San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
These niche ciders are made for fine dining
Posterity’s drinks on menus of Bay Area’s Michelin-starred restaurants
You’re in the middle of your meal at the two-Michelinstarred Saison in San Francisco and your server presents the next course. It’s antelope, bathed in a sauce made from antelope bones and citrus. You might expect a husky red wine like Syrah to go with it, but instead you’re handed a tulipshaped glass containing something with a strawberry hue: a sparkling elderberry rosé cider.
“Most people would not pick that to pair with meat. It’s something you’d find on a patio,” said Molly Greene, beverage director at Saison. “I think they’re quite shocked that a cider could have so much depth.”
At fine dining restaurants, it’s rare to find a cider as part of the beverage pairing, which is traditionally exclusive to wines. If there is an alternative slot, it’s much more likely to be filled with sake than cider, a beverage often overlooked and misunderstood in the U.S. But Posterity Ciderworks, a tiny and niche cider producer in the Sierra Foothills, has become a noted exception at many of the Bay Area’s Michelin-lauded restaurants.
“I like to have one beverage on the pairing that’s challenging,” said Francis Kulaga, general manager and beverage director at San Francisco’s Anomaly, a tasting menu spot that opened last year. He paired Posterity’s elderberry rosé cider with a halibut dish featuring watermelon radish scales and a rhubarb-serrano broth. “If you’re not challenging people it’s a little boring.”
Posterity Ciderworks founder Brendan Barnard, who runs the operation with his wife, Kris Barnard, self-distributes. This means he cold-calls restaurants and often drives several hours to meet with beverage directors and sommeliers in person. But the effort has paid off. In just a few years, he’s won over some of the top beverage professionals in California, placing his ciders at eight Michelin-rated restaurants, including the three-starred Atelier Crenn.
“There’s very little time to taste and I am very picky about who I spend an afternoon with,” said Greene of Saison. “I think it’s really charming and refreshing that people still work that hard to get their products into restaurants. But also, their ciders taste like nothing else.”
Posterity’s ciders seem specifically designed for fine dining. Their depth, complexity and high acidity make them incredibly food-friendly, and they’re serious, more akin to wine than mass-market ciders like Angry Orchard. Many are small, one-off batches, unorthodox blends. Barnard grows produce in his home garden but also forages for underutilized botanicals and fruits, like chrysanthemums, which he’s used to add herbal undertones to a rich sparkling cherry cider.
One of Posterity’s most eccentric infusions is the In the Garden cider made with tomatoes, fig leaves and green almond thinnings (the crop removed from the almond tree early in the season). “It started out as a pretty risky, wild idea,” Barnard said, but it’s been one of his bestsellers with restaurants. David Kolvek, beverage director at San Francisco’s Michelin-starred Sons & Daughters, paired it with an herbaceous caviar course served atop a bed of lactic-fermented potatoes, green tomatoes and pickled dill seeds.
Last year at Anomaly, Kulaga paired In the Garden with a tomato, kale and “truffle cheese whiz” salad. It was his most successful and longest-running pairing to date. “The smell is like walking through a greenhouse,” he said. “We went through five to 10 cases of that cider and I hardly order anything by the case.”
Some of Posterity’s ciders are direct homages to the wine craft — and their price points reflect it. Aurora ($112) is a sherry-inspired crab apple dessert cider, which Barnard allows to oxidize for at least six months. Nova
($112) uses the same crab apples
nd but is made like Champagne, aged on its natural yeasts for a year. He’s even cofermented apples with noblerotted wine grapes. Noble rot occurs when a fungus known as botrytis cinerea attacks the grapes, resulting in higher, concentrated sugar levels. These grapes are traditionally used in dessert wines, like Sauternes.
Not unlike the chefs at the restaurants he works with, Barnard is meticulous with his production process and is hyperfocused on sustainability. He sources the majority of his fruit, mostly heirloom varieties, from old, abandoned orchards — dating as far back as the late 1800s — throughout Northern California. They’re typically former commercial orchards, phased out in the mid-1900s when the industry shifted toward commodity crops. “There was no reason for the families to keep harvesting them. They couldn’t make money anymore,” said Barnard. “But also, there was no reason to tear them out. A lot of people just walked away.”
For many of these orchards, Posterity is single-handedly keeping their roots in the ground, preventing the land from being redeveloped for something else, like housing. The orchards are “use it or lose it, and unfortunately, we’re losing
a lot of them,” said Kulaga. “We need stalwarts like (Barnard) to make sure they don’t go away.”
Like old vines, these older fruit trees produce small yields and “exceptional quality,” said Barnard, but working with them isn’t easy. Untouched for decades, the orchards are often so overgrown he has to spend hours with a machete clearing space. Sometimes, he can’t drive a truck into an orchard, forcing him to haul hundreds of pounds of fruit back to the entrance by hand. “A lot of these properties would be a nightmare to deal with if you were looking solely for grocery-grade fruit,” he said.
The Barnards have also planted a 2-acre research orchard at their farm in Mokelumne Hill (Calaveras County), located about 60 miles southeast of Sacramento. The orchard has roughly 100 varieties of apples, pears and quince that are native to countries like France, England and Spain, as well as eastern parts of the U.S.
Recent severe weather events like heat waves and frost have challenged the cider industry, so climate change is top of mind for Barnard. He’s on a mission to not only preserve these heritage varieties but also bring back the old-school cider styles that have been lost to massmarket
production. Posterity’s growing presence in the upper echelon of Bay Area’s fine dining is a start.
“We’re trying to show that cider can stand on its own and belongs in the fine dining setting, just like wine,” he said.
Back at Saison, the meal is wrapping up. The server brings out dessert: sunchoke ice cream served with candied hazelnuts, brown butter cream and a large chocolate tuile. Its pairing? Not the standard demi-sec Champagne or Sauternes, but the semi-sweet, golden-colored Nova from a little-known producer named Posterity Ciderworks.
Here’s where to buy Posterity Ciderworks in the Bay Area (call ahead to confirm
availability): Healthy Spirits. 249 Courtland Ave., San Francisco
Flora & Ferment. 1122 Solano Ave., Albany
Out of the Barrel. 201 Saratoga-Los Gatos Rd., Los Gatos; 1875 S Bascom Ave. Ste #560, Campbell
Cadet Wine & Beer Bar. 930 Franklin St., NapaBottle Barn. 3331-A Industrial Dr., Santa RosaPomme Cider Shop. 531 Broadway, Sonoma