Plants, People, Science

The Art and Science of Cider Making - A Discussion with Dr. Greg Peck

• American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) • Season 2 • Episode 2

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Embark on an intoxicating voyage through the storied groves of apple history and the intricate science of cider with Dr. Greg Peck from Cornell's School of Integrative Plant Science. Prepare your palate for a revelation as we uncover why cider apples bear little resemblance to their grocery store relatives, and how a symphony of tannins, sugars, and acidity beautifully ferment into the cider that elevates our dining experiences. Greg's expertise illuminates the journey from orchard to glass, revealing the transformative art that turns simple apples into complex beverages with every press and ferment. Our conversation is a rich blend of natural chemistry and meticulous craft, sure to deepen your appreciation for cider's robust charm.

This episode also delves into the practical research that guides orchard optimization—think sunlight exposure, phenolic development, and the pivotal role of nitrogen in fermentation. It's a masterclass in managing apple varieties and maximizing yields to shape the future of fine cider.

Read the HortTechnology article "Growing Apples for Hard Cider Production in the United States—Trends and Research Opportunities" at https://doi.org/10.21273/HORTTECH04488-19.

The HortScience article "Fruitlet Thinning Improves Juice Quality in Seven High-tannin Cider Cultivars" is available at https://doi.org/10.21273/HORTSCI17096-23 and "Fruitlet Thinning Reduces Biennial Bearing in Seven High-tannin Cider Apple Cultivars" is at https://doi.org/10.21273/HORTSCI17455-23.

Additional information about Dr. Greg Peck is available at https://cals.cornell.edu/gregory-michael-peck.

Learn more about the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) at https://ashs.org/.
HortTechnology, HortScience and the Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science are all open-access and peer-reviewed journals, published by the American Society of Horticultural Science (ASHS). Find them at journals.ashs.org.

Consider becoming an ASHS member at https://ashs.org/page/Becomeamember!

You can also find the official webpage for Plants, People, Science at ashs.org/plantspeoplesciencepodcast, and we encourage you to send us feedback or suggestions at https://ashs.org/webinarpodcastsuggestion.

Podcast transcripts are available at https://plantspeoplescience.buzzsprout.com.

On LinkedIn find Sam Humphrey at linkedin.com/in/samson-humphrey. Curt Rom is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/curt-rom-611085134/. Lena Wilson is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lena-wilson-2531a5141/.

Thank you for listening!


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Sam Humphrey:

Welcome to 'Plants People Science', a podcast by the American Society for Horticultural Science, where we talk about all things horticulture. In today's episode, we discuss cider and the amazing science and people that bring us this wonderful drink. Today, we have a very special guest, Dr. Greg Peck, who is an associate professor at Cornell's School of Integrative Plant Science. In 2018, the American Cider Association named him Grower Advocate of the Year and he teaches several cider and orchard management classes alongside his fascinating research. Dr Peck, welcome to the show.

Greg Peck:

Hi Sam, good morning.

Curt Rom:

Hey Dr Peck. This is Curt Rom. I've got a question for you for the conversation today. Would you like us to call you Dr Peck, or would you like us to call you Greg? What are you most comfortable with?

Greg Peck:

Let's use Greg, I think, a nice casual tone. Okay if I call you Curt and Sam?

Curt Rom:

That'd be great.

Sam Humphrey:

Absolutely. Greg, in your words, what do you do?

Greg Peck:

Well, yeah, that's a great question for an academic. We'll be here for days. My official job title with Cornell is associate professor. I have a 60% research appointment, 30% teaching and 10% extension. Within my research program I do several projects. We're going to talk today about the cider research, but I also work in organic apple systems, I do some work in sustainability and also crop load management for apples using some modeling work with pollen tube growth.

Curt Rom:

Greg, today I think we'd like to focus in on the part of your work on cider. "Cider" is kind of a short word. It's a small word but it seems to have kind of big implication, big meaning. When we say cider, what do we mean? What do you mean when you say "cider Great?

Greg Peck:

Great question, Curt, because it does have a lot of different meanings. I think traditionally in the United States "cider" meant a sweet, unfermented juice. It came right off of press, i usually brown and cloudy. In the northeastern US it was a big part of a lot of the average tourism Traditionally. here in the you- pick operations and you go and pick apples, get cider, get cider apple donuts. donuts U nfermented juice. Today we think about cider more as a fermented beverage. And so cider has a long, long history dating back centuries in Europe. It's where apple juice is fermented, usually by yeast -- always by yeast, I guess -- and the sugar gets converted to alcohol. So you have an alcoholic product. Some people will refer to it as hard cider. Many parts of Europe, they just call it cider. There's some back and forth in the industry whether hard cider has this kind of negative connotation, "hard being something that maybe isn't a positive attribute. There's some producers say we just want to call it cider, not hard cider. Today in our conversation when we say cider, we are talking about the fermented product.

Curt Rom:

Okay, thanks a lot. In preparation for today. I was reading several of your articles and you've been very prolific in publishing about cider apple production. The cultivars that you talk about are not familiar with me. I don't see them at the grocery store. So what differentiates a cider apple and a good cider apple from the apples I see at the grocery store -- the fresh market, the consumable, the edible and cookable apples?

Greg Peck:

Right. So cider apples are a very difficult subset of apples to define, because all apples contain sugar, and so yeast can convert the juice from any apple into alcohol and you'd have hard cider. However, there is a subset of apples that have very specific chemical attributes that make them uniquely purpose- driven for making hard cider. And so this might be their sugar content. They have higher sugar, so you get a higher alcohol content. That might be their acidity, and so you get a product that's sharper or more sour, which lends a little bit more of a backbone to the finished cider.

Greg Peck:

Or what's really interesting to us in our program, and what's really interesting to a lot of the cider producers, is they might have a very high concentration of a subset of phenolics or polyphenols called tannins, and these are the ones that the compounds that lend to really make a robust product. Makes it bitter or astringent, depending on the specific types of tannins in the product. But for a fresh eating apple, high concentration of tannin would be very unpleasant, and so oftentimes the cider producers will call these spitters, because once you take a bite out of the fresh apple, you want to spit it out of your mouth as quickly as possible.

Sam Humphrey:

That sounds traumatic. I don't want ever to eat an apple like that! But cider is delicious. So there are many factors, then, that go into making these apples good for cider production. But on top of that there's also the post-harvest treatments. There's here's and pressing and fermentation. How does all that change the flavor of cider?

Greg Peck:

Well, it's very dramatic, and we'll probably over the course of our conversation today, try to draw on analogies to wine production, because I think a lot of cider production is very much similar to wine production. So grapes have juice in them. You have to somehow extract that juice, and then the yeast will ferment the sugar in that juice into wine. And we know, though, that when you eat a grape, it doesn't taste like wine. The flavor composition changes dramatically over the fermentation process and the finished product. For the most part, especially for the Vitis vinifera ( the European wine grapes) are very different between juice and wine. The same is true for cider. When you're, if you have sweet cider, the unfermented product, it's not going to taste the same as the fermented cider. That's because the flavor volatiles change. You might have some changes in aromatics and you might have some changes in the acid and the phenolic composition over the course of fermentation and also aging.

Greg Peck:

When we look for characteristics for what do we want for cider apple right, because I'm a horticulturalist, of course, and that's what we're here to talk about, I'm on the apple production side we always have to kind of think about okay, well, what is this juice going to be like in fermentation and what's going to be like after fermentation. It's really important and it's maybe something that, when we think about apple quality attributes and a lot of the research that goes into how do we improve apple quality for commercial production we're also thinking about peel color, fruit size maybe, and for the breeding angle might be crispiness, right, we have a ton of apples now that are crisp, this crisp, that, or the sugar acid balance in there. But for cider production we have other characteristics as well that we're really trying to hone in on. So it's different. There's a lot to draw on, but different.

Sam Humphrey:

With decades, centuries of experience of literature talking about how people are making this cider and what sorts of apples work the best. There's a very rich history there. Would you give us an abbreviated history of cider in America?

Greg Peck:

Yeah, so cider in America. When the European colonists first arrived here, they definitely wanted alcohol, right, well, other than the Puritans, after the Puritans, maybe. And so where humans go, typically alcohol follows, and they did try to bring over Viti s vinifera. A lot of those grapevines failed because we have phylloxera. Phylloxera is actually endemic to North America and it's one of our tests that pests released into the world, and it's an invasive pest in many other parts of the world. So a lot of those grapevines perished. They did eventually figure out how to grow apples here in North America, and cider became just part of the landscape, in terms of both physical landscape but also the culinary landscape in the Eastern US, right, a lot of farms would have cider apple trees, they would produce cider. It was a very localized production. Sometimes it was used in commerce, but mostly just for household use, or sometimes just very much so a local thing.

Greg Peck:

Fast forward, you know, centuries. We get up to the late 1800s. We start having a temperance movement, people started to see the ills of alcohol consumption and we had prohibition in the early 1900s. And so one of the famous kind of mythologies about prohibition is that the prohibitionists, the temperance movement, went around chopping down all the apple trees because they were being used for making cider. And it probably happened to some extent, maybe not as much as the mythology says. Certainly it was some famous pictures of it that really dramatized that.

Greg Peck:

But coming out of prohibition, what happened is that not only did we have a shift in our kind of view of alcohol consumption but we also had a shift in our demographics in the country. We had a lot of immigration from Northern Europe, places like Ireland and Germany, beer drinking countries, and after prohibition, instead of having an agricultural society, an agrarian society, we started to move towards a more urban society. So it's a lot easier to make beer for urban masses because it's grain, right. Beer is made from a grain. You can store it year round. You can transport that grain; it doesn't have a very much water content. Transport it into urban centers and make beer where the people are. So cider largely died away.

Greg Peck:

If it wasn't prohibition, it was really certainly those demographic changes that happened and also the change in our economic structure in our country after prohibition. So that was in the 1930s and it really wasn't until the 1990s, 60- 70 years later, that we started to see a few producers say, hey, we can also make alcohol from apples, we should try this. So we had a few cider producers starting in the '90s and then in the 2000s we started to see I think it probably ties into some of the local food movement, some of the change in demographics where people want to try different things and new foods, and we started to see a resurgence about 20 years ago in cider production production, so now cider is produced by nearly 1,400 different companies around the US in all 50 states, including Alaska, Hawaii, Texas. I mean there's ciders in all these places and for retail sales it's probably somewhere around a $1.5 billion industry.

Curt Rom:

That's an interesting story. Yeah, even in the state of Arkansas and the turn of the 20th century, going 19th to 20th century, our large industry was built on either cider apples, brandy apples or drying apples, which is interesting. So, there's this resurgence in the 1990s, Greg Peck is finishing a PhD, how you get involved in -- What caused the interest in you starting to work on cider apples? Because I've been in this and there's not a lot of us pomologists that have focused on that market. What got you into it?

Greg Peck:

It really started when I was at my first tenure track job at Virginia Tech and I got contacted. I had a 50-50 research extension split so I worked a lot with the growers in the state on a lot of different issues around pomology and apple production, mostly for the fresh market. But I got contacted by a few of them within a year or two of being there and saying, "ey, we're getting calls from some of our local cideries and they want us to plant these weird varieties that we've never heard of. Should we do it?" And I said, wow, geez, I don't know, let's try to figure this out. And so we started off collaborating with an ag economist. We did some cost of production studies. That was really where we started.

Greg Peck:

What's the economic feasibility? The growers wanted to know, is this economically feasible? And those results were really favorable and the calls kept coming to the apple growers saying, "ey, we want this variety, we want that variety. All of a sudden it was "we want so many different varieties because the cider producers didn't really understand the horticultural traits of these, and so they just said, "oh, we've read about this, we've read about that, we want these varieties. So the next series of studies and really it's still ongoing was about cultivar evaluation. We say, okay, well, there's a price premium for these and the demand is high, the supply is low and now we have to figure out which ones of these cider apple cultivars should we really be growing in Virginia and continue that work in my current job at Cornell.

Curt Rom:

That's an interesting start. So now you're knee- deep into cider, cider- barrel deep, I guess. As you have emerged yourself in the science, what are some of the big questions? What are the research questions? You know, what are things -- I know there can be both grower questions that are researchable, but also, I'm sure, now that you've been working on this for a decade plus, you see some deeper questions. So what are the questions? What? Where's the research edge?

Greg Peck:

Yeah, we have several lines of research in my lab and you know many of them are applied. Just because you know some of this, you know we haven't no one's really, as you said, Curt, no one's really touched this topic for 100 years plus in our country or really around the world. We're starting to see a lot more research everywhere, including other researchers in the US, which is exciting. But in terms of my lab, we have questions around, I mentioned the tannins and the polyphenols, a subset of polyphenols that lend to mouth feel and robustness to a product. And so now we're really interested to understand what pre-harvest factors can affect fruit quality, therefore juice quality, cider quality. So I look at a lot of this very similar to again going back to the analogy with grapes and wine, as what viticulture is to wine production, right? What are the factors that we can manipulate in an orchard that will affect cider quality? So, from the very basic side, we just have to understand, like when do phenolics form in apples? Right? There hasn't been a lot of research on that. What controls polyphenol production in apples? Right? So there's been research on this, looking at it from a nutraceutical, from a human health perspective, but you know we're talking about apples for cider production that have 10 plus times the level of these compounds, and so a lot of the work that we're doing is showing that the phenolics developed very early in the season, typically right at, maybe at the point of fertilization, right as soon as cell division really starts. All the way up through that cell division phase, that first 30, 45 days after bloom is when we're seeing a lot of these phenolics develop. And then it kind of is a dilution question. As cells enlarge, they get more water and they might change a bit in composition. And we're actually studying that right now to try to figure out. You know, they polymerizing more or we're getting some different types of phenolics developing later in the season.

Greg Peck:

And then on top of that we ask questions about, you know, what factors might change that concentration or composition. So we look at things like crop load, right, of course, crop load. For apples, crop load is so important and you know we find very strong correlations between how many apples are on an apple tree and the concentration of phenolics in the apples themselves. Right, there's a real dilution effect. The more apples you have, the lower the phenolic content. So what causes that? Right, that's the question, and so we're still trying to look at that. We know that it's related to crop load. Is it a source- sink relationship? Is it about the carbon reallocation in the tree? Is it other factors genes being up- or down- regulated, that you know, in response to carbon availability or response to some other factors? We're getting pretty deep into those questions right now in my lab.

Curt Rom:

Sounds like typical biology. Both nature and nurture are important here, yeah, for sure.

Greg Peck:

And so besides for crop load.

Greg Peck:

We also look at things like sunlight, and so we've done a lot of projects over the last five, six years, shading different whole trees, shading different organs on the tree. If we just shade an apple versus the apple and the spur leaves, the apple, the spur leaves and the whole grooming shoot. You know, we're trying to really understand and get at some of these source- sink relationships. So that's one line of questioning. We have a whole other line of questioning too, looking at nitrogen, right. So we're a horticulturalists, we're always, you know, go for the big things that are going to control a lot of things in plants, right carbon and nitrogen. And so nitrogen, interestingly, is another very specific thing related to cider, which is that and again back to the analogy with grapes is that one of the attributes, one of the quality attributes for cider before fermentation is the amount of yeast-assimilable nitrogen or YAN, and this is something that wine producers talk a lot about, because yeast need that nitrogen for their metabolism. In addition, if nitrogen content, if the YAN content, (the yeast-assimilable nitrogen content or YAN content), is low, the yeast, what they'll do is, through respiration, we'll start depositing electrons on sulfur compounds as opposed to nitrogen, because they've reduced all the nitrogen, and then they have to get rid of their electrons right through respiration somehow, and so they'll start reducing sulfur.

Greg Peck:

So reduced sulfur, or hydrogen sulfide, is the same compound that natural gas companies put into their natural gas so that it smells like rotten eggs could be skunky. Clearly this is a fault, right? This is something that we'd find unpleasant in the finished product. So apples, by and large, have a lower concentration of nitrogen than grapes do, and so this is adding all sorts of new research questions about how do we increase the nitrogen content in apples, but also what yeast strains, right? So we work a little bit with the knowledge of this. What yeast strains are there? The yeast strains that are more adaptable to low nitrogen environments, and that kind of thing. So a whole bunch of line of questioning along those around nitrogen as well.

Curt Rom:

I have a production question for you. It's not really pomological, but maybe it is so in the fermentation process. Do fermenters add yeast or are these surface- native, surface indigenous yeasts? And so the pomological question is: are there factors, are there things that we would do from the production standpoint that would change the indigenous yeast population, the surface yeast population, if that's important in the fermentation process? Again, I'm ignorant about it. You gotta fill me in, tell me.

Greg Peck:

Man, this is a great question because this is really a hot button issue for the cider industry right now. Again, analogies to the wine industry. The kind of standard process or protocol would be that the cider producer would add sulfite (SO2) to their juice before fermentation, which would decrease significantly the yeast population, the native yeast population, and then they would inoculate with a commercial strain of yeast and then allow the fermentation to proceed. But there's this whole subset of the industry that wants to do natural fermentation or spontaneous fermentation would be another name for that which is allowing, as you said, the yeast that were either in the orchard or oftentimes in the press room or on the pressing equipment to allow those yeast strains to become the dominant strain in fermentation. And it's a little bit less of a controlled process but something that a lot of our smaller scale I'd say some of our medium scale producers are doing in order to allow. Either it's a philosophical reason for doing it right, because they believe in the more natural process of that, or believe that it is a more natural process, whereas I think for a lot of our larger scale producers they wanna make sure that they have a reliable product that's gonna be the same any day of the year in any given year, right, and so they wanna be able to control it.

Greg Peck:

So we haven't actually done any work looking at what kind of pre-harvest factors might affect yeast diversity in orchards, but there's a few people working on that topic. I think we'll probably discover some interesting things over time. There were a few papers that came out of France a number of years ago where they do some natural fermentations or spontaneous fermentations, and what was really interesting was that the yeast strains and the spontaneous fermentations turned out to be identical to the commercial strains, even though no commercial inoculation happened. And that's because they were the yeast strains that were colonizing everything around and that's probably why they became commercialized is because they are out competing their cousins and becoming the dominant strain in the environment and also in the fermentation. So it'll be fun to see if the similar story is true for cider.

Sam Humphrey:

You know it's a bit surreal to me because we're talking and I'm learning about the chemistry and the sulfites and the yeast strains, and you're going so in depth into plant physiology, and yet here's a video there's of you giving an orchard tour and you being very involved with growers. And I'm really fascinated by the idea of systems thinking in what you do. I'm curious if you could give your thoughts on the importance of systems thinking in horticulture.

Greg Peck:

Yeah, thanks, Sam, for that question.

Greg Peck:

I think that really you know the idea of thinking about agricultural production as a system is something that you know.

Greg Peck:

Maybe I came into my PhD or my graduate work and my master's in PhD with. Certainly it's something that evolved during that time, studying organic and conventional systems and comparing them and knowing that no one practice, no one management strategy in an orchard is gonna tell you the whole story, and so I've always been interested in the whole picture and I think that probably comes through in my cider research too, where I kind of touch on different topics. Some of that is thinking like a grower, thinking like what are the growers and answering questions from them and trying to just keep up with what growers have to think about, right, Cause they're always about the system right, they're never just about one aspect of an orchard. And I think, because of the newness of cider apple research in our country and really around the world, it allows me to kind of apply some of the systems thinking and try to figure out, okay, what are the key questions, when can we actually make some positive contributions to the science but also to the producers and answer some questions for them?

Sam Humphrey:

Fantastic. It seems like you must also be teaching this in your classes, right? You teach multiple cider classes, and how does that work: teaching such a varied class to a group of students?

Greg Peck:

Yeah. So we teach two classes related to cider production specifically at Cornell and we do it through the viticulture and enology major, and our cider lecture is a 2000 level class. It's open to students in their first through fourth year or beyond. We get a few grad students in there. And it's really a bit of cider appreciation. We do tastings almost every class where they'll taste three or four different products. Or sometimes it's doctor ed products where we've added certain products, compounds to display faults, right. We might add a lot of hydrogen sulfide, for example, so they can really get a sense of what that rotten egg smell is. We do some regional tastings what are ciders from Spain like, what are ciders from France like and some of the, because they have some unique production characteristics that really typify their styles of cider. It's fun.

Greg Peck:

We do it in a very large lecture hall that was designed for wine tasting and now cider tasting. That allows the TAs to walk between the rows and pour ciders and we typically get 100, 110 students in that class. What's great about it is I co-teach it with my colleague, Kathy Arnink, and she's a microbiologist by training and she's an enologist and so I get to teach everything, probably about the industry, but a lot about apple production, up until the point that the apples will get milled and pressed into juice and then I pass the mic to my colleague. And Kathy then will teach about fermentation and the microbiology and all the things that are in her wheelhouse. So it's a really nice partnership. The students get a lot out of it. I think we, as a general- interest 2000 level class, we get students from all over the university take it, and so we're always -- Kathy and I are always -- trying to slip in as much science as possible. Well, we know that the students are there to taste cider.

Curt Rom:

I want to go back and ask a production question again. You know I've never worked with cider apples. I do like cider, just to be clear about that. So I'm a consumer, but I've never worked with them scientifically. But as a pomologist you know crop load means a lot and so there's this kind of -- I apologize for the pun-- sweet spot in crop load that we can optimize crop load, maximize fruit size, maximize fruit flavor, which usually means, currently means sweetness. So from a cider grower perspective, what is the question? Is it quantity of apples on a tree to increase production or is it the quality of those apples? And is there a sour spot for cider, just like there's a sweet spot for edible apples?

Greg Peck:

A lot of the cider apples that producers are trying to grow in the United States come out of Europe and a lot of these apple cultivars were -- and I'll use variety and cultivar synonymously. ASHS likes us to use cultivar in our written work, and the growers always want us to use variety, and so sometimes I slip back and forth just for definition terms. But a lot of these cider cultivars were selected 100 plus years ago for systems where they were being grown in like standard sized trees that might have been 25, 30 plus feet tall and they were grazing animal sheep or cows underneath it: very imprecise sort of production systems. Whatever came in any given year would be what they harvested, and the apples were typically harvested off of the ground. So having a propensity for pre-harvest fruit drop was not a negative quality attribute like it is with our culinary apples today, and so a lot of these apple cultivars tend to be very biennial, meaning they'll have a year with a lot of fruit, naturally, and then the next year with little to no fruit, and they have these large swings. Well, that's fine in you know, 100 years ago for these very kind of low input systems that were feeding into, you know, farmhouse production. But in modern business we really can't go a year without a crop, or certainly even sometimes if there's a product that has a specific you know mix of certain varieties or cultivars that they want in there, they have to have those reliably right. So now the question is how do we grow these really kind of wonky varieties right in a modern production system and a high density system and crop them annually? And so it always is, Curt, a question of quantity and quality. Right, it always is, and that's true for culinary apples, that's true for wine grapes and it's certainly true for cider apples.

Greg Peck:

So some of our recent research that we actually just published HortScience for ASHS. We published two papers out of David Zakalik's master's work where we did three years of study looking at the different levels of crop load, and we identified crop load or defined crop load as the number of apples per trunk cross-sectional area, which is a nice metric to kind of regardless of the tree size. Physiologically they had the same fruit to vegetative biomass ratio, or at least that's what we strive for. It's not precise but it's close. And so we created a whole range of different crop loads on these trees over three years. Did the same trees, the same crop load, and then we looked at things like the biennial bearing habit, the total yields and a lot of the fruit and juice quality attributes. So lots of details in there. I encourage you to go read those papers, because I think they're really well-written and David did a really great job on his master's and on those publications from his master's work on those.

Greg Peck:

But the take-home was that we could probably crop a lot of these varieties, about twice as much as we do our culinary apples. We'll still have some biennial bearing, but we can drastically reduce the biennial bearing. So instead of having these swings with all production and no production, we get into the in-between. There's still going to be some swings, but when we look at it cumulatively over the long term we find that the cumulative yield per acre or hectare is larger at somewhere around nine fruit per trunk cross-sectional area and that also then will kind of balance between the highest fruit quality or juice quality is at the lowest crop loads.

Greg Peck:

That's probably impractical from a economic standpoint, right, and then the lowest juice quality, t he worst juice quality, is when we over crop the trees. They had a ton of apples on them, ,but poor quality. So we did a little bit of hand-waving and kind of looked at all this data from his research and came up with the number we're just trying to give growers some guidance at about nine fruit per trunk cross-sectional area for a lot of our cider apples. So by comparison, Honeycrisp, a lot of growers are shooting for about four fruit per cross-sectional area. Gala, probably about six in our climate fruit per cross-sectional area. So we're going, you know, sometimes up to twice as much fruit as our culinary apples.

Sam Humphrey:

Wow, that's incredible, and we will include links to those papers in the show notes. I do want to mention that those are in both of them are in Hort Science, is that correct?

Curt Rom:

Correct, yes, and they're really good papers and it's always impressive to me. You know, when you put together a good scientist mentor and a good graduate student, great work happens. So I really enjoyed those papers and congratulations on your co-author and the student. It shows that you can a student can really make a difference to our science.

Greg Peck:

Oh, 100%. I mean Sam asked earlier about, you know, my job and what I do and you know I said I can talk for hours and days on this, but a big part of what we do is mentoring and training graduate students and training new scientists to get into the field, and it's probably one of the hardest things that we do but also one of the most rewarding in the end.

Sam Humphrey:

So, wrapping up here, I am struck that there's a lot, it seems like there's a lot to be excited about. There's exciting research researchy ou described, and I'm sure, many questions that you didn't even mention that are exciting. There are reasons to be excited with teaching and with the different areas of outreach and research in terms of yeasts and fermentation and so many different fields. I'm curious, leaving off, what are you excited about, Dr Peck?

Greg Peck:

Boy. Great question. What's next? What am I really excited by? So we have some new work coming out about mechanical harvesting, which is kind of a practice that's been widely used in Europe for harvesting cider apples, and it's something that really helps with the labor issues.

Greg Peck:

In our country we have huge political issues and also economic issues around harvest labor, so most of our apples in the US are hand harvested. Might be changing down the road with robots, but we can certainly harvest apples a lot more roughly than we can fresh market apples. We can handle some bruising in cider apples because they're going to get milled and pressed into juice. So that's an area of research that we're excited by is trying to figure out. Now we've identified some varieties, we're identifying some management techniques. Now we have to make it cost effective to grow these really unique apples that we know make a really fantastic cider right, these robust ciders, these really great quality attributes. But we need to continually look at okay, how do we do this cost effectively?

Greg Peck:

So mechanization is going to be a big part of that, and I'm also excited by what I'm seeing across the country with cider research, and so, outside of my program, a lot of great cider research has happened by Washington State University, and a big shout out to Carol Miles and her program there. We work a lot together on different projects. She's been working a lot on mechanical harvesting over the years as well, but many other land grant universities around the country are starting to see that their growers are interested in cider apples, that they're diversifying. One really super exciting thing, Sam, is, and I would love for an anthropologist or sociologist to get involved in this with us, is we're seeing a return to the farm from the next generation, where, for years years we always heard, oh, it's hard to get the family farm to keep going and have that sustainability to the next generation because the kids don't want to do it."

Greg Peck:

They want to go and make money doing finance or computer science or whatever. Maybe they want to go into art, but they're not going back to the farm. And we're seeing, in New York at least, there's a lot of examples where the next generation is coming back to the family farm. They say well, you know, I'm interested in apple production, but I'm really interested in cider production and are really growing that industry there. So that's also exciting too is because that speaks well for longevity and kind of generational profitability.

Greg Peck:

The cost of startup of a new food or beverage business is so high and the turnover rate is really high as well. Like, 50% failure rate. And we haven't seen nearly that high in cider, but there's always that concern. And so that kind of generational and vertical integrated systems or vertically integrated businesses being developed is super exciting. So a little bit outside of my wheelhouse research, but something you can tell. I'm excited to see this because it means like, okay, we're doing this work and it's going to mean something down the road too, right, we're not just working on a fad, but we're working on something that is going to be here for the future.

Curt Rom:

Well, Greg, this has been really interesting and I really appreciate your time today. You know our listeners might be interested in your work, so I think they can find you. You have a very good website. If you "Google Greg Peck Cornell," or Greg Peck Cider, you'll go to your lab. Now I want to tell our listeners and I've waited the whole time don't Google Gregory Peck, because you'll get to the wrong star. We're really talking about the pomological star Greg Peck, Cornell University, our cider expert in the United States. But it was a great conversation. I learned a whole lot.

Greg Peck:

Thanks, Curt, Really appreciate your time. Thanks Sam.

Sam Humphrey:

Thank you, Greg. To read more about cider apples and their history, check out a paper co-authored by Greg titled "Growing Apples for Hard Cider Production in the United States: Trends and Research Opportunities." It covers the fascinating trends and challenges in cider production and explains the many differences between American and European cider production practices. This paper is published in HortTechnology, one of the open-source peer-reviewed journals published by the American Society for Horticultural Science. A link to this article and the others we talked about during the episode will be provided in the show notes.

Curt Rom:

And again, as I said, if you want to learn more about Greg and his work, you can find his bio at the Cornell website or you can find him featured in an article in modernfarmer. com.

Sam Humphrey:

If this interview resonates with you, I highly recommend renewing your membership and joining the American Society for Horticultural Science so you can be a part of interest groups like Pomology or Post-Harvest or Fruit Breeding. If you'd like more information about the American Society for Horticultural Science in general, you can go to ashs. org.

Curt Rom:

Thank you, Sam. Thank you for listening today.