Before an eager apple harvesting crew left Craftsbury for orchards around the Northeast Kingdom, Cedar Hannan had a few announcements.
“From various Wildbranch Cider department heads,” Hannan began, eliciting chuckles from the crowd.
The legal department warned about ladders, trees and subpar insurance. Traffic and safety pointed out a treacherous hairpin turn at the Route 100 intersection over Eden Mountain. Community relations explained that an orchard planted in the 1970s by a friend’s late father should be treated with care.
The chuckles were fair: Hannan, 48, is all of those departments, plus owner and cidermaker of Wildbranch, which he founded in 2020. He usually works solo.
On September 30, help showed up. For the third year, bar and retail employees from Barr Hill came to shake trees, taste apples and learn more about the cider they sell at their Montpelier distillery.
As at least half the crew of 10 proclaimed throughout the adventure from Craftsbury to Westfield to Barton: “It’s the best day of the year.”
The experience has a secret mission of helping staff tell the story behind the cider.
Barr Hill has carried bottles of Wildbranch Cider in its Distillery Shop for several years, general manager of hospitality Patrick Amice said. It’s now one of Wildbranch’s top accounts — along with Hill Farmstead Brewery in Greensboro and the Burlington and Stowe farmers markets, where Hannan is a regular vendor.
Wildbranch and Barr Hill also collaborate on special releases: Hannan ages his Orchard Cat cider in barrels that previously held Tom Cat gin, then the distillery takes those barrels back to finish its Tom Cat Ginniversary Blend. (Tastes of the latter are available at Barr Hill’s cocktail bar, an Outstanding Bar finalist in the 2024 James Beard Awards.)
“A lot of places would struggle to get 10 people here on their day off,” Amice said. “Every year, our staff is jumping at the opportunity. They can’t wait.”
It helps that the day falls around peak foliage and ends with a cider-fueled picnic on a picture-postcard NEK hillside. It’s a blast, Amice said, but the experience has a secret mission of helping staff tell the story behind the cider — and behind an important part of Vermont’s working landscape.
Prior to the morning’s warnings, Hannan led a quick tour of the cidery, which occupies a third of the downstairs of a repurposed dairy barn. Two cows and a horse live on the other side of the wall from where he produces 1,200 gallons per year of dry, complex cider from heirloom and wild-foraged apples.
That’s not a lot, as far as commercial cideries go. But Hannan said it’s his “sweet spot.” And Wildbranch has already achieved global acclaim: Hannan’s naturally fermented ciders have won several medals at the Great Lakes International Cider and Perry Competition — the world’s largest contest for ciders made from apples and pears.
Hannan had been a hobby cidermaker for nearly 15 years. In 2020, he planted roughly 90 apple trees on his Craftsbury land, then quit his IT job to launch Wildbranch full time. The orchard hasn’t produced much yet, but he’s hopeful he might get enough for an estate cider in 2026. It would be good timing: He’s slowly building a structure among the trees with the goal of hosting monthly tastings next year.
For now, Hannan’s apples are either foraged or sourced from other growers around the state, such as Cobble Knoll Orchard in Benson. The majority come from the NEK.
One of those, a seedling crab apple named My Heart, was discovered by Robert Linck, Hannan’s brother-in-law, at his Fusda Farm in Craftsbury. The kumquat-size amber and red crabs have an official entry in Pomological Series: Wild Apple Exhibition Vol. 2, a book documenting the second annual Wild and Seedling Pomological Exhibition in Massachusetts. The entry calls it “a real treasure” and the year’s best crab apple “by a landslide.” Cidermakers from Long Island, N.Y., to New Brunswick, Canada, have grafted it into their orchards, Hannan included.
The Barr Hill group tasted the intense crabs, learning that cider apples aren’t always pleasant when you bite into them. The balance of sugar, acid and tannin is more important, Hannan said. My Heart is high in all three.
After the quick lesson, the group hopped into pickup trucks, navigating that hairpin turn from the community relations announcement on the way to the Westfield orchard.
The apples there were less complex than My Heart and much bigger. There’s no record of what’s planted, Hannan said, but he guessed they’re mostly McIntosh or Macoun. The orchard is minimally managed, besides brush hogging and some winter pruning when Hannan has time.
Roger Garufi, Barr Hill’s tour lead, stretched a blue tarp under a loaded tree. Isaiah Mayhew — a local musician who tagged along with his partner, bartender Hannah Lillian Jones — climbed the wooden ladder and scrambled out on a branch, gently shaking off the apples from that section. Flannel-clad helpers zoomed in, placing apples in bins. Garufi moved the tarp, and the process repeated.
“How do we feel about bug holes?” someone asked from behind the tree, picking up apples that had dropped.
“We love bugs,” Hannan replied. “Just no rot and nothing that’s been sitting in bear or deer shit.”
Twenty-five minutes later, the bins were full.
“I like working alone, but that’s the fastest I’ve ever picked 12 bushels,” Hannan said.
“This is what Vermont is all about,” Garufi said. “Entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs.”
Arriving a while later at Windswept Farm in Barton, lead bartender Kurstin King hopped into the bed of one of the trucks to get a better photo of the 360-degree hilltop view: Jay Peak and Québec to the right, May Pond with Bald and Wheeler mountains behind it to the left.
“I could live here,” King said.
“Me, too,” server Kate Powell replied.
Adam Parke has since 1979, operating a Christmas tree business until semiretiring this year to focus on sugar making. He planted the orchard’s heirloom trees 45 years ago; some have since been grafted over. Parke had a hand-drawn map on the back of a plant catalog, Hannan said, but neither is sure how accurate it is these days.
The crew quickly found what it determined to be “a perfect apple.” Shined to ruby red, Jones held it proudly in front of blaze orange and red foliage for a series of glamour shots.
Others hauled bins to two trees in a pasture, which Hannan estimated at 100 years old. The apples tasted pretty good, he said, and were probably higher in sugar than they seemed at first bite. Soon, a large wooden bin in the back of Hannan’s minivan was overflowing with hundreds of pounds of fruit. The trucks were full. Harvest was over.
The following day, Hannan would start pressing. The juice might become part of his crowd-pleasing flagship cider, the Spinney, which is about a third of his total production.
But first, it was time to picnic. Hannan set a table, making the most of the view. Amice unwrapped sandwiches from the Craftsbury General Store, aka the Genny, while Hannan opened a variety of bottles: the Spinney; wild-foraged and fermented Wild²; a crushable sparkling perry; a bright-red sour cherry cider; his “oddball” yet very popular rhubarb wine; and a stunning single-varietal cider made with Ashmead’s Kernel.
“Our customers love this one,” Ania Waite said of the Ashmead’s Kernel. “They buy it instead of Champagne.”
Hannan popped a second bottle of it, pouring it around to celebrate this year’s successful collaboration.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Kingdom Peak | Wildbranch Cider and Barr Hill team up for an annual harvest tradition”
This article appears in Oct 8-14 2025.
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