PORTSMOUTH — Apples were a big part of Portsmouth’s past and Dan Keating is banking on them being part of its future, too.

Last week Mr. Keating, who owns the 22-acre sloping tract formerly known as the Pierce-Anthony Farm at 2503 East Main Road, received approval from the Zoning Board of Review to build a cidery — essentially a brewery that will process both hard and sweet cider — and offer public tastings under the same roof.

Assuming the plan receives a few outstanding and necessary permits from the town and state, the cidery would be perhaps the first of its kind in Rhode Island. In fact, when you search for “hard cider” on the Farm Fresh Rhode Island website, only one Rhode Island business comes up: Newport Vineyards in Middletown.

Mr. Keating has lived at the Pierce-Anthony Farm for 13 years. Here his family trains horses for Newport Polo, an operation the family runs on land leased from the town at Glen Farm. (Mr. Keating is president of the polo company.)

“We get young horses off the race track from places like Suffolk Downs and two years later they’re polo ponies,” he said.

For several years, however, he had been thinking about establishing a cidery here. He’s certainly qualified; Mr. Keating’s studied cider-making at Cornell University and has previous experience in the business of beer, wine and spirits distribution.

“I wanted to do something that ties in the farm and makes the farm productive, but speaks to the local area,” said Mr. Keating. “And, apple production has been a part of this community since its inception in 1638.”

40x80-foot building

The cidery would be housed in a 40x80-foot building to be constructed near the front of the property on the east side of East Main Road at the bottom of Quaker Hill, just north of the Foodworks plaza. (The single entrance/exit there now will be improved and shifted slightly to the north.)

Mr. Keating said the cidery will resemble a rural downtown country store and that the business will not be a big operation. He has no interest in hosting any special events at the farm — “I have my hands full at Glen Farm down the road.” Even if he did, the large open field in the back is under a conservation easement and can be used for agricultural purposes only. There will be parking for about 12 and he envisions the tastings running from around 4 to 7 in the afternoon.

“We’ll probably have five or six different offerings and there will be a nominal charge to taste, and then hopefully they’ll buy some cider,” said Mr. Keating, adding he’ll need to secure a liquor license to sell the hard variety.

He also plans to sell cider to Aquidneck Island restaurants and a “handful of places in the Providence area that focus on farm to table.” The business would also like to stock other locally grown products such as cheese and honey, he said.

See the process

Visitors will be able to view the cider-making process firsthand, he said. It starts with a combination of apples from Mr. Keating’s orchards — fruit specially grown for ciders that are not normally found in stores — as well as the more common dessert apples from other local farms.

Mr. Keating, who already had undetermined wild apple trees on his property and planted an additional 200 about three years ago, intends to plant 500 more. “That may seem like a lot, but they’re high-density trees that are on dwarf rootstocks and grow in a trellis system,” he said.

His apples may not look pretty, but they’re perfect for cider.

“A lot of apples are produced mainly for their visuals as opposed to their flavor and cider apples themselves look really ugly — all gnarly — and wouldn’t look good in a supermarket,” Mr. Keating explained. “But what happens is, some apples are so bitter and tannic, but have such great flavor, that you can blend them with dessert apples. I would leave the dessert apples to the people who grow great dessert apples around here, and I would grow the specialty apples.”

The first step is to grind the fruit until it resembles an apple sauce. “Then you put them into a bladder press that squeezes the juice out of the apple sauce,” said Mr. Keating, noting that any leftover pumice could go to feed Louis Escobar’s cows on Middle Road. “The cider’s pH will be checked and we’ll get it to the right temperature and then let nature take over.”

The amount of time needed to process, bottle and sell cider all depends on what people like, he said.

“It’s much like wine; beaujolais nouveau is only a handful of weeks old, but it’s a style of wine that’s not necessarily for everybody,” he said. “Cider’s the same way; you can have a relatively young cider that’s fresh and has some charm to it but doesn’t have a lot of complexity or depth.”

There’s no set timetable for getting the operation up and running, although Mr. Keating said his best guess is “over the course of the next two years.”

He still needs a building permit from the town as well as permission from the R.I. Department of Transportation for the curb cut and R.I. Department of Environmental Management for a septic system. “As for growing apples, you have to have a certain amount of patience. You can’t set an arbitrary timetable,” he said.

‘Perfect example of mixed use’

Last week the project received praise from most zoning board members, who said the business would be an ideal fit for the “town center project," a longstanding — and expensive — plan to build three roundabouts from Town Hall to Clement’s Marketplace along East Main Rod.

Board member John Borden said he couldn’t find anything in the cidery proposal that would pose a nuisance to abutters or negatively impact an already congested traffic area.

“This is a perfect example of mixed use. It also ties in the agricultural nature,” he said.

The project also received a ringing endorsement from the town’s director of business development, Bill Clark.

“The activity and structure he is planning will be an attractive addition for the town,” Mr. Clark wrote in a letter to the board. “The business Dan Keating is creating will also be unique for a main street business. He will be embracing the endorsed principles of ‘farm to table,’ ‘buy local,’ ‘recycling’ and promoting the ‘agriculture heritage’ of Portsmouth.”

Only Allen J. Shers, the board’s first alternate, voted against the application, saying he didn’t believe that manufacturing — in this case turning apples into cider — was allowed in the town center zone.

The board also heard from one abutter, Thomas Pietraszek of 34 Edwards Drive, who said he was concerned about the manufacturing aspect of the business and “what’s left after the apples are squeezed.”

Mr. Pietraszek said manure and other remnants from horse stalls have been repeatedly dumped close to his property line and that he has also seen Mr. Keating bury a horse.

“I don’t like that. It’s a detriment to my property value and it’s an eyesore,” said Mr. Pietraszek, adding that he was concerned about where future waste from the new venture would be deposited.

As one of the conditions imposed by the board in approving the application, any dumping area must be located at least 200 feet away from the nearest abutter and be fenced in and enclosed.