Since at least the Neolithic period, humans have used fermentation to make the most of what the land has to offer. Whether turning milk into yogurt, or fruits and grains into alcohol, fermenters have long harnessed the preservative and transformative powers of fermentation to produce creative expressions of what is locally and seasonally available. While disparate industries have arisen around particular alcoholic ferments—wine, cider, beer, and the like—many craft alcohol producers choose to experiment along and across the boundaries between them. In doing so, they challenge popular expectations around what these beverages can look and taste like, and keep their projects responsive to the local agriculture and climate.
Put simply, co-fermentation is the process of fermenting multiple things at once, together. Co-fermentation as a practice is nothing new. Indeed, the very first alcohols were likely co-ferments of grain, fruit, and honey. Co-ferments may fit neatly into traditional categories, such as a wine fermented from multiple grape varietals, a cider fermented from multiple apple varietals. Beers, too, have historically been co-fermented with seasonal fruit to add flavor, color, or complexity. But co-fermentation can also upset these categories, creating hybridized beverages that muddle our preconceived ideas about what wine, cider, and beer can be. In recent years, as small alcohol producers grapple with how to keep their projects tied to the land, many have begun to approach co-fermentation with a renewed vigor, and with a profound spirit of experimentation. Many producers in the Hudson Valley are participating in this growing trend, using age-old methodologies to create novel ferments, and breaking down barriers as they go.
Local and Seasonal
Left Bank Ciders, based in Catskill, has been co-fermenting since their operation began in 2019. Using a base of apple juice steeped with whole fruits, their team has made a wide array of co-fermented concoctions, including plum, peach, and cherry ciders, as well as cherry and black currant meads. Limiting their ingredients to what is locally and seasonally available, they simultaneously ensure that their ferments are distinct to the region and minimize the environmental impact of their work. Local ingredients travel less far from the farm to the fermentation vessel.
Likewise, fermentation projects offer an opportunity for farms to offload less cosmetically attractive inventory. Co-fermentation across varietals and species amplifies this effect, since Left Bank can think more fluidly about what to ferment, depending on what is most readily available. Cofounder and cidermaker Tim Graham explains that they get most of their fruit from Mead Orchard in Red Hook. “Often, they have ‘seconds’ fruit they can’t sell at market because of some visual issue, a bruise or cut, which we are happy to use for our co-ferments. We are lucky to be able to help farms use this otherwise unsellable fruit and to help eliminate waste when we can!”
“Co-ferments are definitely having a moment and really bending the rigid concepts of wine, cider, beer in new directions,” Graham explains. “I think that climate change is a big part of the equation, and making more resilient drinks, using what we have on hand, and experimentation are all part of what makes co-fermenting interesting. Instead of making another single varietal wine that has to be grown in a super specific way, we can look to what is already growing, and thriving right here, right now. I think we can make some amazing beverages without having to force things to grow that might not fit our climate in the first place.”
Experimenting and Integrating
One thing that grows quite well in the Hudson Valley is apples, and Left Bank is hardly the only cidery in the area making use of their local availability. In New Paltz, the folks at Brooklyn Cider House have been co-fermenting for about a decade, since Peter and Susan Yi first began making ciders with multiple apple varietals. However, as Richard Yi—Peter’s son and a member of the production team—explains, “In regard to using different fruits, we have only scratched the surface. We started co-fermenting apples with strawberries grown on our farm in 2023, and those batches should be nearing release. We’re also experimenting with locally sourced blueberries, but those won’t be ready until next year.” Yi believes that “integrating other fruit at an early stage in the fermentation process creates a depth of flavor that cannot be achieved through ‘flavored’ ciders.”
Like other producers in the Hudson Valley, Brooklyn Cider House is approaching multi-species co-ferments with hopes of more fully appreciating the agricultural diversity on hand in the region, and even on their own land. Integrating new fruits into their ferments is a natural extention of their approach to cidermaking, which aims to make the most of what the local landscape has to offer.
Zero Waste
For Matthew Sanford and his production team at Rose Hill Farm in Red Hook, sustainability is the name of the game. Rose Hill has been a site for co-fermented experimentation since its very inception in 2018. “The impetus is really the availability of different kinds of fruit, since our farm grows many kinds of fruit, and many varieties of each. We strive for zero waste, utilizing everything we grow in some shape or form,” their team explains. “Cider is wine” is a maxim that echoes throughout Rose Hill’s production space and tasting room, as Sanford educates his clientele about the methodological and historical slippage between these seemingly disparate beverages. Yeast eats sugar and produces alcohol the same way regardless of fruit species, so all fruit wines are, in a sense, of the same broader category of ferments. By educating their customer base in this way, Rose Hill’s team hopes to “blur the lines between wine and cider, and to expand people’s understanding of what is possible.” Doing so might lend legitimacy to the co-fermented projects that are Rose Hill’s bread and butter, and encourage both consumers and producers to embrace experimentation in the fermentation vessel.
Co-fermentation across fruit species is a powerful framework for upsetting long-held cultural ideas around what wine, cider, or other ferments can be. The fermenters at Rose Hill, Left Bank, and Brooklyn Cider House are helping to flatten the distinctions around different kinds of fruit wine, which have historically pigeonholed alcohol producers, fruits, and ferments into narrow, often ill-fitting definitions. In many cases, conventions, industry standards, and even licensing regulations have precluded producers from using everything at their disposal and (co)-fermenting with total creative freedom.
A Passion for Fermentation
The acrobatics and nuances of licensing are well within the wheelhouse of Michael Renganeschi of Hudson Valley Brewery, who is working in a similar vein. Since the brewery’s opening in 2017, Renganeschi and his team have accumulated no fewer than five licenses—a collection that allows them to produce the beer, cider, grape wine, and myriad unusual fruit wines, co-ferments, and curiosities within their repertoire. While all the beer is brewed at their brewery and taproom site in Beacon, they maintain another facility in Poughkeepsie, where their more eccentric, wild-fermented experiments are made. For Renganeschi, beer has always been just one tributary feeding his larger passion for fermentation. Working across categories of ferments allows him to engage more holistically with the ingredients at his disposal.
To make Kinds of Light, one of the brewery’s farmhouse ales, Renganeschi ferments merlot grapes for four weeks before pulling off the fermented juice and adding an aged farmhouse beer on top of the spent skins, stems, and seeds, which kickstarts a refermentation of the beer and grape pomace together. The result is a hybridized beer-wine beverage that is emblematic of Hudson Valley Brewery’s broader practice. They might do the same thing with peaches instead of grapes, with cider instead of beer. “I think about it as a really sustainable approach to using fruit,” Renganeschi explains, “because you’re not just buying the peaches, pressing them out, discarding half of it and trying to get some extracted version into one beer. You’re using fruit in a way that maybe has slightly diminishing returns, but you’re adding nuance and depth to products for sometimes a whole year.”
The breadth and depth of available agriculture and native fruits in the Hudson Valley makes the region particularly ripe for co-fermented projects. Without a singular exceptional fruit or varietal dominating the local landscape, Hudson Valley producers have more space to experiment with what is on hand. “I see a lot of younger producers in the Hudson Valley really looking at and taking advantage of what is growing here. We have really good stone fruit, and pretty good grapes, and really good apples, and a really diverse range of herb farmers and flower farmers,” Renganeschi explains. Referring to the region’s “plethora of agriculture,” he goes on: “We’re, a lot more keen to not be boxed in by one thing we’re doing, because it’s a lot more exciting to just take what comes to you and try to work with it.”
While co-ferments offer a framework for creative expression in the production room, they also offer a more flexible way forward for alcohol producers hoping to keep their projects grounded in local agriculture, paying heed to seasonality and sustainability. As climate change escalates, becoming an increasingly relevant concern in the craft alcohol space, it will only grow more important to work creatively with what is locally available. Co-ferments and boundary-crossing fermentation projects more broadly will be an important part of this story, just as they have been since the very beginning.
This article appears in May 2024.
