SF Beer Week was not just a celebration of beer. Apple cider was also poured at several events. I like a glass of cider now and then — and I certainly prefer it to certain beer styles — so I’m not complaining. I just find it interesting that cider, made of fermented apple juice and in some ways a lot like wine, is piggybacking on the success of craft beer. What’s more, it seems cider may even be having an identity crisis — and it could be a good thing for cider.
Aside from edging their way into beer festivals, cidermakers are borrowing tricks and techniques innovated by craft brewers, like aging their cider in barrels, making it sour with various yeasts and bacteria, and simply adding hops to create more and deeper flavors than apples alone can generally create. Perhaps some cidermakers lack confidence in the power of the apple as the sole ingredient, or they may be craft beer fans at heart, eager to use the many tricks of the brewing trade in producing cider.
On the other hand, there are more traditional cidermakers who smirk — I’ve seen them do it — at the notion of adding hops to their product or otherwise influencing its flavor in the style of craft brewers. To them, cider is like wine — the fruit of the season and of the earth, not something to be created via a recipe and technical applications post-harvest but something that nature makes with just a light helping hand.
So, with these two opposite approaches to making cider, it appears that the cidermaking culture and community aren’t entirely certain how to present or identify themselves — which perhaps is to be expected of a craft that has lain dormant for decades and is now reawakening in a time when most people perceive drinking as a choice between two main products: “Beer or wine?” (Doesn’t that query have a familiar ring?) So, the people who have taken it upon themselves to earn a living making and selling cider find themselves marketing their product to a binary marketplace, and they often must pick a side.
“I think it’s a pretty natural progression for cidermakers to go down the same road that craft brewers are going down,” says Arne Johnson, brewmaster at Marin Brewing Co. in Larkspur. “I see a lot of the newer cidermakers doing boutiquey things to their ciders that add quality and value, like having it barrel-age, sour fruited or hopped.”
Johnson suspects that many cidermakers add other ingredients to their fermenting apple juice to make the final product more interesting, or more complex, anyway, than it otherwise might have been.
Johnson says he can’t recall ever buying a pint, a bottle or a can of cider in his life, but he has tasted many. Hopped ciders, he says, are interesting, but he most enjoys the “funky” styles traditionally made in parts of England and, especially, northern Spain.
Tilted Shed Ciderworks, in Windsor, makes such a Basque-style cider — a tart, sour and barnyard-scented cider called Txotx. Reverend Nat’s in Portland, Oregon, has also made Spanish-style ciders — as well as just about every sort of cider you could think of. The owner, Nat West, operates like a brewer and treats apple juice as just one ingredient in a product that is greater than, not beholden to, its parts (the way wine is). He has used apricots, hops, pears, strawberries, pineapples and many more ingredients to make his ciders. Also in Portland, 2 Towns Ciderhouse uses mangoes and habaneros in one its ciders, and also makes a strong “imperial” cider — borrowing vernacular straight out of the craft beer dictionary. In Sebastopol, Golden State Cider uses not just its own apples, but also ginger, hops and barrels.
Each of the above cideries also make more traditional cider from pure apples — what some might argue is how cider is supposed to be. However, from the creativity seen in the cidermaking culture, it’s clear that to many cidermakers, the apple alone isn’t enough — and for beer fans eager to sample these unorthodox ciders, that’s just fine.
Alastair Bland’s Through the Hopvine runs every week in Zest. Contact him at allybland79@gmail.com.
