Hello again, and apologies for the delay since last time. But, you see, I’ve been busy plotting. Plotting the planting of a small cider apple orchard, that is. More on that later. For now, though, let’s venture into an arena that I have little experience in (apologies in [...]

A quick perusal of the label reveals that this is a hard cider with ‘a splash of raspberry to awaken your taste buds’. That sounded good to me…then when I opened it, it poured a deep purple, almost black, and delivered a powerful raspberry punch with tart acidity from both apple [...]

Ross-On-Wye is the first of the traditional English farmhouse ciders that I’ve reviewed–it contrasts on several dimensions with standard commercial ciders. Phenolic and slightly funky, semi-dry, astringent, and uncarbonated (still), it has a depth of character that I have not [...]

JK Scrumpy’s Winterruption is a spiced, unfiltered hard cider of the common 6.9% abv strength–any higher and the tax rate on the cidermaker increases, hence why so many ciders sit right below the 7% boundary. As its namesake indicates, it’s definitely a beverage for winter [...]

Atropa is a French hard cider made by Blossomwood Cidery in Cedaredge, Colorado. It is quite sweet as a result of a traditional keeving process: essentially a stuck fermentation achieved on purpose to preserve some residual sugars…in this case, a lot of residual sugar. It reminds me a bit of [...]

As a follow-up to the Kegging Tutorial, I’ve added a beer gun tutorial for bottling from a keg using the Blichmann Beer Gun. Now, when you keg your hard cider or mead, you don’t have to forego bottling some of it later on down the road. In addition, you can bottle force-carbonated hard [...]

This one will get your juices flowing. Amber, effervescent, and crabby, it packs sour and bitter bites with very little perceptible sugar to offset them. It’s most definitely unique, complex, and interesting. Whether it’s pleasant, though, is another matter…to me it seems to lack [...]

While I’ve spent a lot of time and placed emphasis on the pursuit of traditional, dry English ciders, in fact there are multiple other regions of Europe that have their own cider traditions. Of these, Normandy is perhaps the best known, and this is where Clos Normand Brut is produced. In some [...]

This week I was fortunate in that a friend, Joe, visited from California and brought me a few ciders from Tieton Ciderworks of Tieton, WA–which is about 30 minutes away from Yakima. The first one I tried is the Apricot Cider–a semi-dry hard apple cider made with–you guessed [...]

Hard Cider Tutorial, Part One: Obtaining, Grinding, and Pressing Applesd Yours truly with press, carboys, and Winesap and Rome apples. At long last, it begins… What begins, you ask? The 2013 hard cider-making tutorial I’ve been promising, that’s what! Specifically, I’ll be [...]