For brewing, Hall had trained at the Siebel Institute. While he sees that training as “great and important,” Hall says that his strongest inspiration has always come from Old World brewers, especially in England and France. “Nobody really brews by the book there. They’re so multi-generational, they brewed the way they figured out how to brew.”
Whatever insights and skills Hall acquired in the Old World, he was going to face adaptation in the New. Back in the day, as Hall observes, “You couldn’t call an equipment supplier and say, ‘I’ll have a seven-barrel system with steam.’” From yeast, hops and malt to brewing equipment, you worked with what you could build, create, nurture or find.

Hall took a cider class in England, “but what I really wanted to do was taste as much cider as I could and talk to people, find out why they made their cider that way.” Quality is in the details. Hall set out to learn what traditional cider-makers did, “and what they thought the strengths were, and the parts of the process they thought were most important.”

Photo via Virtue Cider

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