Lucy Gellman Photo
If you didn’t know Liam Doherty-Nicholson outside of his photos, you might think he owned an orchard, or a small farm.
Buckets of apples and crates of fresh hops fill his Facebook feed. He’ll flip through dozens of trees, heavy with shiny, ripe fruit if you ask to see his phone. A rustic cider press pops up at one point, followed by a stream of recycled glass bottles that you can almost hear clink and clang as they roll around and out of the frame.
It’s not too far from the truth. As the driving force behind Second Chance Cider, a noncommercial home-brew that, coming right out of his East Rock home, has community at its core, Doherty-Nicholson relies on apple tree owners in New Haven and Branford for his fruit. The two communities become his orchard through September, October and November. The arrangement benefits the owners, who do not like to see their extra fruit rot on the ground, as much as it benefits him.
“When I was out in Portland [Oregon], I started this organization — it’s a group, basically — called Community Supported Brewing,” he said on WNHH radio’s “Kitchen Sync.” “Every Thursday we had a party and made 15 gallons of beer … it was a really fun time.”
That was the catalyst for a partner operation in cider brewing, which followed Doherty-Nicholson’s discovery that “95 percent of people who have trees, they don’t want any of it.’” Using his bike and his business acumen, he made a google map of apple trees across Portland, and began seeing which owners didn’t want all of their apples. Within two years, the group had brewed 150 gallons of hard cider, Oregon’s state limit, was trying out different types of yeast, and declared the operation officially “a lot of fun.”
So when he and his wife relocated to New Haven a year and a half ago, it felt natural to continue it. But before he could, misfortune struck: while downstairs working alone in a wood shop for his job with Connecticut Working Families, he fell and suffered a massive seizure that resulted in removal of part of his skull (to allot for swelling), partial loss of speech, a new regimen of anti-convulsants intended to keep seizures in check.
“It was really strange after about nine years of doing all work that was just talking to people, knocking on doors and talking about different political things … now I don’t remember how to say most of my things at all,” he said in the same interview. “It’s been a hard year, just figuring out what I’m going to do, how do I be a person again, talking well as I’d like to, or as I remember I used to be able to do.”
Enter Second Chance Cider as a very unlikely vehicle for recovery. While the name alludes primarily to the apples, which get a second chance when they are “saved” from decay for human consumption, there’s also a meaning in it for him, as he feels out this unexpected second chance at his career and social life.
Courtesy Liam Doherty-Nicholson
“The cider is just really exciting,” he said. “I’m figuring out how to do this right now and having a lot of fun … using the time that I can to read different things about apple cider making, riding my bike around, finding apple trees and getting the apples out — just doing all these different things with the pieces that you make cider with … it’s [given me] an ability to do a lot of things that I forgot how to do with the whole process that I have.”
While there is no direct correlation between cider brewing and neurological recovery (to the contrary, doctors often caution against alcohol use for its interaction with anti-epileptic medication), there is a proposed one between what are called complimentary therapies — in this case, a sort of normalized social play, à la hard cider — and recovery time. Doherty-Nicholson isn’t interested in writing off his prescribed course of treatment, or proposing that the specific process of brewing is nursing him back to health — but he does think there’s definitely something to it. In sifting through which apples go through the press, he challenges himself to think critically in new ways. When he’s talking to tree owners, he feels like he’s relearning the parts of speech that he lost. Biking around the city is a sort of physical therapy. And the brewing process itself, its step-by-step nature, is an unconventional way of training his brain.
“I feel like we lost the ability to make cider as people. A couple hundred years ago, everybody did it all the time, 100 percent, and that was how they actually were able to have something to drink … and now they’ve kind of lost it. I’m really excited about figuring out how to get back into it and get people more into knowing about it.”
“I feel like I’m one year into a five to ten year build to get 100 percent back,” he added. “I feel I’ve gotten really far the first year. I feel like … just figuring out more and more about what’s going on helps that a lot.”
To listen to the episode of WNHH’s “Kitchen Sync” on which this first appeared, click on or download the above audio.