Alongside Utah Highway 24 run cliff bands and domed buttes, leading visitors into Capitol Reef National Park, the town of Torrey and Etta Place Cider.

Husband and wife couple, Robert Marc and Ann Torrence, left their home in Salt Lake City and their careers – he worked in neuroscience, and she was a writer and photographer – for what they had thought would be a vacation home where they could eventually retire.

Their Torrey property came with “use it or lose it” water rights. Water is a valuable resource in the desert, so Robert and Ann brainstormed worthy uses for theirs.

“We wanted to do something interesting and meaningful with the land,” Robert said.

They gravitated to the idea of growing heritage apples, but Torrey is not an ideal place to grow fruit. At 7,000 feet in elevation, the town endures cold winters; the bright sun can scorch tree bark and the climate overall is drier than optimal.

Nevertheless, there is a precedent for orchards in the region. Just down the road, the historic town of Fruita at 5,400 feet, now part of Capitol Reef National Park, is known for its 19th century, pioneer-planted orchards of apricots, cherries, peaches, pears, plums – and apples. The park has about two dozen varieties of apples, including the Capitol Reef Red, recognized in 1994 as a unique variety found only in the park.

An adverse climate didn’t dissuade Robert and Ann, so they began planting trees in 2012, eventually expanding to 500 trees. “I never do anything small,” Ann said.

Their vacation home was becoming a business and new career.

The couple arbitrarily chose to lay out their 90 varieties of apples in alphabetical order, an arrangement that almost guaranteed each tree to have a neighbor of a different variety.

Apples need to cross-pollinate with different varieties to produce a robust crop. Bees are an important pollinator, and when a mass die-off drastically reduced bee populations last year, the orchard layout allowed the trees to be wind-pollinated in the bees’ absence.

At first, the couple’s decision to plant an orchard was “all about the fruit – the romance of growing rare heritage apples,” Robert said. But they knew some of the varieties they wanted to grow were coveted by home cider-makers, so they investigated that craft, too.

They visited cideries in Virginia and New York, and then met cider-makers across the West, including Colorado-based Shawn Larson.

The couple told Larson their plan to grow heritage apples: They would juice the fruit and sell the product to home-brewers.

“What is wrong with you?” Robert recalled Larson asking them. Cider is much more valuable than apple juice – if they were already going to grow the apples and press the juice, it just made sense to go ahead and brew the cider themselves.

They took a course on cider-making through Cornell University, which has a world-class apple genetics program.

They also found a welcoming and collaborative community in Torrey. Local farmers and gardeners have been generous with insights and advice, as well as bucketsful of fruit from backyard trees.

Eventually, they hired their head cider-maker Travis Nelson, a professional beer brewer from Salt Lake City who dabbled in cider-making at home. They met Nelson after he showed up at the orchard “to beg for apples,” Robert said.

 

Robert’s science background gives him a keen interest in the chemistry of flavor. Diagrams of flavor molecules cover a chalkboard in the fermentation facility, a large, high-ceilinged room that is also the bottling facility. Robert describes how subtle variations in similar molecules can result in different flavors.

When ripe apples are harvested, they’re processed through a grinder; the resulting mash is pressed to extract the juice. The juice is fermented in huge, heavy-duty plastic bags fitted with valves. Part of the fermentation process is done in barrels, which can impart interesting essences to the finished beverage. When the fermentations are ready, they’re mixed to nuanced blends and carbonated before being bottled.

Thousands of varietals of apples have been cultivated over the thousands of years since the fruits originated in central Asia, creating a huge range of flavors and properties. Some are table apples, best for eating fresh; others are ideal for making cider.

“Some varieties are not good for eating – too bitter, lots of tannins, astringent,” Robert said. “They’re only good for fermenting.”

For example, Robert described the Kingston Black apple as “very funky; very astringent and bitter. But,” he added, “it makes world-class cider.”

The Kingston Black comes from the United Kingdom and by the 1800s was popular for cider-making. Today, Robert said, it’s “irreplaceable in the cider canon.”

The couple also loves the Dabinett apple, even though it’s particularly difficult to grow. They make a single varietal cider from the Newtown Pippin apple. One of Ann’s favorite varietals is the Redfield, which has bright red flesh under its red skin. In Robert’s opinion, Ashmead’s Kernel is the “best apple in the world.”

By now Robert knows these varieties by sight and can point them out on a stroll through the orchard.

Though their intended retirement  turned into a full-time job, there are many upsides to their new lifestyle.

“There’s something pretty zen about going out in the wintertime to prune your tree,” Robert said. “I’m not sure I would give it up to someone else.”