Bite Hard Apple Cider is the cider Smith & Forge secretly wants to be but falls short of. Dry, crisp, quite tart, and clean, Bite Hard packs a bitter bite that reminds me a bit of a milder version of Wickson by Wandering Aengus, with a bitterness that more closely resembles a hard, [...]

I’m not going to beat around the bush on this one: Smith & Forge Hard Cider is one of the worst ciders I’ve ever tried. I discovered it in the usual way–looking for new ciders at my local liquor stores–and made the mistake of buying this just because it was new and next [...]

Wickson by Wandering Aengus Ciderworks is one potent cider. No, it doesn’t have the pleasant tannin of bittersweet or bittersharp cider apples, but it does have a unique wild apple character–powerfully acidic and crabby–that I’ve only encountered once before in JK [...]

While the general tale of the Anthem cider line by Wandering Aengus Ciderworks has already been told in the Anthem Hops Review, Anthem Traditional is worth mentioning as well. As I understand it, Anthem Traditional is the base product that all the Anthem ciders start out as before other ingredients [...]

I obtained a bottle of Anthem Hops from a friend of mine, Joe, who lives in California, which unsurprisingly has better availability of Pacific Northwest ciders than I have here in Colorado. Perhaps that dynamic will change someday (FYI, if you’re a CO distributor reading and reading this, [...]

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 [...]