Hollenbeck’s Cider is Made in Cortland

Matt Brooks: Matt Brooks here on X101 Always Classic in for another edition of Made in Cortland and with me this month, well, it’s Matt Hollenbeck from Hollenbeck’s Cider Mill. First off, Matt, thank you for joining me on this edition of Made in Cortland.

Matt Hollenbeck: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Matt Brooks: We have a lot to talk about cause Hollenbeck’s Cider Mill has been around for quite a while. Started back in 1933 when Harold Doc Hollenbeck began pressing local apples in a barn during the Great Depression. Can you tell me the story of Hollenbeck’s because the Great Depression was a very different time compared to what we live in now?

Matt Hollenbeck: Sure. I would say the big difference, aside from it going from a side hustle, supplementary family income to my only job, is that Doc would have been pressing people’s apples who collected them at their farm, in their yard, grew them, but didn’t have the equipment to process them. They would bring them to him, he would make cider, and either return all of the cider in exchange for payment, or some of that payment might be a percentage of the cider, a barrel of cider, things like that. So it was more a custom processing business than what it has shifted to today is we’re buying apples, we’re doing all of the processing, and we’re retailing those things, where retail was very much not part of the original business. It was more providing that processing of people’s home produce.

Matt Brooks: Yeah, it’s a very… it went from a service to a retail, and that’s a big shift. Saying that kind of reminds me of how like when people go hunting, they bring their deer to get processed. You Hollenbeck’s had that process for ciders and really reinvented themselves. And that’s actually a really cool thing to think about just becoming a service and then ended up kind of going vertical with it and making such delicious cider.

Matt Hollenbeck: Yeah, it’s definitely been a slow process I think that has very much paralleled sort of the loss of the home garden, home agriculture. I’m still willing and able to process other people’s apples, do that same service. It’s not a common service out there, and we’ve found that when people hear that, they get excited, they’re gonna do it, and then they realize, “Oh, that’s actually a lot of work getting enough apples to make a reasonable amount of cider.” Nobody’s putting away multiple 50-gallon barrels of cider into their basement, into their barn like they used to. It was producing sweet cider to then be made into hard cider was very much a way to preserve calories, right. Before refrigeration, how can you take those calories that you grew and save them long term through the winter into the spring before anything else is really growing? It was making it into hard cider, vinegar, cider syrup, things like that.

Matt Brooks: Yeah, just the methods to make sure that what you grew during the season stayed good through the colder months where you didn’t have access to that fresh produce. Now, kind of speaking up because you haven’t been around since the 1930s, or at least I’m not sure if you have. Give me your story with Hollenbeck Cider Mill. There’s got to be some great childhood memories with having…

Matt Hollenbeck: Yeah, so the person that most people nowadays are going to remember as the old guy, Bruce, he was Doc’s son, ran it for 50 years, really became associated… he was the cider mill for a lot of people. We’re cousins. As a kid going to the cider mill, I have those same memories that everybody does. I remember holding the chain at about my chin height and watching Bruce press cider and thinking it was this amazing process. When I was 5 years old, it was just after the bakery started, and I remember… this is something very vivid in my mind… again, standing by the chain, watching the apple peeler, and just mesmerized by it, and watching for who knows how long, getting lost in time. And at some point after watching just people picking up tons of apples from the 20 bushel bin and putting them on the apple peeler and watching the apple peelers spin and get peeled before they get sliced, I looked up at my mom, who was talking to Bruce who was standing there, and I said, “Every apple gets its turn.” And Bruce thought that was great, and he made a sign that hung on the apple peeler for many years. And then fast forward 20 years, and life sort of brings me around where I’m looking for a fall and winter seasonal job, and it’s just like, “Well, obviously I got to go work for Bruce.” And when I started working, he russled through his collection of old things and found the sign and pulled it out. Yeah, that was a pretty cool special thing to be to really connect my childhood memories of the place to actually starting to work for Bruce. Yeah.

Matt Brooks: Yeah, no, it’s so great to hear that these family businesses stay in family. The hands may change, the approach to the business may change, like in Hollenbeck’s did, but one of the things that hasn’t changed with Hollenbeck’s is the equipment. 1870s Boomer and Boschert knuckle press? And I probably said that wrong, but I mean, you’re still using the same equipment that Doc did.

Matt Hollenbeck: Yeah, it’s a… it’s an interesting thing because we do… it is… that is the same model press that Doc used. I actually… there was in the ’70s a new version, exactly that model, came into our possession. That’s the one that we’re using. I actually pulled the original one… when it got uninstalled, it kind of got tossed outside into a hedgerow. I’ve pulled it out last summer, and I’m working on restoring it. But yeah, that original one, it’s… that’s not the one in the building. And there’s also the interesting things… I don’t feel like I could ever update to a modern press. I don’t think that’s like… I don’t think that’s a good business decision. It’s not something I want to do. I work on Victorian era equipment every day. Beautiful, functional antiques. It is a joy. It is one of the great pleasures of my working life. And also, people don’t remember that both Doc and Bruce had bought modern hydraulic presses that they used at various points throughout the cider mill’s history. They didn’t get run out of town and tarred and feathered. I might if I tried to do something like that. But it is, yeah, it’s a great pleasure. We have these mechanical, Victorian era, analog pieces of equipment that function and do the things we need. We don’t… there’s no reason… they’re not obsolete. They’re as good as when they were new, and they are as good as modern options.

Matt Brooks: And there’s things you want to modernize, but there’s some things you just don’t want to reinvent the wheel for. So you have the… again, you have the vintage… it’s more than vintage at this point… Victorian style press, but you also have another piece of equipment, the modified maple evaporator. Can you tell me about that?

Matt Hollenbeck: Sure. So, that actually… it goes back to the press. It’s a press from the 1870s. So I have… I’m always on the lookout for whole presses, parts, information about that because the… the company that made that’s been gone for nearly as long as the press is old. And once upon a time, I came across the 1894 sales catalog from Boomer and Boschert and was looking… there’s great information that have been very helpful in restoring and things like that, making new parts. But I found there was a whole section on cider evaporators. And my first thought was, well, what was that for? And it led me down a research rabbit hole that yet another one of those, preservation methods of of apples was cider syrup. It, you know, it gets called cider syrup, apple molasses, boiled cider, all sorts of different things. I was never able to find an original version of that. But the process is extremely similar to making maple syrup, but instead of maple sap, sweet cider goes in. And it didn’t take a ton of modifying, but there are there are some very significant differences between using sweet cider and using maple. So it required a little bit of modifying and adapting for our purposes. But we at the time I started that process, we were just the second place in North America to bring this vintage product back to market.

Matt Brooks: Wow. That is something to be said. Second in North America?

Matt Hollenbeck: Yeah.

Matt Brooks: And again, it kind of hails to the the services that Hollenbeck’s can provide, but then also turning around, making it a a retail product that is unique to the area. Now, one last thing. I mean, we talked about the equipment, but one of the most important things of apple cider is the apples themselves. And back when it was a a service business, I mean, you got what they brought in. You mentioned that you buy apples to be used in your apple cider and other apple products. What goes into the the choosing, cause there’s there’s a plenty of varieties of apples you can choose from. How do you know which ones to use for various products?

Matt Hollenbeck: Sure. It’s we’ve lost a lot of apple variety through through sort of time. Once upon a time, when we many people had a handful of apple trees in their side yard as part of part of their garden or farm, people would have maybe an early-season apple, a late-season apple, a baking apple or two, and then you would have a hard cider apple or or a boiled cider apple. So there are specific varieties that were known to be excellent for different purposes. Now we’ve really the apple industry has really really skewed towards just eating apples. That is where that is where the money is. And so that’s mostly what’s grown. That there are many good multi-purpose apples that are still widely grown. There are also varieties of apples that are a lot harder to get that are excellent for specific purposes. And we are very intentional in our buying of apples to make sure we’re covering all of our needs with apples that are good for that purpose. The cider, the blend can change throughout the day, let alone throughout the season, just as apple quality changes as they get older, right? The apple that’s great in September is maybe not going to be the best in December. So we’re planning ahead for what we want to use in different times of the season, and really making sure it has a good balance of flavors. There’s a few classic varieties that we make up the bulk of say the cider or pies at different times of year, and just making sure that you’re getting a good blend of sweets and sharps and balanced flavor. There’s even things like there are varieties that make excellent tasting cider if you were blindfolded, but it looks terrible! It looks absolutely terrible because of certain qualities of the apples. And so you have to really make sure that even though that’s delicious, nobody’s going to want it. So you’re going to need a different apple to go with that to make it something that’s palatable looking.

Matt Brooks: Right. You have to convince somebody to put it in their mouth, no matter how good you say it is. Though, I trust you. If it looks like it came out of the bottom of the machine, I’d still drink it if you told me it was good. Moving towards just Hollenbeck’s as a whole, so a lot of previous guests that I’ve had on Made in Cortland, they’re year-round businesses. You’re the one of the first that’s a seasonal business. How do you have to approach that, especially in a area as seasonal as Central New York?

Matt Hollenbeck: Yeah, I mean, it is it’s crazy. It is a thing that kind of every business in our industry deals with, just from a people strongly associate these products with a time of year. There are people who if we were about to sell out of a Dutch apple pie in October, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a fist fight over that pie in October. In February, we would there are days where we would struggle to give them away.

Matt Brooks: Right.

Matt Hollenbeck: And it’s not that that product is any less good. It is just a sense that people have. They associate these products with a time of year, they associate us with a time of year, and that has been a great struggle of I think of all of our tenures, but certainly I know of mine. And so it is a thing that we’ve really struggled with, but I think to a certain degree, you just have to embrace it and try to do your best with with that fact. It’s not necessarily a thing that that we can change. Yeah, just have to be prepared for it.

Matt Brooks: Well, one of the benefits at least in this area is that there’s a community that you’re located in that when that apple season does come around, again, fist fight over pie, that’s not something you’d normally think there, but I’ve heard people going in there, the lines long, it’s like I could actually see that happening at Hollenbeck’s. Tell me about your community connection, cause you wouldn’t be anywhere without community, especially for being near a hundred years old.

Matt Hollenbeck: For sure. Yeah, I mean, some of my oldest ancestors were buried in the 1820s in Cortland County. We’ve we’ve been here for a long time, and it’s it’s home. Our products and our business are a result of place. We buy only New York apples, largely from orchards that we’ve buying been buying from for generations. It is, we could take all of our equipment and building and pick it up and put it someplace else and it would not be successful.

Matt Brooks: Right.

Matt Hollenbeck: We are a part of and a product of the community, and it’s, it could not be some place else and be what it is today.

Matt Brooks: And that’s, I mean, I couldn’t say it better myself. As we head into the 2026 season, and even ahead, I mean, as you said, you’re working on the original press and such, anything that you’re looking forward to as we start getting into fall?

Matt Hollenbeck: We have a couple of things on the horizon that I think are probably the most requested or desired things that over many years, but certainly over my tenure, and those are smaller pies for maybe people living alone or, or… Our pies are real big, and so maybe that’s people want the taste, but maybe not quite the volume. So we’re, we’re gonna… We’ve got to do a little honing of that product, but that should be something we introduce this season. And then the other thing is we’ve done kind of a large infrastructure project that’s going to help us be able to start shipping pies, which is every social media post easily weekly, if not more, we get a we get messages from people who grew up here or went to college here and want the products, but now they live in Arizona, Florida, Texas. They live further afield, but they still want the product, and that has not been a thing that we’ve been able to do, and we’re making making strides to being able to bring that taste of Cortland to to people who miss it.

Matt Brooks: I I know if once that system’s up and running, there will be relatives I would be sending pie to, so that’s… And they didn’t even come from Cortland, they just were infatuated with the area, and Central New York and apples, it’s like apple pie and sharp cheddar cheese, but that’s a New England thing for me, so.

Matt Hollenbeck: We have It is a common phrase, but a thing that my wife and I say to each other, “An apple pie without the cheese is like a kiss without the squeeze.”

Matt Brooks: So before we head out, you’ve said all this great information, backstory, future projects, what it takes to make that glass of apple cider or other apple pie. If there is somebody listening today and they’re like, “You know what? For whatever reason or another, I haven’t been to Hollenbeck’s. I’m going to make it a point to go to Hollenbeck’s this season.” What is your personal recommendation of the first thing they should try at Hollenbeck’s?

Matt Hollenbeck: Whew! I mean, the sweet cider is is obviously my favorite and is the product that has existed through our whole history. Donuts is another big one. That came in the ’70s. The pies, which is at this point truly the bulk of the business, didn’t happen until the late ’80s, early ’90s, so not the longest portion of our history. Those are big ones. I would check out the boiled cider as well. That’s a unique, amazing product that I think people are still getting to know. And so, yeah, those are those are my highlights.

Matt Brooks: Well, I got to thank you, Matt. You’re talking about apple cider. There’s just so much goes into it, and also how this business transformed really from a side hustle that was bringing apples in and being a service to a place that lines galore when when those doors open. So I’m excited for another great apple season at Hollenbeck’s. Excited for that apple cider cause we always make sure to pick some up when your doors open. And thank you for spending just a a portion of your day to talk about all the great things going on at Hollenbeck’s.

Matt Hollenbeck: Of course. Thanks for having me.

Matt Brooks: And this has been another edition of Made in Cortland here on X101. I’m Matt Brooks.