I didn’t want to hijack the Johnny Appleseed thread (linked below) so I started this one. The discussion of apples and cider reminded me of the 2 weeks I spent in Ireland and England last summer, and my discovery of hard apple cider on tap, available at every pub or bar that I visited. I like bottled and canned cider, but on tap brings it to a whole new level of deliciousness.
An Irish website says that Ireland is in the world top 5 as one of the biggest cider drinkers, alongside the UK, France, Spain and Australia (The 5 BEST IRISH CIDERS you will find in a good pub) so it’s natural that it should be readily available on tap there and in the UK. I’ve seen hard ciders become more popular here in the US in the past decades, but haven’t seen it on tap yet; has anyone else?
. What did Johnny Appleseed actually do?
Basic midwestern city here. There are a number of neighborhood bars that have hard ciders on tap. My local tavern always has one on tap (“Angry Apple” now, I think). Check around.
In California, I’d estimate that almost anyplace with five or more taps has at least one dedicated to a cider. So many people are on gluten-free diets these days, it just makes sense.
So I’m looked at website menus for Irish pubs and bars near me. I’m in Long Island, NY, an area where lots of people are proud of having Irish roots.
One of the closest has 12 taps and they’re all beers. Another, which was voted “Best Irish Pub” last year, has 15 taps, again all beer.
After looking at 10 websites, I’ve found just 3 mentioning cider on tap. One has 18 taps and 1 is McKenzie’s Black Cherry, the other has 20 and has Doc’s, but they’re 25 miles away from me. One is 10 miles from me and has 22 taps, 2 of them are ciders, Angry Orchard and Blakes.
One curious thing that has been confusing me a little is that ‘apple cider’ in the US is a soft, alcohol-free drink, and alcoholic cider is known as ‘hard cider’. In the UK and Ireland, the assumption is that cider will be alcoholic, and sometimes nearly as alcoholic as wine. You need to be careful visiting a pub in the West Country with cider on tap, as it could impair your functioning significantly.
One pub I went to in Bishop’s Lydeard only sold cider in half-pint measures, for safety.
Blame Prohibition. Hard cider was very popular in the US in the 19th century, but it pretty much went extinct after the legal market got shut down. It didn’t really become a thing again in the US until 15-20 years or so, and the craft cider movement only really started to spread out of the PNW within the last decade once Angry Orchard became available nationwide. I remember when the only hard ciders I could find at the grocery store were Hornsby’s (an overly sweet macrobrew from Gallo which I’m not sure they even make anymore) and imported bottles of Aspall for $7 a pint.
Most American hard ciders are only about 5-7%, comparable to your standard strength beer - the stuff that’s over 10% tends to get marketed as “apple wine” and is bottled and priced accordingly. Lately, around here, some of the craft cideries have been introducing “Imperial cider”, borrowing the terminology from Imperial stouts and IPAs, which are in the 8-9% range, but nothing along the lines of the fabled white lightning of the West Country.
Indeed. Even cheap bottled cider usually has a higher ABV than equivalent bottles of beer. If you drink draught cider, it’s a good idea to check the ABV first. It will be displayed on the pump handle. It can vary hugely - anything between 3.5% and 12% (although that’s rare). Typically, wine is around 12.5%.
In my high-school crowd, Boone’s Farm Apple Wine was the drink of choice (some fifty years ago) and I remember enjoying it. How does that compare to hard cider in terms of flavor and of alcohol content?
Hard cider is big in New England. In my local grocery there will be eight or ten brands. Pressing your own cider in the fall is a thing rural people do, like tapping their maples in late winter. I’ve never had one anything like as cloyingly sweet as Boone’s Farm. Some are exceedingly dry, in fact.
We used to have a big apple tree in our yard that produced hundreds of apples. One year I used a heavy-duty juicer and made 10 gallons of hard cider (yeah, that’s how many apples the tree produced at one time). I added brown sugar to get the specific gravity up high enough to produce a 5-6% finished alcohol content. Good stuff!
Unfortunately the tree eventually stopped producing apples, then died altogether after a particularly hard winter.
I, er, brew my own hard cider most falls. That is, i buy more fresh local cider than we get around to drinking, and one day i open the fridge and find that the plastic jug has expanded from the carbon dioxide the wild yeasts have produced. My best guess is that it’s typically as strong as small beer. It’s pleasantly fizzy, medium dry, and quite refreshing.
Is perry a thing at all in the US? It’s made the same way as apple cider except using pears instead of apples. They’re typically a bit sweeter that cider but cam be just as strong.
I suspect there were kickbacks involved in the article about the 5 best Irish ciders. Bulmer’s is a factory produced cider that’s decidedly average.
In urban areas in the US, maybe. In rural parts, it never really went away, in part because it’s super easy to make your own. Lots of people have a few apple trees of their own, and there are lots of places (roadside stands and the like) where you can buy fresh apple cider without preservatives, and once you’ve got that, all you need to do to turn it into hard cider is wait.
Certainly, at my grandparents’ house as a child in the 80s, it was understood that if you had cider from the grocery store, it was non-alcoholic, but grocery-store cider was rare, and otherwise you definitely always had to specify “hard cider” or “sweet cider”. And that was a house that always had a lot of kids around-- I imagine that in all-adult households, hard cider would have been the default.
What’s weirder and something most of us don’t understand, is that grocery store shelves will have “apple juice” and “apple cider” on the shelves next to each other, and AFAIK, they’re indistingishable. Supposedly cider is unfiltered, less sweet, and more ‘raw’ than apple juice.
Then there’s hard cider. The US mass-market brands tend to be aiming to produce an alcoholic version of apple juice/apple cider, while the craft brands are more in keeping with the traditional cider flavors- more tart/bitter, and less sweet.
Seems like I’ve had it a time or two, and I think it was one imported from the UK, and one craft brand from the US. Perry isn’t widely available though.
Our neighbors have an apple orchard and market their cider (non-alcoholic) each year. It is unfiltered and not pasteurized. It is so good we usually finish the current gallon well before the jug begins to balloon.
Literally on tap, Woodside Orchards here on Long Island makes spectacular cider. They’ll fill (or refill) growlers for you to take home and stick in the refrigerator. Or pour out glasses for you to drink at their bar or take out to the picnic tables on the lawn.
Lots of bars around here have one of the commercial ciders such as Angry Orchard featured along with the beers and ales.