About Mast Year Collective Cider: Mast Year Cider is a worker-owned company specializing in ciders made from wild or abandoned apples and pears foraged in Columbia and Walla Walla counties. Started in 2021 by a group of cider-passionate friends with wine making backgrounds. Inspired by wild apple foragers and cataloguers on the East Coast, the team took long drives through the foothills near Walla Walla's wine country and ventured up into the Blue Mountains where they discovered an abundance of wild and abandoned fruit trees. They've begun to take care of many of these high elevation trees, and forage/collect the fruit themselves to use in their cider & perry. All of their ciders are naturally fermented using native yeast, and bottled unfiltered. The Collective believes in minimalism in the cellar, with wild fermentations, unamended musts, and low-to-no use of sulfur. 

A Mast Year is a year in which a fruit (or nut) tree has a bumper crop resulting in an abundance of fruit relative to other years. It's common for fruit & nut trees to have a mast year every 2-5 years. For apples specifically, it's highly common for many varieties to have a bumper crop (i.e. mast year) every other year.