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 [...]

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 [...]

Summer Solstice is that rarest of animals in the commercial mead world: a relatively dry mead from a small producer who tends his own beehives. Medovina is the creation of Mark Beran of Niwot, Colorado, who has been keeping bees since the 90’s and who–as I’ve been reminded of a [...]