There's a reason we're called Wayside. The best things, it turns out, are often the ones growing just off the path — untended, unassuming, and entirely unbothered by your expectations.

Wayside Cider started with a simple idea: that the best cider comes from the place where you live. With all due respect to imported cultivars and European traditions, our hearts belong to the wild and abandoned apple trees growing in the hills of Delaware County. The ones nobody planted on purpose. The scraggly, stubborn ones that figured it out on their own.

We hand-pick them. We graft them. We press them slow and bottle by hand, from orchard to glass, every step of the way. Wild apples give less juice than cultivated ones — that's just the truth of it — but what they give you instead is something you can't manufacture. Complexity. Character. A flavor that tastes unmistakably like this place.

Our home is High Meadows Farm in East Delhi, a working farm where our Tamworth and Gloucester Old Spot pigs make excellent use of the spent pressings. Nothing goes to waste up here. We knew what we were getting into and started Wayside anyway, which is either principled or thickheaded depending on who you ask.

The taproom is in two restored barns behind Main Street in Andes, NY. Come find us at 55 Redden Lane. We'd love to pour you something.