In a nondescript industrial park on a Carson street cluttered with car repair shops, Southern California’s lone cider maker is tucked away in a tiny space with not even a sign to distinguish it.
The Honest Abe Cidery, as it is officially called, is so little known that, until late last week, immediate neighbors were unaware that the 1,500-square-foot business at 17800 S. Main St. — officially a winery, with an even smaller tasting room next door — even existed.
But if you equate cider with the fizzy, sweet product manufactured by the likes of Angry Orchard, you’re in a for a bit of a shock.
Cider produced at Honest Abe’s is more akin to an experimental craft beer than a mass produced product like Angry Orchard.
“Angry Orchard is a bit of a blessing and a curse,” said owner Spencer Chambers, 35. “They’re the ones that opened the market up. Before that, nobody was thinking of cider at all. The irony is I call it Frankencider; to me it’s not even cider. It’s just apple flavor and corn syrup.”
In contrast, Chambers’ product is all natural, using a variety of locally produced fruit — lemons from Ventura County, honey from Temecula and, of course, a blend of apples from the Big Bear area.
It’s sweet, yet tart, with a complexity that changes and improves as it ages, much like wine.
Chambers has eight ciders and meads — a mead is a honey wine — on tap at his modest tasting room, which amounts to a couple of white leather couches in a corner of his cubbyhole-size cidery arranged around a rustic wood table.
He’s got cider varieties infused with pineapple, mango, lemons and even hops. He’s got a barrel-aged cider in Zinfandel barrels. And he’s working on a cucumber-mint cider as well.
Cider may be largely unknown in this country — cider is a bigger industry and better known in England, for instance, — but it wasn’t always that way.
‘Go-to drink’ for settlers
“Cider was the go-to drink for the people who settled this country,” Chambers said. “For a number of reasons, it went by the wayside and beer became the drink of the common man. Cider is just now making a comeback. It’s having a fun renaissance and it’s fun to be a part of that.”
Still, cider remains little known, representing just 2 percent of sales in the alcoholic beverage industry, although a new pub that focuses on ciders just opened in Long Beach.
And most of that consists of sweet products like Angry Orchard, which claims about half of the entire cider market in the U.S. and is owned by the Boston Beer Co., which also makes its flagship Sam Adams brand beer.
Indeed, many folks are completely unaware a thing such as hard or alcoholic cider exists, since it’s largely known as a carbonated ,nonalcoholic apple juice.
Cidery hard to find
You have to be a determined consumer just to find the Honest Abe Cidery, because it’s not readily apparent even when standing outside the front door.
Moreover, even though it’s in Carson, the cidery confusingly has a Gardena address, although it is within walking distance of the Phantom Carriage Brewery just down the street in Carson.
The tasting room was a bit of an afterthought that only came about because a Santa Monica rugby club wanted to throw a birthday bash at the cidery, Chambers acknowledges.
While the cidery itself received a liquor license on Dec. 26, 2014, the tasting room opened to the public only on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. starting in March.
Chambers added a Friday “happy hour” in April from 4:30-7 p.m. and, since the beginning of August, is now open the same hours on Thursdays, too.
The reason for the abbreviated hours?
The steel doors at the entrance to the industrial park automatically swing shut at 7 p.m. weekdays and 2 p.m. Saturdays, although you can get out, so people often hang with Chambers for an hour or so after “closing.”
Chambers loves talking about his product, which is usually served in 4 to 5-ounce flights that cost $2 to $3 per glass (his cider ranges from 7 to 8.5 percent alcohol by volume). Bottles are $13 to $19.
“I’m pretty sure it’s by far the most comfortable tasting room that anybody’s got around here,” he said. “When people come on a Friday night, it’s more like a date than a bar. They can actually sit on a couch, get comfortable and kick back.”
As long as there’s not too many of them, since the entire operation is quite intimate. Only about 15 to 20 people show up on a typical Saturday anyway.
It’s not easy to find Chambers’ product elsewhere in the South Bay either because most of his commercial accounts are in Los Angeles.
However, it is available at the Hop Saint brewpub in Torrance, Hot’s Kitchen and Mediterraneo in Hermosa Beach and BrewCo and Simmzy’s in Manhattan Beach as well as Phantom Carriage.
Moonshine cider
Chambers made his first batch of cider as a 14-year-old in the best tradition of the dry Kentucky county he grew up in — it was moonshine.
Since then he’s received undergraduate degrees in chemistry and biology and a master’s in economics and finance that led to such diverse jobs as a marine biologist, Wall Street financial analyst and Waikiki Beach boy.
An itinerant traveler who has visited all seven continents and 50 states, Chambers was on his way to San Francisco to live about five years ago when he stopped in L.A. and never left.
Realizing that cider was growing in popularity, but nothing was available locally, Chambers decided to change that.
His business has grown steadily over the past 18 months, and expansion plans are afoot.
Next year, Chambers plans to move the tasting room to a new development next door and open a farm-to-table restaurant so he can serve food that complements the ciders, which is a gluten-free product.
He’s also tinkering with making wine and even a brandy, which is permitted under his license. And Whole Foods is ready to stock his product once he has a larger-scale bottling operation in place.
The South Bay has been in the forefront of the fast-growing craft beer scene.
Honest Abe Cidery seems a natural extension of that industry as brewers at Inglewood’s Three Weavers Brewery and Phantom Carriage have recognized.
“My biggest advocates have been local brewers,” Chambers said. “I wasn’t part of the whole craft beer thing, but the craft beer community took me in as one of their own.”
