Built through defiance.

A brief love affair with cider

It all started on a trip to Ireland in 2010. "I'll never forget the stag party lads. I turned towards the commotion and they had propped my wife up on a bar table and began chanting in chorus for her to teach them Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson songs. We sang and drank cider all night. What was fun at the time became a life-changing moment. I wouldn't realize its significance for six more years."

Tristan returned to the States and quickly reverted to whiskey and beer.

The quest began

Fast forward to 2015, when Tristan was diagnosed with serious soy and gluten allergies. "I was sitting on the hospital bed, the doctor staring at me intently. I had one question: was I really, really sick? In a flash everything I thought I knew about food and drink needed to change."

The path to a gluten- and soy-free life is not straightforward. Breaking old habits is tough, and many ingredients in commercial food are less than desirable. Perhaps the worst part was saying goodbye to beer and whiskey. Tristan gave up alcohol altogether for nearly seven months. "Purely out of fear. I literally thought I might be dying. What I didn't realize was that I had been slowly poisoning myself."

When the doctors gave the all-clear, mass-produced wine and hard liquor weren't good options. That's when the trip to Ireland came back, and the lightbulb began to glow. The quest to become a cidermaker began in earnest.

The goal

Tristan wanted to do something simple: create an American-made, modern-style, handcrafted cider at home. Anyone who knows anything about winemaking knows that this is not as easy as it sounds, especially coming from a completely different career. Two years of research later, armed with certificates from Cornell's viticulture program and Oregon State University's cider production school, Lost Boy was born. Schoolbooks studied, recipes developed, a supportive wife and family, and an unstoppable passion.

Why Northern Virginia?

The DC region is our home, and Virginia is the country's ninth-largest apple-growing state. Washington and Jefferson planted large swaths of fruit trees here for their, ahem, personal enjoyment. Virginia's apple history runs deeper than any other state's, and we're honored to continue the tradition. With personal connections to Shenandoah Valley orchards, where better to begin? Lost Boy opened in June 2019 as Alexandria's first cidery since Prohibition.