Ahlbin's Fire Cider: A Traditional Remedy, Locally Reimagined!
by Matt Mahoney
Our community loves fire cider, and Kara Peters does it like no one else. She cultivated her wellness-focused business like the garden she grew when first crafting her popular tonic, nurturing it from the roots up to provide our valley with a "tried and true" natural remedy that stems from generations of traditional herbal medicines. And Kara's version? It's packed full with some of our favorite locally grown ingredients! She chooses local everywhere and anywhere possible: raw local honey from Shelburne Honey in Shelburne, fresh organic ginger and turmeric from Old Friends Farm in Amherst, local apple cider vinegar from Apex Orchards in Shelburne Falls, and more!
Owner & founder of Ahlbin's, Kara Peters, with her two favorite people!
Fire cider is a traditional herbal tonic with powerful healing properties. It supports the immune system, aids digestion, and makes a perfect topping or addition to some of our favorite foods. So where did it come from? The truth is, we don’t really know! Vinegar and honey-based herbal remedies have been around for millennia in one form or another. The earliest known iteration, oxymel, was prescribed by Hippocrates to patients in 400 B.C. to relieve illness-related symptoms and support general wellness – beneficial qualities that remain to this day, hence “tried-and-true.” As such, these tonics have become folk remedies passed down and improved upon for generations through to the modern era, where people have since taken to spicier versions of the formula. Kara’s fire cider marks the latest refinement of this ancient remedial blend, and what a perfection it is thanks to the wonderful bounty of local and organically sourced veggies, herbs, and spices that go into each bottle!
Ahlbin's blossomed naturally out of Kara's passion for finding wellness and health-conscious food options for her growing family. After coming across a recipe for fire cider, she realized it was something she could make using ingredients from her own garden at home, and jumped at the opportunity for a new "go-to" ingredient for use in her cooking. Kara continued to tweak, refine, and perfect her version of the cider, adding new fresh ingredients and changing ratios. It would not take long before she began bottling and gifting small batches of her fire cider to family and friends, who loved it so much she decided to found Ahlbin's and bring it to market!
As any independent food producer will tell you, it takes a great deal of support to get things off the ground; and while they all have their own story to tell, each share similar milestones throughout every chapter. Owners like Kara must become jacks-of-all-trades, handling every aspect of their business from the bottom up, from securing the initial financing to networking with customers and contracting suppliers. As Ahlbin's skyrocketed in popularity, Kara knew her kitchen could no longer support another important aspect of her business: production. That's when she discovered the Western Massachusetts Food Processing Center in Greenfield, MA, a program of the Franklin County Community Development Corporation (learn more here: https://www.fccdc.org/). A business helping businesses, WMFPC provides a rare, and wonderful service to small food businesses in our local area: the opportunity to make dreams come true.
Liz Buxton and the team at the Western Mass Food Processing Center work with local food businesses to turn great ideas into shelf-ready products. In addition to Ahlbin's, they also work with other local brands you'll see at the co-op, like Kitchen Garden Farm and Dosa Kitchen. They provide critical resources for emerging food businesses; things most upstarts cannot obtain on their own such as industrial kitchen equipment, refrigerated storage, and a team of dedicated staff to make the product. Having such access opens doors of opportunity for entrepreneurs to craft their recipes at scale, both efficiently and in high quality. WMFPC helps vision become reality for small food producers, making it a rare and valuable asset to Kara and others in our ever-growing local food system.
Kara, Jason, and the entire WMFPC team assemble a handful of times throughout the year to produce Ahlbin's Homemade, waiting several weeks between blending and bottling each batch to allow her local and organic ingredients to steep and work nature's magic. We visited on three separate visits to see it all through! Catch a glimpse of all three production days in the videos above and discover as we did: there's just as much of that magic behind the story this cider as the good things in each and every bottle.
Click play to watch the videos, and stop by the Wellness Department to try this 'Tried & True' formula that treats us so wonderfully well!
Click the logo above for more Ahlbin's Homemade!