Pivot Brewing to open; cidery offers alternative to beer (and it’s gluten free)

Lexington’s first modern cidery is gearing up to open later this month. Owner Kevin Compton has worked for more than two years to get his Pivot Brewery going and will launch the taproom Saturday at 11:30 a.m.

The grand opening will feature ciders from other makers for now. Compton will have 11 ciders on tap, ranging from sweet to dry, plus eight mostly Kentucky craft beers.

The Pasta Garage, just down Delaware Avenue from the cidery, will have food for sale on the extensive patio overlooking downtown Lexington.

“What sets us apart is our concentration on ciders,” Compton said. After the taproom opened quietly a couple weeks ago, customers began trickling in. Many, he said, are grateful to have a gluten-free option in adult beverage. Others just share his love of hard cider.

Why cider, which until fairly recently was not much on the American drinker’s radar?

“I just like it,” Compton said. He’s hardly alone these days.

Hard cider sales grew to more than $523 million in 2015, according to The Cider Journal, although sales growth has slowed.

Compton plans to make several versions, have seven or eight on tap, and hopes to have at least three versions in kegs for distribution.

He also plans to brew some beer, too. And he’ll share space in his production area with the maker of Gents ginger ale and other local drinks.

Sometime in the next two weeks, Pivot will begin crushing apples, Compton said, so he could have his own hard cider to serve before the end of the year. Already he has most of the equipment in place to wash, crush and mash apples.

Operations manager Kyle Degener is seeking a source of local apples, but for now he plans to bring them from Indiana and Ohio. Finding the right variety is tough, because most orchards prefer to grow sweeter dessert apples for eating.

“Winesaps or Arkansas Blacks, ... those are just great,” Degener said.

They will need to bring whole truckloads, 50 bins at a time of 900 to 950 pounds each. They will juice them and fill the three 10-barrel fermenters and add yeast to generate the appropriate flavor.

“You can do wild fermenting, with the yeast that’s on the apples naturally, but for a more consistent product, we’ll use industrial brewers’ yeast,” Compton said. “We might do some wild ferment down the road.”

He also plans to try barrel-aging of ciders in bourbon barrels. And he hopes to turn the “pumice” (the leftover bits of apple after the juice is pressed out) into another product, although for now it will go to farmers for animal feed.

“Chickens love it,” Compton said.

This story was originally published October 25, 2016 at 2:03 PM with the headline "Pivot Brewing to open; cidery offers alternative to beer (and it’s gluten free)."