Food reigns supreme at Thanksgiving. And specific foods, at that. There is the turkey, of course, the stuffing, cranberries, and if you’re lucky, some of my grandmother’s pickled carrots before the pumpkin pie has cooled.
But Thanksgiving isn’t blessed with the great selection of holiday-centric drinks that one enjoys at Christmas. There is no eggnog. No Tom and Jerry. No steaming bowl of bishop. No luxurious French Christmas punch with champagne and sauternes. No coquito. Of course, one can enjoy a nice pinot noir, or perhaps a gamay — light-bodied reds to balance out the heavy-bodied gravy. But as nice as a good pinot noir is for turkey day, it is an excellent wine all the year through.
The Capitol Cider House has a solution: cider. Deliciously dry, the cider from Washington, D.C.’s Petworth neighborhood makes for an excellent Thanksgiving beverage, especially the expression they have made specifically for the holiday. They call it “The Gobbler” which may be a nod to the turkey’s nickname or a description of what one does to the bird. Neither oversweet (the fault of factory-made cider such as Angry Orchard), nor cloying (like the British pub-style of the stuff, such as Strongbow), the Gobbler is made with Thanksgiving in mind. It has hints of tart cranberry and sweet maple syrup.
Jared Fackrell opened the Cider House in 2018, in part to please beer-besotted drinkers looking for something other than an IPA, and in part to recapture hundreds of years of American drinking tradition. “Cider has an incredibly storied history in the U.S.,” Fackrell says, “especially in the mid-Atlantic, where it reigned as the most popular alcoholic beverage.”
In the 19th Century, cider was eagerly consumed from Pennsylvania to Illinois, which just happens to coincide with the map of Johnny Appleseed’s wanderings. Appleseed (Jonathan Chapman) wasn’t planting apple trees with the notion of eating the fruit. Cider was his game.
In Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, the American Story, author Howard Means tells of how the abundance of apples meant there would never be a shortage of cider. This did not go unnoticed by the Prohibitionists, who looked at orchards the way the DEA looks at fields full of coca plants. Those axes that Carry Nation and her followers wielded weren’t just for smashing up whiskey barrels. They were put to work felling apple trees. Prohibitionists argued that “the juice of the apple when it becomes hard cider contains more of the intoxicating element than beer, and if there is a loathsome object on earth it is a cider drunkard.”
In the past century, hard cider fell on hard times. Until the last decade, the drink had largely gone the way the dour old Prohibition ladies wanted it to.
What a travesty. The apple tree is one of the great symbols of nature’s abundance and God’s generosity. Cider belongs on the Thanksgiving table, not just because it is delicious and consonant with the rest of the meal, good reasons though they may be. Cider belongs on the Thanksgiving table as an expression of American sensibilities.
I asked Capitol Cider House founder Fackrell where he saw the Gobbler fitting into the Thanksgiving ritual. Should one enjoy cider while waiting for the turkey to roast? While mashing turnips or making stuffing? With the meal? Or how about while watching football after putting away a plate full of seconds?
“All of the above.”
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
