like Cider Riot are one of the reasons. Abe makes dry cider–completely
dry in nearly every case. (Everyday Cider is the first exception–it
has a touch of sucralose, but is still drier than most products out
there.) Apple juice contains yeast-friends simple sugars, and left
alone, all will get consumed. What’s left behind is alcohol and whatever
flavor and aromatics the apple contained (tannins and acids principle
among them). Fermentation can produce esters which, along with some of
the aromas, suggest sweetness, but these qualities are very far from the
soda-like sweetness you find in supermarket ciders.
To palates
new to cider, naive and somewhat jejune in aesthetics, sweetness is a
bridge, a point of familiarity. But it’s a blunt force, and as palates
mature, people want ever more dry ciders where the flavors and aromas of
the fruit are exposed. Abe, like most cider-makers, doesn’t have access
to the amount of good cider fruit he’d like, but he’s made a specialty
of producing great, palatable cider from simple culinary apples. I
actually think this stage is still a bit young, and as the
fields start to bear more interesting fruit, our collective palates will
get even more sophisticated. (Cider Riot does have access to some cider
apples, and releases bottles of these from time to time.)
EZ Orchards
has led the way in this kind of cider, but others are catching up. 2
Towns just yesterday released Afton Fields, one of their rustic ciders
made with good fruit. Baird and Dewar, Wildcraft, Art+Science, Rack and
Cloth, Runcible, Slopeswell, and others are beginning to push the
envelope for what quality and craft will look like in the next decade. I
don’t know if there are any official counts of cidery numbers in
Oregon, but it’s well past fifty at this point, and a number of them are
shooting to make world-class products.
I asked Abe what he
thought the high-water mark for cider might be, and he guessed it would
top out at about 10% of the beer market. That seems about right to me.
Cider has never been a volume product, and the more it inclines toward
quality, the less volume will matter.
 |
| FX Matthieu. So many hops it has a head! |
When I first started touring cideries and visiting cider-makers for Cider Made Simple four years ago (on sale, for the moment, for eight bucks at Amazon!),
I wondered which direction it would develop. The answer is starting to
become evident. The “mass” end of the spectrum is drier, more
consistent, and more interesting than it was in 2013–stuff like Cider
Riot’s Everyday Cider is leagues better than the first Angry Orchards.
Ciders that seemed gimmicky then, like hopped ciders, have become
credible products. Abe has one called FX Matthieu on tap that uses a
pound per barrel of hops and is vivid and alive in a way the early
versions weren’t. Fruited and flavored ciders are getting more
sophisticated, too–and drier!
But more importantly, cider is
developing that critical high-end tier that has always buoyed successful
product categories. We need to know what a thing is capable of before
we can assess any given example. If cider’s ceiling was Angry Orchard,
that’s one thing. If it’s EZ Orchard’s Cidre, that’s another. Knowing
how good cider can be, we expect even easy-drinking supermarket examples
to satisfy.
That’s happening. It may have not drawn the headlines it did a couple years ago, but cider is coming right along.
