Ellen Cavalli Lives Life In Full
When the Sonoma County cidermaker could no longer drink alcohol, she had to reevaluate her entire identity.
This isn’t just a story about cider. It’s not just a story about cancer, non-alcoholic beverages, family, or business. Instead, this story is one of passion, discovery, survival, and how to rediscover the meaning of a life after one’s world is irrevocably altered. This is Ellen Cavalli’s story.
Ellen Cavalli is a cider evangelist. Yes, that’s her actual job title at Tilted Shed Ciderworks, the Sonoma County cidery and orchard she owns with her husband Scott Heath. But cider has always been more than an occupation for her—it’s the lens through which she fully sees herself.
“I’m a mom, I have another job, and I have all these other interests. But cider very much defines me,” she tells me over the phone, during our conversation last month. She’s worked in cider for more than 13 years, initially uniting her interests in agriculture, horticulture, fermentation, and what she calls “lost skills” into cultivating over 100 varieties of cider apples, perry pears, quince, and other produce in the heart of California’s wine country. Tilted Shed is a small and completely hands-on operation, one that operates seasonally, intentionally, and ethically. They can’t scale up to produce mass commercial quantities, and Ellen doesn’t want to.
“This is very much human scale,” she explains, adding they handle all aspects of the business with a natural winemaker’s mind—low intervention, working directly with farmers, sourcing locally, and pressing and bottling by hand. She estimates Tilted Shed makes less than 5,000 gallons of cider every year. It doesn’t sound like much, but considering just over a quarter of American cideries make between 1,000-5,000 gallons annually, they’re not outrageously small. Of that, Ellen says around ten percent of their business comes from one product: Ellie's Non-Alcoholic Gravenstein.
Ellie’s NA is named after Ellen, and she’s the entire reason it even exists in the Tilted Shed portfolio. With the way non-alcoholic trends are growing in every segment, cider included, it’s possible they would have eventually dabbled in dealcoholized cider for competition’s sake. But it wasn’t on her radar until a routine mammogram came back marked abnormal.
She wasn’t shocked at the news—her older sister was a breast cancer survivor, and her younger sister was diagnosed with advanced cancer in 2021. When the biopsy came back with her own cancer diagnosis, “I didn’t panic,” Ellen says. She’s always been conscientious about her health, and they caught it early. Her chances were good. But it was the next piece of news that flipped her world even further on its head.
Her oncologist recommended no alcohol for her best chance at survival, or extremely limited quantities. “There were definitely actual studies that showed a statistically significant increase in the chance of my cancer coming back if I continue to drink alcohol,” she says. If she continued to drink the way any alcohol maker would—tasting, sipping, enjoying—there was a good chance it could kill her, or at the very least shorten her lifespan.
Who was Ellen if not a cider drinker, educator, maker, lover? She co-owns the second-oldest cidery in Sonoma County. She launched Malus, “a quarterly print zine exploring the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of American cider.” She advocates for local farmers, works to improve cider representation, and regularly speaks at industry conferences. Without cider, what was left?
Feeling lost when a part of your professional identity is stripped away isn’t uncommon. In fact, I covered it at length for Good Beer Hunting during the height of the pandemic. But knowing others have struggled with a similar loss of identity didn’t make it any easier for Ellen. Then, as she watched her younger sister lose her own painful battle with cancer, she knew what she had to do.
“I want to be alive,” says Ellen simply. “I don’t want it to be like I chose alcohol over a longer life with my family.”
Not drinking was the easy part. Feeling disconnected from the community and industry she helped build was the hard part. She had to make a choice. “Do I want to continue living with constant anxiety, sorrow, grief, depression, no joy and faking it?” she asked herself. “What do I want my life to be?”
She told Scott something had to change for her to find meaning in her life’s work once again. For her to feel joy. For her to feel hope. If she couldn’t drink alcohol, then the choice was clear—make a non-alcoholic cider. After a few months of expedited trials, Ellie's Non-Alcoholic Gravenstein became the first commercially available dealcoholized cider in the United States in December 2022. (She’s pretty sure they squeaked by Golden State Cider’s Dry & Mighty NA cider by a few weeks.)
Ellie’s NA has had a great reception, explains Ellen. Not only has it allowed her to reconnect with a huge area of her life, but it’s allowed her to see how many other people out there are thirsty, for whatever reasons, for non-alcoholic options. “I now truly have something for everybody,” she says with pride, adding that cancer has a way of wresting control away from you. Now, she’s claimed back her agency, happiness, and creativity.
“The fact I even made it this far is huge,” she admits. But she wants other cider makers to look at her success, outside of trends and consumer tastes, and realize NA cider’s potential. “It’s good for people to feel like we’re looking out for them,” she says. “What we’re trying to do is share joy with other people and give them little moments that are special, with people they love. This is just one other way to do that.”
Keep up with Ellen and Tilted Shed on Instagram at @tiltedshed.
Do you know of a woman or non-binary person working in beverage alcohol who hasn’t seen the spotlight—and should? Nominate them for a future feature!
What I’m Reading
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