Yours truly with press, carboys, and Winesap and Rome apples.

Dan Daugherty is a cider, mead, and craft beer enthusiast in Longmont, Colorado whose growing interest in mead and cider in particular has become something of an obsession over the years.

Like anyone else with a true obsession, he’s going to get professional counseling to deal with it, right? Heck no! He’s going to pull you into the insanity by blogging about it incessantly!

Dan is most frequently found in front of a computer, at Lefthand Brewing Company in Longmont, in his basement grumbling while either 1) making cider or 2) making mead (grumbling being one of the secret techniques for each), or some combination of the above. He also likes to talk in third person and I’m very sorry for doing so.

This blog will come to you primarily from the perspective of a beer enthusiast increasingly cross-trained into cider and mead, because, well, that’s my perspective. I’m sure it will evolve and change over time, but that’s the background context if you are looking for any in a given post or piece of content.

Cider and mead are fascinating topics both wide and deep–one can spend years learning about their culture, history, chemistry, preparation, and tasting. It is my hope that, as I travel my path of exploring these topics, The Cider Sage Blog will help others along theirs, be they similar or even just tangential to mine.

In the relatively brief time I’ve been maintaining this blog, I’ve been amazed at the increasing diversity and growth of all things cider in particular, and the more I learn, the more I realize I have left to learn. The end result, for now, is a blog that is broad if not exceedingly deep, with a smattering of reviews, tutorials, resources, and miscellany, with a bit of a bias toward home cider making because that’s near and dear to my heart.

My other projects are Cider School–a companion site focused on more serious cidermaking and orcharding topics.

One thing that’s become increasingly clear to me in learning about cider, the people who make it, the people who grow apples, and the cider geeks who seek it out it is that they form a unique, often idiosyncratic, sometimes weird, but always interesting  and helpful community.

I’m excited and honored to be a part of that community and its part in the craft beverage revolution, which–sure, is about new and different products and quality, but more than that, is a self-empowering activity–you can produce better product yourself than what some giant breweries or wineries can (or will, at least), and you can learn from and teach a community of others who do the same. It’s good, old-fashioned community and good, old-fashioned American ingenuity in a positive, collaborative environment. And I love that.

-Dan Daugherty