Dressler Estate’s DIY Cidery in Downington
Leave it to a Drexel engineer to build a boutique hard cider brewery in his suburban backyard.
Engineering and cider making may seem like they’re on two different sides of the career spectrum, but they make sense to Brian Dressler. He’s the co-owner of Dressler Estate, a cidery he built in his garage in Downingtown, Pennsylvania.
“Most engineers – we need hobbies,” he says. Since a lot of engineering work is done at a desk, most of his engineering friends “have a hands-on hobby to pull them back to the real world.”
For him, that hobby was making cider, which he did while working as a mechanical engineer. Before striking out on his own, he served in product design and manufacturing engineering roles for both the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries.
The change I’d most like to see in the world is…
“…people caring for each other more.”
Dressler started tinkering with cider in 2012 while his friends were homebrewing beer. Cider recalled great memories for him of going apple picking with his mom as a kid and making pies. “I said to myself, ‘If you can make a nice wine-type product out of grapes, you can do that with apples.’” Plus, with Pennsylvania being the fourth-largest apple producing state in the country, he knew his cider could be a local product as well.
When he and his wife (Olga, a Temple grad) decided to turn this hobby into a business, they DIY’d the entire enterprise. First, in 2015 they purchased a home with an eye to the local zoning codes, ensuring they had permits for a home-based business. For funds, they took an early withdrawal from Dressler’s retirement savings account and ran a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kiva, an online platform where people lend small amounts of money for three years, interest free. With that money they licensed and renovated a garage on their property, transforming it into an efficient and unique production space. They got their equipment from an estate sale when a winery closed in Chester Springs.
The market was right for the kind of ciders Dressler Estate makes. Angry Orchard had just made a splashy debut in 2012 that drew a lot of converts to cider.
Where a lot of hard ciders come in cans, Dressler’s products are served in wine bottles. “The taste there has matured a little bit and people wanted something a little elegant, dryer and driven by local agriculture,” he says. All of their apples are sourced from Pennsylvania orchards, with most coming from one century-old family orchard in Lancaster County.
The Dresslers ferment a boutique batch of 6,000 liters a year. They self-distribute bottles to bars, restaurants, bottle shops and a couple of farmer’s markets across Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties, and they do tastings around the region. They hope to open their own tasting room in the near future.
“We aim to make elegant ciders that let the fruit character and growing conditions of the orchard shine through in every glass,” says Dressler. “We didn’t want to get rich. If that happens, that’s wonderful and a happy side effect.” — Jen A. Miller