After years of planning, planting and patient development, Dendric Estate has released its first bottle of cider, a huge exhale for the husband-and-wife founders and visionaries who are finally seeing their dreams come to life.
“Carly and I have been putting this wild, harebrained idea together for years,” said Brendan Coyle. “The dream for this project has always been to bring the agriculture to the product and do it on a beautiful site right next to the mountains where everyone loves to ski, bike, hike and enjoy the cool, crisp mountain air.”
Located at 6,440 feet just outside Kamas, Dendric Estate is doing just that, pioneering what Coyle said no one else is doing: a mountain estate cidery.
“We are a mountain estate winery, except we make our wine from apples instead of grapes,” he said. “We like to say that we’re agriculture on the fringe.”
The Coyles spent years searching for the perfect property before finding their 20-acre site nearly by accident while Brendan was working as the master distiller for High West Distillery.
“One morning when I was driving to the distillery, they were literally hammering in the ‘for sale’ sign on this property,” he recalled. “We built it out from 2019 until now, and to see it finally taking shape — and to have a beautiful glass of it, cold and bubbly in front of us — it’s a huge reward for us.”
Brendan is no stranger to Utah’s alcohol beverage scene. His resume spans nearly 25 years across brewing, distilling (notably with High West) and now cider production. His experience shows in the precision of Dendric’s production, from the patient research and development to their first release with Dry Cut.
The cider’s label features a rattlesnake — a nod to the native species in Utah and a symbol of Dendric’s ethos. The cider itself is built on a blend of apples sourced 100% from Idaho and Oregon, primarily from Idaho, with estate-grown apples expected to appear in future blends.
Each bottle of Dry Cut is filled directly from their 1,000-gallon Charmat tank, preserving natural carbonation with no added sugars, extracts or flavorings. Bottling is done in small runs of about 250 bottles per hour to ensure close attention to quality. The result is an almost champagne-like release, not overly sweet and more like a wine.
The Coyles plan to continue experimenting with off-estate apples in the future, as is common in the industry, while also preparing their first estate fermenters of cider next summer following this fall’s harvest.
“We’ll always buy fruit, and we’ll always have estate fruit because it gives you the most opportunity for blending different apples together from different regions, different zones and different varietals. It gives you a lot of colors on the color wheel to paint that picture,” Brendan said.
In spring 2020, the team planted a research orchard with 30 apple varieties to test what thrives at high elevation. The goal for making cider was to find “great acids, great tannins and great flavor profile,” Brendan said, and they learned that crab varietal style fruit both checks those boxes and grows best.
Varieties like Redfield — a red-fleshed apple that can be used to create a dry, rosé-style cider — and Virginia Hewes — an historic cider apple once favored by Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin — are some of their favorites. In the spring, they’ll plant another 1,600 trees of each on another block of the orchard, Brendan said.
Now, with a good idea of what apples they like, they’re transitioning away from the research and development and readying for production.
Their approach, according to estate horticulturist Max Eatchel, will focus on growing “fruiting walls,” densely spaced trees planted 3 feet by 12 feet apart and heavily pruned for more efficient and sustainable growing.
“You don’t want the trees to get full sized, or else they’ll start competing with each other, and it’ll become hard to harvest,” said Eatchel, who recently graduated from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo with a degree in plant sciences. “We don’t want to bring in too big of ladders.”
Eatchel explained that they’re using dwarfing rootstocks, which are the root system and lower part of the trunk that feeds the grafted-on portion of the tree that fruits, called the scion.
“The rootstock wood is limiting the amount that the scion wood is taking, so essentially these trees are meant to be kept and managed in a dwarf capacity,” said Eatchel.
Keeping the trees smaller will make it easy for the small harvest team, just Eatchel, to keep up with the fruit. The way apples get pollinated, a cluster of flowers will first produce a king bloom, which will set fruit first and eventually become the biggest apple. But the other flowers will try to set fruit, too, meaning there will be too much competition for resources.
“You will have way too much fruit in one central location, and there’s not enough carbohydrates to be allocated to all the fruit I want,” said Eatchel. “So you have to pull all the apples off that are not the king bloom.”
In non-organic settings, chemicals have been invented that will cause the tree to do that itself, but the Dendric Estate team has decided to do that by hand.
“They’re really harsh chemicals, and we’re really about promoting beneficial biologies out here and keeping a healthy soil ecosystem,” said Eatchel.
That’ll be a process for the next batch of cider.
For now, the hard work for producing Dry Cut is done, and the Coyles are excited to get their bottles in the hands of restaurants and residents in the area.
Dry Cut is available for purchase while supplies last this summer on Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 6 p.m. at Dendric Estate’s on-site package agency, open to people ages 21-plus only, 2617 S.R. 32, Kamas. Each 750 ml bottle is $18.32, with a two-bottle-per-customer limit.
Check the Dendric Estate Instagram @dendricestate for the most up-to-date information on bottle availability and to follow along on the Coyles’ journey.