Category Archives: Cider

Cider Tasting

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It may be fall in other places, but we’ve got a few more months of 80°+ weather ahead of us in Florida.  So we recently did a double-blind tasting of several bottles of cider we picked up at the grocery store.  They’re probably not as good as some of the cider we can get in New York (like Eve’s and Bellwether), but then that’s not really the reason I wanted to do a double-blind tasting.  I really had two main reasons:

  1. There’s so much snobbery around beer and cider, and so much of the market is driven more by image and brand than by taste — so I feel like it’s a good reality check to make sure I’m not just buying into that.
  2. I often find myself in a restaurant with only mass-marketed beers and ciders to choose from — so it’s really helpful to know which ones I like better, and if any of them are worth drinking.

The methodology was the same as our lager tasting: one of us poured the ciders into glasses and assigned them numbers, and the other mixed them up and assigned them numbers.  So neither of us knew which ciders were which while we were tasting them, and we revealed them afterwards.

Unlike our lager tasting, there were no big surprises.  We didn’t agree on the exact ordering, or exactly where the drinkable/undrinkable line was.  But we were in broad agreement and our rankings lined up pretty well with what we thought coming in to the tasting:

  • Both of us thought Redd’s Apple Ale and Woodchuck Summer were pretty bad.  Wind ranked Redd’s dead last and thought it was the only truly undrinkable one in the bunch (finding Woodchuck Summer strangely un-summer-y but barely passable).  I thought they were both terrible and thought Redd’s was slightly less terrible than Woodchuck Summer.
  • Neither of us liked Stella Cidre or Woodchuck Granny Smith very much.  But they were definitely better than Redd’s and Summer.  I found Stella Cidre to be strangely mineral tasting, and we both agreed there was not much flavor at all.  The Granny Smith was at least crisp and dry, but still just not much there.
  • Strongbow Gold and Angry Orchard Crisp were the clear winners.  Strongbow is much juicier and Angry Orchard is much drier, but we both found them very drinkable.

With that in mind, I’m tempted to do another round, using Strongbow and Angry Orchard as controls for whatever craft cider we can find around town.  Though it would be hard to do a blind test of our favorite cider (Julian’s Cherry Bomb) since its strong red color would obviously give it away.

Bottling Barleywine and Cider

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We bottled our barleywine and cider this weekend.  Since it was Obama’s second inauguration day, we used a couple of kitschy tea towels we picked up at his first inauguration to dry out bottle caps and equipment after sanitizing.

The gravity of the barleywine had not changed since I moved it to secondary, so we probably could have just bottled it after two weeks.  Many of the comments about the yeast mentioned how fast it ferments, and I guess they were right.  Barleywine is traditionally aged for ridiculous amounts of time, so we’ve tucked the bottles in the back of a closet, keeping only a handful of small bottles in the pantry to test whether it’s ready.

We tasted samples of the four batches of cider/cyser.  The first batch (plain juice) was nice and dry, lots of good apple character without being juicy at all.  The second batch (juice plus concentrate) was fine when I had a sip of the sample I used to check the gravity, but was decidedly off when we tasted a sample from the end of bottling.  So we’re not sure if it’s just a problem with the dregs or if the whole batch might be off.  The third batch (juice plus honey) was a very interesting cider/mead combination, with a lot of the cider character of the first batch, but also the floral and reedy/bready notes of mead.  But the last batch (juice plus twice as much honey) was the most promising — it was a little sweeter, much more pronounced mead flavor, with the cider tartness really fading to the background.

Cider Four Ways

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We’ve been drinking a lot of cider recently, and decided to make our own.  I had a hard time finding any decent cider recipes online (well, beyond “any old juice and any old yeast and it’ll be fine!” type recipes).  But got a good recommendation of a recipe that had worked for a co-worker of mine.  Though he switched the yeast and used Safeale US-05, so we went with that too.

Since this is our first cider, we decided to repeat our Saison experiement and make five different 1 gallon batches in growlers instead of a single large batch.  The plan was to make one gallon of plain juice, one gallon juice with apple juice concentrate, one gallon juice with candi sugar, one gallon juice with honey, and one gallon of water with honey.  But our small candi sugar batch was too shallow and wound up a caramelized, crystallized lump.  So we went with plain juice, juice with concentrate, juice with honey, and juice with even more honey.  We found unfiltered, no-preservative (not even Vitamin C) apple juice at our grocery store.  And we used a 1 lb. jar of Tupelo honey from Cross Creek Honey.

One thing that was surprising was the gravity of our apple juice.  I’d seen estimates online ranging from 1.035 up to 1.050.  But our juice was actually 1.059.  So we did some experimentation and found 12 oz. of apple juice concentrate added to a gallon of juice brought the gravity up to around 1.070.  We matched that with honey (about 5 Tbsp.) in one batch, and used the rest of our honey (about 10 Tbsp.) in the last batch.  We’re particularly interested in comparing the difference between honey and concentrate at the same gravity — how different will they be?

Another question was whether to heat or boil the honey.  In typical fashion, I saw opinions online ranging from “you have to boil honey or you’ll get botulism” to “probably good to heat to 170° to pasteurize” all the way to “don’t heat at all and don’t bother filtering out honeycomb and wings — they’ll settle out eventually”.  So we sterilized everything but didn’t heat our juice or honey at all.  Luckily there were no wings or honeycomb bits to filter out.