Hard Cider Origins in WV

The seed of West Virginia's industry is rooted good land and great people.

The story of West Virginia apple cider begins in the earth. The first agricultural census, completed in West Virginia back in 1870, revealed there were 39,778 farms with 8,528,395 acres of production. That’s a lot of farms! Another West Virginia agricultural census from 2021 counted 22,300 farms and 3,500,000 acres operational in the state. The land provides.

Apples are a popular crop in the Mountain State. A survey conducted in 2018 by the West Virginia Department of Agriculture found that West Virginia farms harvested $18.1 million in apples that year alone.

West Virginians have made great contributions to apple horticulture. In 1830, Thomas Grimes cultivated the first variation of the Grimes golden apple. His farm was in what is now Wellsburg, West Virginia. The Grimes golden apple is thought by experts to be the parent of the widely popular Golden Delicious apple, which was first developed on the farm of Andrew H. Mullins in West Virginia in 1912. The Golden Delicious apple is now the state fruit of West Virginia. Delicious indeed!

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