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 [...]

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 [...]

Today I’m very pleased to present you with the first Guest Cider Review here on the Cider Sage blog. Today’s review–of one of Angry Orchard’s recent forays into traditional cider styles–is brought to you by none other than Dick and Diane Dunn of Talisman Farm in [...]

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 [...]