When the solar eclipse of 2017 crept across the globe, Nikki West was in New York attending what would become the Cider Institute of North America (CINA) at Cornell University. She was surrounded by like minds learning the particulars of crafting her favorite beverage, “nerding out on science and our beautiful solar system eating some intensely spicy buffalo wings,” she says. “The spiciest I’ve ever had in my life. I felt like I was hallucinating. Everything felt so right.”
She wasn’t hallucinating, though. She was experiencing a life-changing aha moment that would pivot her career trajectory and initiate the creation of Ciders From Mars in Staunton, Virginia.
Art Meets Science
At the time of this aha moment, West was on summer vacation from her job as a professor in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Central Michigan University. When school was in session, she would travel from Michigan home to Virginia to check on her fermenting batches of homemade cider. When she and her husband Jeremy got married, they asked their wedding guests for donations for CINA tuition as part of their registry.
West, who played in several rock bands and who studied earth rocks as an contractor at the US Geological Survey, has long been curious about both art and science. Cidermaking, she discovered, was a melding of both.
“For a long time it was either or; they rarely blended into the same thing,” she says. But in that moment during the eclipse she found her purpose. And she and Jeremy moved back to Virginia to make it happen. They opened their doors in the summer of 2021 after developing and scaling up their recipes (Nikki’s arena) and engineering the system and plotting the building layout (Jeremy’s forte). “Now Ciders From Mars is this perfect, homogenous melting pot of everything I love about art and science.”
Inspired By Space
“In my geoscience background, I was very interested in Mars,” West waxes. “When the Pathfinder mission landed in 1997 there was data suggesting the presence of liquid water on Mars. My young enthusiastic geology self was so excited.”
That excitement was further stoked by her internship during which she was a part of a Mars science enthusiast group called the Mars Society. “I ended up applying for and getting accepted to be on one of the crews in this simulated the Mars habitat experience. “I was 22 at the time,” she remembers. “So, this Mars thing has always been in my personal universe.”
Now, this Mars thing is the name of her and Jeremy’s cidery, and the source from which they draw many of their cider names.
Take Pathfinder, for example, Ciders From Mars’ flagship cider. Beyond the space mission reference, this cider name also nods to finding your path from sweet to dry cider, West explains. “I experimented with apple blends, working closely with our orchard here in Virginia to get the acidity and depth of flavor that could handle back sweetening, so it doesn’t just taste like sugar on top of cider. Yeast was a big deal for this recipe too; I settled on three different, separately fermented and blended strains to proportionately express their mouthfeel, brightness, and floral notes.” This recipe, the first blend at Ciders From Mars, is one that West has put the most energy into creating, and she’s proud to serve it every day as a mainstay.
Another of the Ciders From Mars usual cider suspects is Hellas Dry, what West calls Pathfinder’s “brut dry foil”. It’s named after the Hellas Planitia geographic region on mars, and a word play that lets customers know it’s hella dry. It employs the same blend of apples (Goldrush, Jonagold, Johnathan, and Black Twig) in Pathfinder, using different proportions of those same yeast strains. “It has high bright acid with nice perceived sweetness,” West says lovingly about her cider baby. “We have great apples in Virginia that make it easy to let the fruit provide a perception of sweetness.”
Cocktails, Anyone?
Beyond a unique name that wasn’t agriculturally or place-based, Nikki and Jeremy wanted to differentiate Ciders From Mars with a cocktail program from the get-go. This creative menu often includes barrel-aged ciders and locally foraged ingredients– such as cranberries from bogs in the highlands of western Virginia, wild raspberries, wine berries, blackberries, mulberries, and serviceberries. “We’ll just climb into bushes and trees and find what we can,” West says.
One crowd favorite is Major Tom, made with a Mezcal barrel-aged cider, tomatillo shrub, and jalapeno syrup that West explains as having a margarita vibe.
These cocktails regularly rotate to stay seasonal, and as an opportunity for the savvy Ciders From Mars staff to flex their combined 50 years of bartending and service experience. “The team has my implicit trust that whatever they make will be awesome,” West says with admiration. “They really understand flavor and balance.”
Made In Staunton
The loyal customers at Ciders From Mars know that the team is always searching for exciting ingredients, and often offer the flora of their properties for the menu. This community of makers from the Shenandoah Valley also offers their art to adorn the walls of the cidery lounge, and about 85 percent of these makers, West guesses, are women.
Beyond artists, West says, Ciders From Mars also hosts community and city council events regularly. “Staunton, Virginia is a really special place, and we’re building a wonderful thing here. “I feel so lucky I landed here.”
