“We started pursuing licensing in 2022, and it took a lot of time trying recipes,” says Caleb Harty, owner of Andover Cider Co. “But we started for real in summer of 2023.” The nascent hard cider company, which produces bone-dry products—in the parlance of winemaking, there is no residual sugar in their bottlings—has just celebrated its one-year anniversary. Exclusively sold in off-premises accounts, Andover Cider Co. is available throughout the North Shore, as well as in select Massachusetts areas, like parts of Cape Cod, the Berkshires, and Greater Boston.
The idea behind the brand, Harty says, started in 2019, when his wife was pregnant with their first child. “I was having some digestive health issues,” he says. “I had a comprehensive health panel done, and they thought that I did have an autoimmune response to gluten, so I more or less cut out beer.” Cider, he notes, is “more or less gluten-free,” but he had found it somewhat distasteful in the past. “I really didn’t like it, because it was just generally too sweet, or if it wasn’t too sweet, it just didn’t have good flavor,” he says.
Harty started thinking about a future-facing cider project that might address some of these issues. It began to take shape in his mind. Two years later, Harty and his wife moved to Andover from North Reading. Their new property had a barn—a barn that, he thought, might be perfect for brewing cider.
“With beer being out, I thought: Maybe I could do a better job making this,” he says. The next year, he started pursuing it, investigating regulations and licensing. The barn, he says, was built in 1857, so he converted the old horse stalls to make it a workable space. “And then we got some tanks and started experimenting,” he says. “And friends and family said, ‘Hey, this is really good. We’ve never had cider like this before.’”
Harty added more tanks and continued to experiment, and then brought on Jon Hagnauer as his head of operations and Mary Gould as his head of marketing and branding. Working full time at a financial services practice, Harty Financial, with his brother, Harty says, did not permit for wholesale devotion to a second career, so Hagnauer is there for the day-to-day operations. “He had a lot of experience in home-brewing,” Harty says. “So now he’s really helping make the cider, bottle the cider, deliver the cider.”
Andover Cider Co. is a small-batch operation, producing roughly 650 500-ml bottles each month. The brand is represented in just over 25 retailers across Massachusetts, with a heavy concentration on the North Shore. Juice is sourced from local farms throughout New England. Juice is picked up the same day of pressing and is then fermented without the addition of sulfites or velcorin, a microbial inhibitor that is sometimes added to hard ciders and that requires the use of a Hazmat suit for those who handle it.
Because there are no additives, Harty says, the equipment must be kept scrupulously clean. “Every time we touch anything, we’re spraying it down with a sanitizer solution,” Harty says. “We’re washing all our equipment super thoroughly. We’re triple-washing, triple-sanitizing, triple-rinsing.” The result is a hard cider that lacks any of the components that may contribute to headaches or other complaints in wine and cider drinkers. Some compare these ciders, Harty notes, to fine white wines.
Last fall, the team submitted their ciders to the U.S. Open Cider Championship, a major North American contest; they were awarded the bronze medal in the traditional dry category. “It was pretty incredible,” Harty says. “That was blind taste-testing by judges all throughout the U.S., Canada, and Wales.”
In summer, Andover Cider Co. ran a limited-edition raspberry cider, adding in fresh local raspberries at the end of fermentation. Just in time for the holidays, it will be introducing another specialty flavor, a holiday-centric cranberry cider, issued in a 750-ml bottle—and sure to sell out fast as the season approaches. And although the future is just starting to unfold for this exciting brand, there is plenty left to toast.