I personally just don’t like that style of cider. I’ve tried all of those – Amber, Dark and Dry, and Granny Smith – and they just don’t do it for me. Now, the Normandy ciders do have a good kick of sweetness to them, but they have more depth and complexity to them, for lack of better description. Maybe I’ll grow to appreciate them more in time, but I just don’t like Woodchuck or Crispin or Ace.
It’s by no means the best cider on the market. But it (along with woodpecker & occasionally strongbow) was the first brand to hit the shelves here a couple decades ago, and remains the easiest to find. My wife almost always has some in the fridge, and I don’t find brands like Angry Orchard to be significantly different, though it’s been a while since I’ve done anything resembling a tasting. I also think it can be a good jumping off point for someone who is unfamiliar with ciders.
We also buy a bunch of random brands to try at Total Wine, including Crispin, but I can’t remember too many of them at the moment.
I’m a bit of a cider snob and I find most of the commercial/mainstream brands just too much like fizzy alcoholic apple punch. I know a guy with a 9 acre orchard, one quarter of which is planted to traditional/heritage cider apple varieties - he makes some damn fine cider.
I pressed apples and made my own cider last year - with variable results as I used a variety of different blends of apple - the dessert apple blends came out very neutral tasting and pale, but I made a batch with feral apples that I collected from woods and hedgerows - and that one was amazing - real depth of flavour.
Yep, I found the same. Apples that are good for eating are typically not good for cicdering. I’ve encountered exceptions, but typically you need a good amount of sour or bitter apples in your blend to have that complexity. Crab apples are not an unusual ingredient in old fashioned recipes for ciders for this reason. Typically, you want a blend of sweets, sharps, and bitter apples.
Samuel Smith Organic Cider is very nice. Not easy enough to find, though.
I was on a serious cider jag all summer. Nothing quenches the thirst after mowing the lawn better than slugging down a whole bottle in one pull.
My recommendations:
Angry Orchard - Crisp Apple is good. I like their Granny Smith as well. Woodchuck Ale is also pretty good; they have a Granny Smith option as well.
Both Angry Orchard and Woodchuck had a few misses though. Angry Orchard had some Extra Cinnamon thing (that was on sale cheap) but it was too overbearing. And Woodchuck had something similar. I recall something on the label that said, “tastes like real apple pie.” Yeah, if you used turds instead of apples, maybe.
You also want to steer as far away as you can from Red’s. Why? Because it sucks, that’s why. It tastes like Zima.
Ok, cool thank you for the condescension, but as I mentioned Woodpecker was my first cider ever. I drank it in college, and haven’t had it in years. It was also literally the only cider I could get for some time, and I think my previous post showed I do now have some range in my tastes. So how about rather than telling us how our tastes in cider are pedestrian instead tell us about the brands of cider you do find worthy of your taste buds?
Oh, God, I picked up a sixer of Reds out of morbid curiosity at Walgreens a few months ago. That’s the last time (ok, probably not, as I like to give everyone a fair shake) I do that again.
ETA: No, sorry. That was the Johnny Appleseed stuff I picked up. Good lord.
I think it’s clear I tried to keep my post as non-condescending as possible. I thought it might be interesting and informative for those who like cider, especially if they live somewhere with a limited range of brands. If my idea of the epitome of cider was Woodpecker, or Strongbow, or similar, I would be quite happy to discover that there is so much more out there.
I didn’t want to offend anyone, but your sarcasm has really eliminated any sorrow I might feel over the fact that, apparently, I have.
I’d be curious to taste the tap version to see if I like it better. There’s plenty of beers that I find pretty mediocre in bottles, but I love on tap. (Goose Island seems to be the biggest in this regard. Love the brewery. Love their beers. Rarely have I liked anything in their bottles beyond their “big” beers and Belgians.)
do it! Doooooo iiiiit!
Then there’s the Dickens beverage company in Australia, which has been marketing a hard cider.
I don’t drink cider often, but I enjoy it occasionally. Last year I really liked The Mitten from Virtue Cider. I’ve heard this is the guy who was formerly at Goose Island and doing the cider is how he’s getting around his non-compete.
Weston’s could very well be the Coors Light of British cider for all I know, BUT from their web site, it comes from a village called Much Marcle, and its visitor center is something called Scrumpy House, so I’m figuring it’s most likely made by Hobbits.
Citizen Cider from here in Vermont is really really good. Harpoon also makes some good stuff, like honey cider and pumpkin cider.
Try adding a shot of smokey scotch into your next glass, it’s amazing!
Good to know! I’ve had Woodchuck Amber…it is sweet, but it’s also tasty.
What’s all this adding liquor to liquor business? Bunch 'a reprobates. 
I can recommend Aspall’s and Hogan’s.
I remember trying cider when in England many years ago and liked it.
When it got popular here, I tried Red’s, which was horrific. Never again.
Then I tried Angry Orchard Crisp Apple, which I like.
Am looking to try others. I don’t drink much, though, so it takes me forever to get through a six-pack. I have two of the Angry Orchard left.
Angry Orchard Traditional Dry (yellow packaging) is awesome, probably the best of their selections IMHO.
There are really 3 things that would determine the alcohol content of a cider.
The first one is the alcohol tolerance of the yeast. Most beer yeasts top out somewhere in the 7-10% range, and wine yeasts go higher- up to something like 20% in the case of champagne yeast. The second would be the amount of sugar available in the apple juice to begin with. According to the Federal standards, fresh apple juice is 13.3 degrees Brix, which equates to a specific gravity of about 1.054, which using beer yeast, comes out to an alcohol level of about 7.2% ABV. The third would be the amount of residual sugar left in the cider after fermentation. So if the cider brewers took that 1.053 apple juice, and decided to leave the cider a bit sweet, they’d halt fermentation at say… 5% abv, leaving quite a bit of unfermented sugar.
So really, you can take straight apple juice and ferment it somewhere in the 7-10% range, but few commercial producers do, because it’s quite dry and funky at that point. A few commercial distillers, like Laird’s of New Jersey, take apples, ferment them, and distill the resulting cider into applejack and apple brandy, which is then aged in oak barrels, making something somewhere between apple cider and whiskey.
As for me, I’m kind of partial to the Crispin Brown’s Lane British Cider. Definitely not your normal sweet cider, but has a tremendous amount of character, being both sweet and bitter at the same time. Excellent with a shot of dark rum in a Revolutionary War-correct Stone Fence.