Well, the best reason I have for you is that hard cider was in steep decline long before Prohibition. It hit its trough well before Prohibition rolled along. This is due to a few reasons, but the short explanation is that cider never advanced beyond being a cottage industry in the US, a sideline for homesteaders, while other libation productions commercialized. I’ve organized this into a few sections that contributed to the fall of cider: Improved Apple Cultivation, Improved Agricultural Technology, Improved Production/Distribution Technology, Industrial Revolution Cultural Shifts, and Temperance (with a capital T).
So, let’s start with where cider came from. Early settlers brought apple trees as a fairly easy crop to cultivate that required little direct labor compared to grains and vegetables. While settlers needed grains and vegetables, apples were an easy windfall. Plant the orchard, and a few years later, you’re getting easy bonus food over and over, while vegetables and grains needed to be planted annually. Since a fairly robust supply of drink was needed, due to settlers not being able to easily process American water, from contamination or novel diseases, cider found an easy place in colonial America. [1]
Applejack (cider further distilled into spirits) also gained a great deal of traction, and the first licensed distillery in the newly liberated US in 1780 (Laird & Company) was basically founded as a cottage industry selling applejack. [1]
So, what happened?
Apple Cultivation Improvement (all of this is [1]): Fruit trees can be cultivated in two methods. The easiest is from seed. When you cultivated from seed, you’re allowing genetics to occur. You have an apple, produced by a tree, but that apple contains seeds that are pollinated from another tree. Which means that the seeds of an apple don’t necessarily produce a tree that will make the apple that started the tree. Cultivating from seed, then, is tricky business, especially when there are diverse trees in an area. You get a lot of novel cultivations. Some are really super delicious. Others, not so much. Johnny Appleseed (who was a real person) believed that this was the only ethical way to plant, and planted thousands of apple trees from seed.
Cider, like all other forms of alcohol production, isn’t just a desire to produce cider. It’s a choice a farmer makes to convert his raw produce into a refined form to improve its marketability. Distilling whiskey, for example, is an excellent way (as we’ll discover) to convert large amounts of low-value-by-volume barley into high-value-by-volume whiskey. This conversion means that we can now transport our crop for much, much cheaper. As early Americans planted orchards from seed, some of the apples were bad, and not fit for sale or enjoyable for the farmer to eat. Converting this into cider was an easy way to recoup the economics.
As time went on, however, more and more farmers began planting orchards by graft, which is a technique to graft an existing tree, creating a clone. This allowed orchard-owners to create extremely consistent, tasty apples, with far less waste. As raw fresh fruit is a high-value-by-volume good already, this reduced economic incentive to convert apples into cider.
Improving Agricultural Technology [1], [2], and [3]: One of cider’s chief early advantages was the relative lack of labor required for apples relative to other crops. Plant the trees, wait, harvest. As cultivation techniques and accessible area improved, however, the face of American agriculture started to shift from homesteads to cash-crop farmers. Farmers needed to maximize their output in the territory they farmed rather than maximize their output based on what they could personally manage, and cereal grains became progressively more common. In the North, hired help was easy to find, particularly as child labor was still in full swing. In the South, most cash crops were the harder-to-raise crops such as cotton, as labor was, of course, compulsory. For all that, cereal grain production raised dramatically in Antebellum, and more dramatically following Republican Reconstruction. This increased availability of material made beer, whiskey, and vodka progressively more common throughout the US.
Improving Production/Distribution Technology [3]: Separate from improved apple orchard consistency, cider faced stiff competition from other libations. Nineteenth century Americans loved booze. European visitors frequently remarked upon the overall booziness of American society. But that doesn’t mean they loved cider. Beer was a growing contender to the throne; cheap, just as alcoholic, less subject to spoilage, and more favored by the increasing Germanic population in the US throughout the nineteenth century, beer production was skyrocketing throughout the century leading up to Prohibition. In 1865, the US produced 3.7 million barrels of beer, and the average American drank 3.4 gallons of the stuff annually. By 1910, the nation was producing 59.6 million barrels of beer, and the average American was drinking 20 gallons of beer per year. Improvements to brewing technology would lead to a spike in competition throughout this period. The average annual output of a brewery in 1865 was 1,640 barrels. By 1910, that had increased to 38,000.
Whiskey was experiencing an even larger renaissance in the States [2]. After rum and gin imports were cut off during the Revolutionary war, Americans began to produce whiskey. A lot of whiskey. And where I discussed the economic incentives? The economic benefits for converting corn to whiskey were huge. Much more profitable by volume, and neither the farmer nor the distiller ever had to worry about spoilage. While whiskey suffered to some degree during the industrial revolution, it remained a strong fallback for excess crops of corn, rye, and wheat, allowing farmers to plant full fields regardless of demand for grains, and without concern for bottoming out prices.
The advent of the railroads accelerated the reach of both whiskey and beer. Producers began to centralize in a way that cider production never did, significantly increasing the profitability of cash-based libations due to economics of scale. Further, the railroad improved the solvency of fresh fruit, decreasing the value proposition for cash-crop farmers to convert fruit into cider, as it didn’t increase its value-by-volume.
Industrial Revolution [2]: As I mentioned earlier, cider was a cottage industry. Homesteaders would have apple orchards and produce cider on their own premises. The Industrial Revolution changed all of that. Fewer people were homesteading every year; fewer people were bartering, fewer people were keeping small sideline cottage industries. More people had jobs, had money but no land, less and less time for their own projects. They wanted drink quick, they didn’t want to produce the drink. This continued to stimulate the production of whiskey and beer, but served to wipe cider out entirely.
Temperance [2]: Cider was maybe the first casualty of the Temperance movement. It’s hard to note, due to the unreliability of production numbers from before around 1850, but it’s estimated that cider’s popularity dropped nearly in half between 1820-1840. W.J. Rorabaugh strongly attributes this to the spreading Temperance movement. Cider’s status as a cottage industry made it more susceptible to the forces of Temperance than the other libations. If a cider-producing homestead joined the movement, that was an immediate reduction in supply. If that homestead later fell off the wagon, they were highly likely to begin purchasing produced beverages rather than resume production of their cider. Over the period of decades, then, this ended up having a profound effect on cider production.
[1]: The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart
[2]: The Alcoholic Republic (W.J. Rorabaugh)
[3]: Economic History: A Concise History of America’s Brewing Industry