A chat with cidermaker
Cindy Craven
Written by Matthew Vasilev
Lasqueti is a unique island community even among the archipelago of eclectic Gulf Island identities. In the SENĆOŦEN language of many indigenous Coast Salish nations like the Tla’amin Nation, the island is named Xweh et tay, meaning in English “a strong wood, a wood they used to make wedges”, which points to the many yew trees growing there.
Largely forested and without paved roads, its settler residents have fought successive battles to keep the island unplugged from BC hydro’s power grid and any attempts to introduce a car ferry to connect them to Vancouver Island—two key ways to remaining physically and culturally isolated.
The scraggly feral sheep that can be spotted around the island are historically more important to the sustenance of the settler community than both the fishing and shipbuilding industry that once flourished on this island (40-foot fishing boats were once fabricated on this tiny island). “The early ‘back-to-the-landers’ ate a whole lot of sheep! And shellfish, obviously,” Cindy says. In fact, oysters and clams also provided her family with additional income in the first couple decades while they were planting trees, milling apples from the old orchard, and selling juice to the locals.
“Why did you decide to grow apples?” I ask, and she quickly replies, “I didn’t.”
Cindy and her late husband Mike moved to Lasqueti in 1988, bought an old settler farm with an existing orchard, and raised their two children there. They were both employed at plant nurseries on the island and Cindy ended up taking home countless un-homed trees. “We just kept moving the fence back further and further.”
The juice and eating apples were their main source of farm income until they started cultivating a business from blueberries. Berries offered a more seasonally-optimal crop they could focus on when their children were out of school for the summer. But by the fall of 2009, they had “mountains of apples” to deal with, and after years of selling (and transporting) glass carboys of juice to locals who would take it to u-brews in Nanaimo to be fermented and bottled, the cidery idea hit them. After two years of jumping through the many hoops required for a land-based winery licence, Cindy took the only cidermaking course offered in the region at the time at Washington State University, and the cidery business grew from there. She began more purposeful plantings of cider-specific apple varieties, like Kingston Black.
It’s impossible to capture her orchard in a single picture as it rolls up and down, and the trees are planted along the natural contours and winding paths with plenty of inter-planted vegetables, flowers and bushes. Nearer to the main farmhouse, she also has a stone-lined kitchen garden with rows of garlic, and cabbages, tucked between rows and clusters of apple trees. The trees she planted focus on mixed-use, disease-resistant varieties like King of Tompkins, Gravensteins, Discovery, Mutsu, Jonagold, Bramley’s Seedling, as well as more cider-specific bittersweet/sharp varieties.
Every house, cottage, bunky, woodshed and outhouse on her farm is slab plank or hand split shingle. Looking around I can’t tell what was left behind by the Douglas family a century ago and what was hewed and milled by Mike. I’ve asked Cindy multiple times how many apple trees are growing around her farm and she just laughs. “I’ve never bothered to count,” she says. After pressing her a bit more, she takes a guess: “Okay, maybe like seven hundred.” This number of course doesn’t include the many lilac bushes and other perennial flowers integrated in the orchard, sharing bees with the apple trees, or the nut trees, the fig trees, or the century-old malus fusca (pacific crabapple) that overlooks the fields of blueberries.
We head to the cider barn to dive into the task at hand: choosing a batch of cider for a collaborative blend of our Pender Island apples blended with her own. Most of her batches are 2-300 litres in size, which she doesn’t actually taste until long after fermentation winds down. At harvest time she follows a simple rhythm: collect the apples as they drop, blend varieties at the mill, press a barrel a day—add yeast or not, depending on how quickly fermentation kicks-off—and seal the barrel. She only opens to taste and blend when she’s ready to keg them in one to two years.
Her farm business brand, called The Old Douglas Farm (aka The Happy Apple cider), was created collaboratively: her sister Celine (a Pender Islander) painted a folksy image of two smiling apples to adorn her labels, and a friend who had worked as a graphic designer for a Bellingham brewery put the remaining pieces together.
I ask her what the challenges are of working off-grid. She explains: “There isn’t any now that I have [a Penguin glycol chiller] that I can turn off and on. That was my biggest challenge.” This small chiller that she uses for kegging as well as her apple mills run entirely off of solar panels. Meaning, no—she can’t actually mill apples on a cloudy day. A “genius” electrician friend on the island re-wired her mills for 110 volt (originally 220 volt) in order to make this solar hook-up possible. She uses a hydro-press which uses water pressure instead of electricity to operate.
Over the years, she has hosted countless WWOOFers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms network), visitors hoping to start cideries and longterm farm helpers. I ask how this aspect has helped shape the business. “It’s helped hugely in shaping the farm—or more maintaining it.” Cindy has been a teacher to many young folks, including ourselves over on Pender Island. In the exchange, she has at times received new ideas from visitors: like planting haskap berries, which her local market has loved, and even apple scions of new varieties.
Before I leave, we taste her distilled apple eau de vie, a plum wine made by her farm apprentice Matt (pictured above), and a perry pressed from pears from some of the oldest trees on the farm. She fries up some breaded clam “fritters” which are a perfect salty, fatty food pairing and together are a real taste of place.
She admits that her small and closed-loop cidery model (all of her cider is consumed on Lasqueti Island) would be difficult to replicate in other communities that are less physically isolated. Katie and I still feel the relevance and sustainable power in creating a product for “the smallest viable audience” as the marketing gurus say. Though this wasn’t entirely intentional when Cindy started, other key decisions, like keeping the operation off-grid, were. Her community-centred, mixed-farming model is an inspiration to us.
