Andy & Ned

Freedom’s Edge Cider started in 2018 as a series of less-than-sober, late-night, conversations between brothers-in-law Ned Ervin and Andy Kaplan.

Ned is a former chemical engineer and professional chef who has been making cider in his garage since before he was old enough to drink it (“I figured out,” he says, “that they wouldn’t sell you the finished product but they’d sell you the ingredients.”).

Early that fall, Andy had begun noticing, on trips from his home in Camden to Ned’s in Waterville, that every road was lined with wild apple trees. Some research into Maine’s cider history & culture taught us that Maine had once produced some of the finest cider in the world, owing to its ideal apple-growing climate.

Given that history, we began to wonder why almost all the draft cider we saw came from out of state…and why most of it was so sweet that it was close to undrinkable. A few experiments taught us that New England dessert apples had very high acidity, and when you fermented the apples (turning the sugar to alcohol) you were left with a beverage that was hard to drink, unless you added lots of sweetener.

Back in the day, most Maine farms grew apples specifically for cider, with low acid and lots of tannin. These apples were terrible to eat but blended into a rich, cider which needed much less sweetening. We asked around where we could buy those types of apples, and learned that nobody in Maine grew them anymore. Many cider orchards had been cut down during prohibition, and for decades after there was almost no interest in hard cider.

We convinced a cider maker in New Hampshire with his own orchard to sell us some Dabinett, and made our first batch. It made the best cider either of us had ever tasted.

We’d like to say “the rest is history,” but that’s not true (yet!). We managed to find a great piece of land that we thought was in Freedom and, briefly, were known as the Freedom Cider Company. A more careful survey disclosed that the land was actually in Albion, right at the edge of Freedom…and so Freedom’s Edge Cider was born.

That fall, we began fermenting our first few hundred gallons in Andy’s garage. By the spring, we had come up with the recipe for our original blend, which was a well-balanced combination of some dessert apples, some low acid bittersweets, and some highly tannic wild seedlings. Once we had it right we added back a touch of cryo-concentrated fresh juice to provide a bit of fruit forwardness.

In the spring of 2020, we planted seven acres of bittersweet and bittersharp apple varietals. These won’t mature for several years, so in the meantime we get our apples wherever we can, from local Maine growers whenever possible.

By late summer, we started packaging our cider. To get the carbonation right in the early kegs we put them into a trough filled with ice water and we came outside every half hour for the better part of two weeks to shake them with our feet. We figured out later that we’d spent around $300 on ice for every $125 keg we produced. Eventually we invested in a stand-up freezer, which saved us from buying the ice but didn’t really make the carbonation go any quicker. For that, we’d need a dedicated carbonation tank…which would have to wait until we moved to an honest-to God production facility.

In August of 2020, we sold our first kegs to the Proper Pig in Waterville and Cushnoc in Augusta. We drank most of them ourselves, partly out of the thrill of seeing our product on tap, and partly because we didn’t quite believe anyone else would order it. Soon enough, we learned we had fans, and the kegs started to empty even on days when we couldn’t show up to drink. By that fall, we’d sold through what we’d made the previous winter, and we had to scramble to meet demand. 

That winter, we moved out of Andy’s garage into a facility we built near our orchard. We began canning in March 2021, and soon Freedom’s Edge was available throughout most of the state.

We’ve extended our range a bit since then, and we’ve added a few more products to our portfolio, but we still are (and will remain) a family owned cidery in the heart of central Maine.