Edible Food Find: Ragged Hill Cider Co.
Photos by Michael Piazza
In the spring of 2025, Ragged Hill Cider Co. enlisted both man and machine to reclaim a 12-acre section of apple trees from the overgrowth at its new orchard in West Brookfield. The trees, no longer regularly producing fruit, had gone neglected for five years. Softspoken Ragged Hill cofounder Steve Garwood led diligent orchardists from this tree to that, ripping out weeds, pruning unruly, gnarled branches and carefully fusing twigs of trees together to introduce new apple varieties, a process known as grafting. A year later, the orchard is well-manicured, but not all the trees have produced fruit.
“When you make changes to an orchard, it takes years for things to take root and bear fruit,” says Garwood, a cidermaker with a winemaker’s palate, whose ciders capture subtly and intricately New England’s terroir.
By next year, Garwood expects the branches on every mature tree in the orchard to droop and burst with pops of pink and red, the apples he will transform into Ragged Hill’s fine ciders. Garwood and his daughter, co-founder Anne Garwood, last appeared in the pages of Edible in spring 2022; they were a year removed from opening a tasting room at Ragged Hill Orchard, and their cidery had built steady momentum. Later that year, though, the orchard’s owner retired and sold the land. The search began for Ragged Hill’s new orchard.
The Garwoods managed in the meantime by taking advantage of nearby farmers markets to sell bottles of their cider. They expected to rely on apple trees Anne had planted at her West Brookfield home in 2014 shortly after moving back to her hometown from California to handle marketing for Ragged Hill. Steve, meanwhile, traveled and continued to devise new ciders, expanding his knowledge of the craft by talking with other cidermakers around the world. And the lifelong West Brookfield resident—five generations of his family have lived in the pastoral community—kept an eye on an orchard in town he knew had been neglected for years: Honey Bee Orchards, which had gone up for sale in 2024. Few buyers emerged, likely because state agricultural preservation restrictions meant developers had to maintain the property as farmland.
To Steve, however, that stipulation was one of the many qualities that made Honey Bee Orchard the perfect setting for Ragged Hill. In its overgrown orchards he and his daughter would secure more than just a permanent home: They heard a clarion call for a kind of expansion that would mesh with their passion for preserving and promoting local agriculture. Partnering with Vincent Cardillo, a Wilbraham resident, they have taken over the defunct Honey Bee Orchards and its 200 acres with the goal of turning it into a working orchard again, complete with its own restaurant, distillery, cidery and winery. It will be one of the few in the state, if not the country, producing ciders and spirits, such as fruited brandies, from ingredients grown exclusively onsite.
Steve recently moved Ragged Hill’s cider operations into the farm stand, 107 E. Main St., and outfitted it with state-of-the-art equipment to process his apples, machinery he discovered on a trip through Italy. This fall, he’ll open a tasting room in part of the large red farm building, so folks can once again sip his cider from the source, as construction begins on the distillery and winery. Once the distillery and winery project finishes, work will start on an upscale farm-to-table restaurant. The complete renovation won’t wrap up until 2027, he says.
With a background in home brewing and winemaking, Steve gravitated to cider, loving that it has been a staple of rural life: In his teenage years, he worked on a dairy farm not far from Ragged Hill’s original orchard. Uninspired by most craft or commercial ciders, often too sweet or too loaded with other flavors for his taste, his style of cider hews more closely to the tradition of winemaking.
He brings out the interesting and subtle flavors of the different apples—sometimes older and underused varieties common to the state, sometimes unusual ones.
“Man makes beer. God makes cider,” Steve says.
raggedhillcider.com // 107 E. Main St., West Brookfield
This story appeared in the Fall 2026 issue.
