how she can hold convention in one hand and experimentation in the other, Kae recalls another question posed to her by a friend: “How can you be punk rock and drive a Volvo?” She laughs as she answers, “Because you can.”
Pump Up the Volume
The production space in New Paltz remains a work in progress. DiFrancesco, who runs his own construction company, is drawing up plans. Emerging out of the cavernous cellar, Kae points toward the barn complex across the lawn. The smallest one’s in pretty good shape, she explains, but they’ll need to create a new entry. The big one in the middle needs to be taken apart piece by piece, then reconstructed. The furthest one needs to be lifted up so that a new foundation can be laid underneath. The result will be a much larger production space than they’ve ever enjoyed, allowing for more volume and more experimentation. Metal House’s annual output is dictated by fruit yield and availability. It ranges widely, thanks to an increasingly fickle climate, from roughly 300 gallons in a bad growing season to 2,000 gallons in a good one. The new orchard, as well as the larger production space will hopefully facilitate a larger and more consistent annual yield.
The heart quickens at the thought of all that remains to be done. Renovations, new plantings. The turbulent economy is another thing; Kae already knows she’ll have to find a new bottle supplier. Amid all that, harvest creeps up. As Kae recounts all of this, though, there is more wonder in her eyes than anxiety. She looks over toward the new orchard, where a family of deer has convened in the early dusk around a pile of yesterday’s pruning. “They love the budwood,” she says, smiling.
There’s a lot of cider in the Hudson Valley, and in New Paltz in particular, but for Kae it’s never been about competition. “It’s like Napa,” she says. “More is more. In cider, there are so many ways to do it.” As for Kae’s philosophy? “It’s all about finding a way to be in the trees, finding a way to justify spending so many hours in the cold, in the winter, in the trees, pruning. In any season, being in the trees is the reason to do it.” Even though the old metal house sits empty back in Esopus, the spirit of Metal House lives on in the new orchard. Strolling among the trees with Kae, it’s hard not to see what she sees: the potential for “a diverse and alive orchard environment,” colorful with companion plants and bustling with grazing livestock. And, as for the cider, its quality will no doubt continue to express, with humble elegance, the attention paid to its origins.
Metal House Cider can be purchased in bottle shops and restaurants throughout the Hudson Valley and New York City. Reliable stockists include the Montgomery Place Orchards Farm Market (from whom Metal House has sourced fruit in the past) and Kingston Standard. It can also be purchased directly from the producer.
This article appears in April 2025.
