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 [...]

As promised, the hard cider-making tutorial has (finally) been updated to include a Fermentation and Aging section. Head on over for some tips and lessons learned drawn from experiences with the three ciders I made this season (Winesap, Arkansas Black, and a New England-style hard [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]