Lost Boy Cider

The logo behind Lost Boy Cider, Northern Virginia’s first urban cidery in Alexandria, sums up owner Tristan Wright’s entrepreneurial journey and story. The image shows a boy wearing boots, his sleeves rolled up and an apple cap perched on his head.

“He’s standing in the mountains, and his one leg is up with his boot threatening to stomp on an apple sort of defiantly,” Wright says. That lost boy might just represent Wright, a bit of a free spirit who never really loved the constrained environments he found himself in, whether that was an all-boys private school in Charlottesville for high school or the career he had after college in banking. “It doesn’t really fit my personality. Banking’s very structured, very rigid.”

Wright found success, and he could’ve gone on like that, except for a confluence of events. Starting in 2014, he began to get sicker and sicker, with headaches, joint pain, back pain, and brain fog. His wife was about to have her third baby, and Wright went through test after test to find out what was wrong with him. Eventually he got the diagnosis of celiac disease, with serious soy and gluten allergies.

At the same time, one of his best college friends passed away at his desk at work, leaving behind two little boys. After Wright came back from his friend’s funeral, he had an emotional catharsis and a moment of reckoning that stopped him in his tracks. “I just decided that I’m going to start this cidery. It was like a voice, I heard like James Earl Jones or something. ‘You are going to start a cidery.’ And I was like da-ding. And I felt like the apples had found me.”

Wright had always liked hard cider after a memorable honeymoon with his wife in Ireland. After his diagnosis, he had been playing around with making this gluten-free drink in his kitchen. Now he set out to learn the craft in earnest, traveling to Oregon State University’s cider production school and then enrolling in viticulture at Cornell.

In 2019, Wright opened Lost Boy Cider in a 6,000-square foot warehouse in the Carlyle neighborhood, complete with a tap room looking into the production facility. “Alexandria is incredible,” this Del Ray resident says, citing Chamber ALX’s support and the community’s encouragement.

The cider made here is “low-to-no interference,” unfiltered and unpasteurized, with all the juice supplied from orchards in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. In 2026, Lost Boy Cider brought in about 100 gallons of apples from eight trees planted in December 2018, before the cidery opened. On any given day, the Lost Boy’s tap room offers 20 different ciders on draft and more in cans and bottles, everything from their award-winning Comeback Kid to funkier options like an apricot cider or one that tastes just like a margarita.

“Cider can taste and look like anything,” says Wright, noting that one of the challenges is overcoming people’s perception that hard cider is very sweet. “All of our ciders are sugar-free. They are naturally gluten free, and there are advantages to that from a health perspective.”

Lost Boy is a community gathering place, and you can even bring your dog, since the facility is recognized as a Virginia farm winery and allows animals, even goats and alpacas for fun events, like goat yoga.

To Wright, the little boy on Lost Boy’s logo represents finding what you’re meant to do. “Every single person that you meet is on a path, is on a journey. Sometimes we get lost and off the path, and sometimes we don’t even know that we’re on it,” he says. “If the apples can find me, you just need to have your antenna up, roll your sleeves up, put your boots on, and threaten to stomp on the apple, even though it sounds and looks ridiculous. And go get it, follow the path.”

Visit Lost Boy Cider located at 317 Hooffs Run Drive Alexandria, Virginia