Well, folks, it’s that time of year again: The Holidays. And besides being the perfect excuse to bust out the home-fermented beverages, the holidays are a time for something else: awkward, anxiety-laden gift-giving. Anxiety which requires consumption of home-fermented beverages to deal [...]

This September, I had the good fortune to attend a cider pressing hosted by two brothers in Longmont, CO, who have assembled their own, rather ingenious, cider pressing operation. Complete with all the gear and organization needed to efficiently press hundreds of gallons of juice, this [...]

First up, my apologies for the long hiatus…I’ve been quite busy of late on the work and personal front. But time and cider (or was that time and tide) wait for no man, and so here we are. Again. Once more into the breach. Two Rivers Gravenstein may be the U.S’s [current] answer to [...]

Help A Blogger Out… Here’s your chance, folks, to help me make the site better and more targeted for you, the readers: take my online survey. I started cidersage.com with a fairly general approach: I wanted to highlight and document interesting aspects of cider and mead–how to [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a new tutorial, but hopefully it was worth the wait…particularly if you’ve been thinking about making your own mead but have been standing on the edge of that cliff, not quite able to commit. I hope the new mead tutorial throws you [...]

  I thought it might be interesting to periodically profile an ingredient often used in cider and/or mead and the incarnations it can take. Guess we’ll find out if that impulse is [...]

Despite having what, at first blush–if you’re wired like me–seems to be a dirty name, this cider is a gem. A rather large gem, truth be told, in an all-too-convenient, 3-liter bag-in-box package…as my companions, Dick and Diane Dunn, and I discovered over the course of [...]

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, [...]

L’Hermitiére is a sparkling Norman cider that in my mind sits roughly halfway between  Clos Normand and Etienne DuPont on a few [...]

Now this is more like it. Bitter Sweet Funk Dry Cider by Oliver’s Cider and Perry of Herefordshire, UK is funky, phenolic, and still.  Imported by Shelton Brothers, which also imports Ross-On-Wye and Hogan’s, this is a farmhouse cider fermented by wild yeast, aged in barrels and [...]