Locally foraged mulberries were frozen and preserved for the past two years and then used in Blue Bee Cider’s seasonal offering Fanfare. (Photo courtesy Blue Bee Cider)
Springtime for many means the sight of plump fava beans and swirly garlic scapes, scarlet strawberries and potent ramps, and evenings when the sun starts staying out later. At Blue Bee Cider (4801 Bethlehem Road), springtime means having Fanfare on tap.
Infused with locally foraged mulberries, the hard cider is one of the Blue Bee’s most sought-after selections. And now, after a two-year gap in production — and fruit collection — Fanfare has made a triumphant return.
“I just made 250 gallons,” says Taylor Benson, cidermaker and Blue Bee co-owner along with his partner in business and life, Mackenzie Smith. “This is the largest batch we’ve ever been able to produce.”
The roots of Fanfare trace back over a decade, when Benson and Smith were still young college students working at Blue Bee’s original location in Manchester. A customer of the cidery, Brian Ahnmark, took notice of wild-growing mulberries in the area and pitched the idea of cultivating the sweet-tart fruit to then owner Courtney Mailey.
“He was like, ‘I feel like this could be something,’” Smith recalls. “He was the one that started the cultivating of the mulberries to create something, and then it just kind of blew up.”
And while Fanfare has remained in the Blue Bee repertoire since then, it is by far the cidery’s most finicky and fragile offering. There have been harvest seasons where crops were meager and resulted in a mere 5 gallons of cider, others where they were completely decimated.
“Mulberries, of all the different fruits, are very fragile to different weather systems,” Smith explains. “The crop is either just, you know, barren or a really bad storm or frost will happen, and it will completely kill the tree. “
Despite the delicate nature of its hallmark ingredient, Fanfare has remained a key component of Blue Bee’s identity.
(From left) Blue Bee Cider owners Taylor Benson and Mackenzie Smith (Photo by Eileen Mellon)
For Benson and Smith, who purchased Blue Bee Cider in 2023, Fanfare is a connection to their company’s origin story, a through line they can trace back to the early days, and a tradition that they’re proud to preserve.
“It’s just kind of always been a treasured product, and so we’ve still continued that,” Smith says.
This year, Benson, head cidermaker since 2018, tinkered with the recipe after a nudge from Smith. He switched the base apple to an acidic Rhode Island Greening, leading to a cider with a rounder flavor, layers of astringency and a balanced burst of berry. The unfiltered result is perhaps Fanfare’s most mature and complex iteration yet.
“You smell the berry, you can taste the berry, but it’s not jammy,” Benson says.
Blue Bee is the first (and currently the sole) producer of mulberry-flavored hard cider in Virginia and one of the few cideries in the country offering the beverage. The locally foraged fruit has been supplied by everyone from McKenzie and Smith’s neighbors and people living near the cidery to Blue Bee’s Cider Club members. It’s a product that relies on community.
Benson says, “For this particular project, this particular vintage, all 80 pounds of mulberries were collected by the community; it was all community driven. It’s also all fruit that is 100% foraged, because no one is commercially growing it.”
Smith holds mulberries used for Fanfare. (Photo courtesy Blue Bee Cider)
Similar in appearance but smaller and firmer than blackberries and extremely juicy, mulberries ripen around late spring and early summer; an easy way to spot them is to look down. They are notorious for leaving bright purple stains on sidewalks as the lobed fruits ripen and fall from trees that grow all over the city and across much of the world.
“I know Lewis Ginter [Botanical Garden] has one of the oldest ones in the city, and there’s plenty of them throughout the Fan,” Benson says. “A couple customers came in telling us that they loved Fanfare in the past, so much that they have planted mulberry trees in their yard to help supply berries in the future.”
While mulberries are common, they’re not necessarily well known. Smith admits, “I personally was not really familiar with mulberries until Richmond, because they’re everywhere.”
Benson adds, “If people grew up around mulberry trees and stuff, they’ll use it and make jam and preserves, but it seems like a lost art. It just feels like mulberries are very similar to crab apples, where it’s almost from a different generation.”
Benson says he and Smith have created a map of Richmond documenting where good mulberry trees have been found. The cidery plans to issue a public call for mulberries within the next week to collect fruit for their next vintage of Fanfare and reward harvesters with “cider bucks.”
Currently, Fanfare is only found on tap at the cidery. On June 7, it will make its debut in bottles during the return of Virginia Berry Cider Jam. The festival will feature berry-centric ciders from across the state. The lineup for this year includes Buskey Cider, Ciders From Mars, Old Town Cidery, Potter’s Craft Cider, Providence Farms Cidery, Sage Bird Ciderworks and Sly Clyde Cider. Food vendors include Kwam’s Chicken Project, Kobop, Karmalita’s Confections and Nam Prik Pao.
“There’s something more special about a berry cider,” Benson says. “People love the color and the presentation and just the flavor; it’s always been a huge hit. What I like most about [the Cider Jam] is we’re getting different production styles involved.”
And while Benson and Smith just picked up 150 pounds of raspberries and blackberries from Agriberry Farm last week for future concoctions, Fanfare — the cider made with fussy, fleeting, far-out fruit — remains an important element of their business.
“The idea that customers can be a part of a cider, like, ‘Hey, I did that,’ is a really cool aspect,” Smith says, “the fact that they can be involved in the making of something. We have these regulars and this huge fan base that just loves Blue Bee so much, and they just want to be a part of it. And we’re continuing to grow that, and we’re really excited about this particular Fanfare.”
