Flavor is Ancient: Orchard Revival in the High Desert

In the high desert of southwest Colorado, where orcharding once flourished before trains stopped running and water grew scarce, a quiet revolution is taking root. At 6,850 feet above sea level, Elizabeth Philbrick and her team at EsoTerra Cider Works are cultivating more than just apples—they’re preserving biodiversity, rewriting the narrative of American cider, and quite literally bottling memory. With over 250 heritage apple varieties and a mission to make agriculture deliciously regenerative, Elizabeth shows us that flavor is not only a sensual experience—it’s a form of time travel, a tether to land, lineage, and the past lives of trees.

Jonnah
This is going to be a really cool way to talk about orcharding in your specific ecosystem and economy. So let’s just dive in. Why don’t you start by introducing yourself—your name, your business, and where you’re located?

Elizabeth
I’m Elizabeth Philbrick, co-founder and CEO of EsoTerra. We’re a conservation orchard and research vineyard, and we make hard ciders and wines to fund our good work—without having to ask for money. We’re based in southwest Colorado, one of the most historic apple-growing regions in North America. Over 600 heritage apple cultivars have been DNA-tested and identified here. On our 70-acre property, we conserve over 250 of those varieties. At this point, we’re one of the most diverse, if not the most diverse, privately owned orchards in North America. We’re also definitively the highest altitude estate winery on the continent.

Jonnah
Wow. What is the altitude where you are?

Elizabeth
Technically, 6,850 feet above sea level.

Jonnah
That’s wild. My orcharding reference point is the Upper Midwest—low altitude, too much moisture, pests, mold, and the classic early warmth followed by a freeze. I’m guessing you deal with some of the opposite?

Elizabeth
Yeah, we have extreme diurnal shifts. Like last night, it froze at midnight, but it’ll hit 70 degrees today. Those swings are brutal. That’s one reason historic orchards thrived here—diversity. They planted many varieties that bloom and ripen at different times. So, say in 2024, half our apples get knocked out by frost—well, the other half might do great. That diversity buffers the risk. Modern monoculture orchards—thousands of acres of one variety—require constant spraying just to survive. One surprise frost can wipe out everything. That’s a dangerous game when you’re trying to grow food.

Jonnah
Right. You’re working within a biological reality—these are plants, not machines. How do you communicate that variability to customers who expect flavor consistency, year after year?

Elizabeth
That’s a great question. First off, we do not focus on six flagship varieties, but we make over 30 different ciders, usually named after the apples in them or the orchard they came from. Here’s the thing: American cider has an embarrassingly low bar. You could trip over it. We’re talking soda-pop ciders. Boone’s Farm used to call itself cider. Angry Orchard in a six-pack doesn’t exactly inspire reverence at Thanksgiving dinner.

We make classic European-style cider. It’s aged for at least a year and bottled like champagne. Cider is a wine—fruit, yeast, and time. But most American ciders? They’re made from concentrated apple juice, 80% of which comes from China. That’s a completely different drink.

We had one bad review—one star—because someone said, “It tastes like wine!” And I’m like, “Sister, we have a wine manufacturing license. This is wine.”

Before Prohibition, cider was the most consumed alcoholic beverage in the U.S. Today it’s 1–2% of the market. In the EU, it’s 20%, but they call it apple wine—lots of names. Even brandy is just distilled apple cider. It’s got this long, storied history.

Jonnah
And in terms of processing—why is cider such a smart product in an ag system that’s increasingly unpredictable?

Elizabeth
Perfect question. Grocery store apples are the same six varieties: Granny Smith, Red Delicious, Cosmic Crisp. But food is faddish. Your grandparents would freak out at a bowl of green mush—your kids call it guacamole and love it. Celery used to be elite—traded like caviar. Those long, shallow crystal trays in antique stores? They were for celery.

Most of that diversity is gone now. We’ve selected fruits and vegetables for looks and shippability, not taste. These antique apples—gnarly, weird-colored, sometimes potato-looking—are delicious. I didn’t even like apples until I met my husband, who was obsessed with fruit. One Colorado apple, the Yellow Banana, smells like ripe bananas and tastes like one too.

But they don’t “look right.” So juicing them is perfect—it captures that flavor without relying on shelf appeal. Then turning that juice into cider, which is the fastest-growing adult beverage in the U.S., gives those apples purpose again.

We even make non-alcoholic, single-varietal apple juices—like Rum Beauty. People come into our Durango tasting room and try it frozen from an Italian granita machine—it’ll blow your mind.

And that’s the thing: if we can give these trees a job, we can preserve biodiversity. We’re down to six apple varieties, eleven types of rice, three types of celery. If we had a potato famine for celery, celery would vanish. That’s why this matters.

Jonnah
So biodiversity is a lifeline—and it sounds like Southwest Colorado actually can support orcharding. But what are the real challenges on the ground—climate, water, infrastructure?

Elizabeth
Orcharding only disappeared here about 20 years ago. Mountain Sun Juice, out of Dolores, was once the largest organic juice factory in the world—11 million gallons a year, shipped nationwide.

What killed orcharding here wasn’t the climate. It was logistics. Trains stopped running. Fruit is heavy and expensive to move. We’re remote—I’m four hours from any store that sells regular underwear. You can either go to Walmart or a boutique lingerie shop. Nothing in between.

When the trains stopped, we moved to juice—value-added, easier to store and ship. And juicing doesn’t require the same inputs. Most sprays are cosmetic—to make apples look right. I can juice a bird-pecked apple and still make something delicious and healthy.

Water is the real limiter. We’re in the Colorado River Basin, where 50–80% of the water goes to alfalfa. And a lot of that alfalfa feeds dairy cows… overseas. Japan, China, the UAE. It’s water laundering. We’re growing one of the thirstiest crops in one of the driest places on earth—and shipping it abroad, not even feeding our own people.

Meanwhile, the farmer selling vegetables at the farmers’ market gets almost no support. But if you want to grow corn or soy for industrial ingredients, there’s a line of subsidies waiting for you.

Here’s the good news: apples and grapes use just one-eleventh the water of alfalfa. And they feed people directly. I can hand a bottle of cider or juice to someone and watch them enjoy it. That’s a closed-loop system, in a way—even if you follow it through the bathroom and back into the watershed.

Jonnah
That’s wild. And kind of beautiful. So what keeps you going emotionally? What gives you that lift—harvesting fruit, creating this beverage, handing it to someone—does it help ease the existential dread of the broken system?

Elizabeth
I went from working in the U.S. Senate—fancy job, embossed business card, rules and policy. And then I met my husband in grad school. One night he rolls over and says, “If I started a cidery, would you help me run it?” I said, “Only if you’ve got a business plan.” By morning, he’d stayed up all night writing one.

Now, we’re hands-on. Everyone on our team does everything—bartending, kitchen work, picking fruit. And there’s magic in it.

One winter, I handed a hot mulled cider to an 85-year-old local man. He took a sip and said, “This tastes like my grandmother’s house smelled.” She picked from the same trees we juiced that day. That man tasted something he hadn’t tasted in 80 years. Then he bought six five-liter boxes to serve at Christmas dinner.

That’s time travel. Literal time travel. These trees live 200 years. They connect generations through flavor, which is more powerful than words. Flavor is ancient. It evokes memory before language.

Jonnah
That’s what I’m going to bring up on the panel. That’s not metaphorical time travel—it’s real. You’re giving people the chance to taste across generations. You can’t do that with a photo. That’s legacy.

Elizabeth
Exactly. One of our team members is Native American, and we’re right next to Mesa Verde. There’s a flour mill here that still grinds the same wheat that was given as rations when Native people were displaced—and that’s where the flour tortilla comes from. People ask why their tortillas don’t taste the same, and I’m like: it’s the flour. It’s the terroire. You can’t transport that with a recipe.

Even if the recipe is just “grab fruit and juice it,” the ingredients—the land—matter. And being part of that, feeding people directly from that land, growing something more meaningful than alfalfa bales? That feels like the most significant thing I can offer this world right now.