Hardball Cider

Geoff Deen ’04, a former baseball player at Moravian, founded craft cidery Hardball Cider in 2013 on his family’s farm in Mount Bethel. “The farm has been in operation for about 125 years, and we can date cider making here to 1934,” Deen says. “In the early 1980s, my parents bought a commercial cider press, and we can produce about 1,000 gallons a day with it.”

Deen’s route to the craft cider business was a circuitous one. After graduating from Moravian with a self-designed major in business information systems, Deen spent the next 10 years in corporate America, working various positions in the telecommunications industry. But his first love has always been the hardball diamond.

After his own college baseball career, Deen coached softball at Moravian for seven years and did a year in a professional women’s softball league. However, after his corporate career began taking more and more of his time, and after incurring a shoulder injury that limited his participation in the sport, Deen started to miss the energy of the baseball stadium.

Hard Cider Pancakes

One of Geoff Deen’s favorite hard cider food pairings is Hard Cider Strawberry-Banana Pancakes. Using your favorite pancake mix, incorporate some Strawberry Hard Cider into the batter along with slices of banana and strawberries before you cook the pancakes. You’ll get some of the sweetness from the cider and the strawberry flavor to complement the fresh strawberries and bananas in the pancakes. Instead of maple syrup, reduce some fresh apple cider into a glaze and drizzle on top of the pancakes for an extra kick of apple flavor.

Around that time, hard cider was starting to gain popularity as a “new again” beverage. “It was the drink of colonial America up until the time Prohibition hit,” Deen says. “So I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got a farm here, and a cider press—now’s a great time to try this.’ ”

Deen began by taking viticulture courses at Harrisburg Area Community College and completed an immersive weeklong hard cider workshop at Cornell University with 20 other cider producers from across the United States and Canada and an instructor from the UK.

“Fast-forward to today, and we just had our fourth-anniversary party for the opening of our taproom here on the farm.”

In addition to the taproom, Hardball Cider’s property includes a two-acre lake and outside seating for more than 300 people. “Folks bring their whole family along with their own tables, chairs, and pop-up tents and make a day of it,” Deen says. “On Friday nights, we do live trivia. On Saturdays and Sundays, we have live music, and there’s a different food truck every day.”

The first three ciders Deen created of course had to have baseball-themed names: the semisweet Splitter, the sweet Curveball, and the dry Fastball. “I started getting more creative after that. This year, we’ll probably produce close to 30 different ciders. Our most popular one today is White Wash, which has a white peach flavor.”

Currently, Hardball’s original cider press grinds between 15,000 and 20,000 pounds of fruit a day from farm’s 25 acres, but that’s not enough to meet the demand the cidery has generated. “We also source apples from other Pennsylvania and New Jersey farms,” Deen says. “My parents have done business with those growers over the years, so we know the families and their farms, and we know the quality of the fruit.”

And the growing demand for Hardball Cider extends beyond the beverages themselves. Deen says he keeps getting inquiries to host bridal showers, wedding receptions, and other private parties. To accommodate this new service, he plans on moving the taproom into the property’s large 1838 bank barn after he renovates it. The current taproom would then be converted into its own rentable space.

For Deen, the most satisfying part of creating Hardball Cider isn’t that he was able to merge a lifelong sports passion into a viable business but that the business has had its own “Build it, and they will come” moment. On Mother’s Day of this year, cars were parked up and down both sides of the property’s half-mile-long pastoral lane.

“To go from wondering if there’s a car coming up the lane to asking where we’re going to park everyone is a pretty cool story to be able to tell,” Deen says. “We’re a small family business on an old family farm, and to see it come back to life is really awesome.”