The most celebrated Southern cider apple, the Hewe’s Crab was first recorded in 1741 and became a favorite of our founding fathers, including Washington and Jefferson. William Coxe included an entire chapter on “the system of management adapted to the peculiar qualities of the fruit” in his treatise on orcharding in 1817, during the early years of the United States.
Though cultivated for nearly two hundred years for fine cider, the Hewe’s Crab was lost during the Prohibition Era, joining the ranks of many other fine, but extinct, cider apples that we hear about from apple-lorists like Tom Burford. It was rediscovered by Rollin Wooley from Colonial Williamsburg in the late 1900’s disguised in a commercial orchard as a pollinator. Since then, Tom Burford has managed to convince modern cidermakers to re-propagate the apples in larger quantities. When I apprenticed at Albemarle CiderWorks in 2011, I had the good fortune to taste their one and only batch. Every year they hope for another chance, but the apple is strongly biennial. So you have to hope that the weather gives you a good year every two years. You have to be twice as lucky.
The trees that I grafted in 2011 were planted in a nursery in Tricycle Gardens and then moved to the country orchard in 2012. This year gave us our first Hewe’s Crab harvest, which came in early and full. As I write this blog, Manuel and the cellar team are patiently bottling our first-ever single-varietal. We followed Coxe’s directions and handled the cider very minimally from start to finish. As they run the bottler, I can smell the cider aroma wafting across the building and it is not like any other cider we have made. I am not going to ruin it for you. You must taste it for yourself.
-Courtney Mailey
PHOTO CREDIT: Anne Shelton, Albemarle CiderWorks
