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This episode of Gastropod explores the surprising history, botany, and cultural impact of apples and hard cider. Hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley trace the apple's origins from wild forests in Kazakhstan, where bears and the Silk Road helped select for sweetness, to its arrival in colonial America via figures like John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed. Guests such as Michael Pollan and apple historian Dan Bussey explain how American settlers planted thousands of cider-focused seedling orchards, fueling a golden age of over 14,000 apple varieties before prohibition and industrial beer consolidation wiped most of them out. The episode also uncovers how the champagne method was actually invented in England for cider before exploring the modern craft cider and heirloom apple renaissance.
Hosts welcome listeners to Pine Hill Orchards and describe the evocative apple aroma that sets the episode’s tone.
The hosts introduce the episode’s focus on apples and cider, outlining their personal quests and the questions they’ll explore.
The hosts recap the early history of apples in America, touching on Johnny Appleseed, grafting, and the rise of cider.
The conversation examines how selective breeding turned the original Red Delicious into a less tasty, more marketable variety.
The hosts discuss how Prohibition shifted apple branding from alcohol to health, affecting variety availability in supermarkets.
The hosts taste and describe various apples and ciders, noting flavor profiles and the importance of cider apples.
Soham Bhatt shares his journey from college to founding Artifact Cider, highlighting the revival of cider culture in the U.S.
Dan Bussey’s quest to catalog North American apple varieties is detailed, including his book and the ongoing search for rare types.
The episode concludes with reflections on the future of apple cultivation, cider production, and the preservation of rare apple varieties.
Hosts discuss how 17th‑century England turned cider into a national wine using stronger glass bottles and a second fermentation.
Speakers explain that the method for making champagne was first described in England for cider before the French monk Dom Perignon popularised it.
The hosts trace cider’s popularity from the 1650s, its decline in the mid‑20th century due to cheap ingredients, and the craft renaissance of the 2000s.
Wild Apple Origins in Kazakhstaninsight
Apples originated in Kazakhstan around Almaty, where massive 50-foot trees grow wild like weeds with incredible genetic diversity, ranging from olive-sized fruits to various shapes and colors.
Why Apples Require Graftinginsight
Because apples are extreme heterozygotes with massive genomes, seeds do not grow true to type. To replicate a specific variety like Granny Smith, humans must clone them through grafting.
The Oldest American Named Appledata
The Roxbury Russet, planted around 1630 in Massachusetts, is the oldest named American apple still available today and is celebrated for its bright acidity and excellent storage life.
Johnny Appleseed's True Purposeinsight
Johnny Appleseed planted seedling trees across the American frontier not to provide fresh snacking fruit, but to supply homesteaders with the bitter, tannic apples needed to make hard cider.
By 1900, the USDA counted 14,000 distinct apple varieties being grown across the United States after removing duplicate names from the country's cider orchard golden age.
Prohibition and the Apple Rebrandstrategy
Prohibition devastated the apple industry by targeting cider orchards with axes. To survive, the industry rebranded eating apples with the advertising slogan an apple a day keeps the doctor away.
English Invention of Champagne Methodinsight
Historical evidence shows that the méthode champenoise was actually invented in England in the 1600s using strong glass bottles to create sparkling cider decades before Dom Perignon.
“Years and years of apple juice in every corner, and apples kind of ripening in here have like imprinted the whole space with this aroma.”
“Cider was like the Swiss Army knife of booze on the frontier.”
“Apples have a particularly large genome, and on top of that, they have a wider variety of variations of each gene.”
“They're from Kazakhstan, around a town called Almaata, which means father of the apple.”
“And apparently, it was also actually delicious. Whereas nowadays, it is all red and not delicious at all.”
“The terminology cleared up in the 1600s, and in fact, the 1600s was a big century for cider in the UK.”
“But once you put it in a strong bottle and shut the bottle tight, yeast can keep eating the sugar and farting out carbon dioxide.”
“And it's a good 50 years before the French monk, Dom Perignon, supposedly invented this exact same method to make champagne.”
“Cider was very popular from 1650s onwards and only really fell out of favor when the breweries became bigger and bigger.”
“There's this profusion of experimentation in the United States. Maybe that's the thing that makes it stand out more than anything else, is that people are willing to try anything.”
There’s nothing more American than apple pie—or is there? We might prescribe an apple a day and call our largest city the Big Apple, but this legendary fruit originally hails from the mountains of Kazakhstan. This episode, Michael Pollan (something of a legend himself) tells us how apples become so important on the American frontier, and what cider (the alcoholic kind) had to do with it. We talk to apple fan Amy Traverso and apple detective Dan Bussey to figure out how many thousands of apple varieties used to grow in America, and why are there only a handful—including the notorious Red Delicious, which, while red, is far from delicious—in supermarkets today? All that, plus we get out in the orchard with Soham Bhatt to learn about the cider renaissance that's sweeping the nation. (encore) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
11,109 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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