'Gingerroot' to 'Ciderberry': Making Mead, Cider In Monkton

Move over beer and wine: mead and cider are carving out a niche in the Baltimore area and it's in large part thanks to the Sherrers.

Nestled away inside a historic mill in Monkton, Kyle Sherrer and his father Curt are making cider and mead the old-school way; fermenting locally-sourced, heirloom fruits and honeys into tasty libations. 

Kyle Sherrer, 24, of Towson, is the head of the operation at Millstone Cellars; he's the one behind popular flavors like "Gingerroot," which is just what it sounds like, and "Ciderberry," a tart, dry cider flavored with raspberries. 

While Millstone has only been fermenting ciders and meads for about a year and a half and been at market for just six months, Kyle said his father Curt has been working to rehab the mid-19th-century grist mill for about 10 years. 

Now, the building where moonshiners once ran stills in a secluded basement during prohibition has new life, a story Kyle and Curt are fond of telling. 

"I thought about starting businesses in college and had been investigating the hard cider market," Kyle said. "We've been fermenting about a year and a half now ... there’s so little known about what’s going on with cider right now… I get to introduce people to American cider."

Making cider—essentially fermented apple juice—and mead—fermented honey—is similar to the wine-making process. 

Fruit or honey is harvested and then either crushed or combined with water. Yeast is added to the sugary liquid and converts sugars into alcohol. At Millstone, ciders and meads are aged in oak barrels then, in the case of cider, naturally carbonated in a bottle through additional fermentation.

"I'm a big fan of the craft beer revolution and stuff," Kyle said. "It's about finding creative alcohols. The point wasn't to do do ciders and meads, but to do wine style products that have the creativity from the beer side without having the stigma that you’d have if you did it with a grape wine."

And their ciders are creative. 

The current line includes the aforementioned Gingerroot and Ciderberry flavors along with a semi-sweet cider and a dry cider. Kyle said currently, he's fermenting a batch of strawberry-rhubarb cider and is working on a "cyser" or cider-mead hybrid.  On the mead side, Millstone's "Hopbrosia" is a mead flavored with the hops—the ingredient that gives many beers their characteristic flavor. 

"We don’t have a line, we just have a set number of products. We’re not replicating, we have a seasonal product," Kyle said. "I came into this not wanting to replicate a line. The main thing is that the consumer society today is that the consumer society is looking for new things to try." 

All of Millstone's ingredients are sourced from local farms—many within Maryland, but all within 150 miles of the Monkton operation—Sherrer's desire to source locally and to experiment heavily are some of the driving forces behind the business. 

In fact, Kyle said that Delaware-based Dogfish Head Brewing (for "Having the tenacity to do anything under the sun that they think is interesting") and Baltimore's Woodberry Kitchen (for "sourcing locally, finding creative solutions") were major inspirations for Millstone.

Recently, he said, he had to grab a group of friends to drive out to Baugher's Farm in Westminster for pick-your-own strawberries in order to start the batch of strawberry-rhubarb cider. 

Millstone also sources ingredients from Brown's Orchards in Pennsylvania (where they get 80 percent of their apples in heirloom varieties like Jonathan and York Imperial) Calvert Farm in Cecil County and Bartenfelder Farms in Fullerton. 

"What it says on the label "From farm to bottle," it's the most pretentious thing we say, but it sums up what we do," Kyle said. 

Kyle, whose background is in finance, has been learning the cider-making process as he goes along. 

"It’s from experimentation, a lot of it happened here in the winery. It is homebrewing, mad lab, on a large scale," he said. 

But he's had some help from Curt, a UC Davis graduate who has experience working in traditional wineries in Maryland and Virginia. 

"We’re doing a lot of things that I don’t think people are doing yet. I get to introduce people to ciders and meads and for me that’s fun. I’m going to take as much creative liberty with that as I can," Kyle said. 

And they're just getting started. The father-son duo is restoring an abandoned orchard at Gennesee Valley Outdoor Learning Center, where they've grafted about 70 southern American heirloom apple varieties to trees. 

Recently, they started selling their products at farmer's markets like the one held Sundays in Baltimore City under the Jones Falls Expressway and the Union Graze farmers market held Friday nights in the Hampden area. 

And that's on top of getting their product into 70 stores from Bel Air to Silver Spring. 

"I have to handcuff myself, you can’t do too much. As soon as I get more time, I add more things I have to do," Kyle said. 

Millstone Cellars is located at 2029 Monkton Road in Monkton. The tasting room is open from 12-6 p.m. Saturdays, and for those who don't want to make the trip check their website to see where you can find their ciders and meads near you.