Bellefonte cidery takes home awards at Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg

This year’s Pennsylvania Farm Show brought national cider experts to the Harrisburg stage to compare, contrast and place judgment on more than 100 different ciders across nine categories, all produced in Pennsylvania. One cidery that caught their eye was Good Intent Cider, located in Bellefonte.

Good Intent Cider placed second in the Modern Cider – Dry category for its Late Bloomer cider and third in the Wood Aged Cider category for its North Meets South cider.

“North Meets South has always been our bestseller,” said Adam Redding, cider maker and proprietor at Good Intent Cider. To create the wood-aged cider, he said he and his team “try to choose a blend of apples for the base cider, before it even goes into the barrel, that already has a fair amount of character and has enough structure that when it comes out of the barrel, it still has a decent apple flavor and you’re not overwhelmed by the flavor of the bourbon or the wood itself.”

For the Late Bloomer Cider, the cidery blends apples that don’t necessarily bloom late, but that are picked very late in the season. “We let those apples mature in cold storage for several months before we press them. ... These are apples bred for long-term storage, so that once you finally do eat them, they’ve really ripened and gained a lot of character,” Redding said.

While the Wood Aged Cider category is relatively self-explanatory, Redding further clarifies what it means for his North Meets South cider to be placed in the Modern Cider category.

Modern ciders, he said, “are made with apples that are modern in the sense that they’re a more recent cultivar that’s been bred (as) dessert or culinary apples, and weren’t necessarily bred as cider apples. They won’t have a lot of the characteristics that cider apples have. Cider apples tend to be more stringent, they have more tannin and the flavors they provide are quite a bit different than the modern apple. That’s really what separates it. The heritage apples are old breeds and the modern apples are newer ones.”

North Meets South is currently available in the Good Intent Cider tasting room, on South Potter Street in Bellefonte.

Winning awards for their labors isn’t the only reason the Good Intent Cider team attends the Pennsylvania Farm Show, though. Other benefits the show provides include market research, camaraderie and a bit of public relations.

“It’s really great to be at the judging, and see who the new people are, up-and-coming, and what varieties they’re producing and what’s winning and what’s being judged well. That’s really market research,” Redding said. “The other important (aspect of the show) is to just support cider in general and see that more people in the public know about it. ... A lot of people have no idea there’s anything else out there other than the mainstream varieties. I think the general (public), they don’t know what cider can be.”

In the coming months, Good Intent Cider plans to offer a few new varieties in its tasting room, including a modern apple offering called Crimson Topaz. “It tastes phenomenal,” Redding said. “It doesn’t even taste like it came from an apple. It tastes like it came from grapefruit. It’s pretty wild.”

Pennsylvania currently ranks sixth for U.S. cider producers and this is the second year the Pennsylvania Farm Show has held a cider competition.