Aficionados of Angry Orchard products might be interested to know that they’re made by Boston Brewing Co., makers of Samuel Adams (and who seem keenly interested in keeping that hush-hush, for whatever reason).
Strongbow is my current favorite, although I’ve enjoyed a lot of Woodchuck over the years.
Woodchuck Granny Smith is the only hard cider I can stomach. Every other one I’ve tried is wayyyyy too sweet. WGS has more of that dry champagne feel.
I actually can’t think of many beer companies that do cider. Most of the ones mentioned in this thread are from cideries. Which ciders have you tried? That might help us pick one for you. If you want an English cider, just go find some Samuel Smith or Aspall. Whole Foods (at least in Chicago has it), and if you’re in this general area, which I think you are, go to Binny’s. Those are both English ciders, and neither taste like beer. I really can’t think of a cider that I would say tastes like beer, unless you’re talking those apple malt beverages like Redd’s, which is not a true cider, anyway. That’s more of a cider-beer hybrid, an “apple ale.”
Hogan’s dry cider is really nice and very dry. But on a hot summer’s day I prefer their pear cider.
I can’t speak to what professional breweries do, but in my experience (and what I’ve been told by the guy at the homebrew store in my town), cider is best made with the same varieties of yeast that one would use for champagne or dry white wine. I personally use Lalvin EC-1118 for my homemade cider, which generally produces a nice demi-sec cider with an ABV around 10%.
My tastes are the opposite. I find the ale yeasts better and fruitier. The champagne and wine yeasts just chew way too much through the yeast and leave an insipid cider. Five or six years ago, I made around 60 gallons of cider with a friend’s apples. I tried all sorts of yeasts. There wasn’t a huge difference (for the most part), except that I personally found the ale yeasts more to my liking than the wine or champagne yeasts. The one I disliked the most was a Cote de Rhone yeast, IIRC. I think it was one of the Lalvins. The best of the commercial yeasts to my tastes was, much to my surprise, the Wyeast Weihenstephaner 3068 yeast. That was head and shoulders above the rest to me. The Danstar Nottingham Ale yeast was also pretty good. That said, the absolute best batch of cider was the two carboys of spontaneously fermented juice. It wasn’t even close. I also found the ciders took about a good year before they really came into their own. I managed to get those ciders to undergo malolactic fermentation on their own, and that really rounded out and made the flavors much more interesting.
At any rate, this just shows you, experiment and see what best suits your taste.
*through the sugars
Smith & Forge is decent, if a bit funky. IIRC, it’s a SABMiller product.
Stella Artois Cidre is made in the US, believe it or not, and wasn’t anything remarkable at all. Not bad at all, but nothing special. Certainly not worth paying import money for, when you can get Angry Orchard, Woodchuck and Smith & Forge for less.
My Irish friends all seem to like Magner’s. Especially “the day after”. They drink it until the hangover eases and then go back to beer or whatever else did them in the night before. Evidently, it has another name in Europe. I can’t drink more than one or two of any that I’ve tried.
Woodchuck is the only one I’ve ever tried, and it tastes like beer, not cider. I hate beer.
So…which hard cider tastes the most like apples and the least like beer?
Thank you! I get the feeling a lot of posters on this thread are beer drinkers, and don’t taste the beer flavor of a lot of US apple ciders. Woodchuck tastes like beer, and none of the British ciders I tried tasted anything like beer.
IMO, you’re going at it in both the wrong directions - a cider should taste no more like apples than white wine tastes like grapes.
Like beer? Not like any beer I’ve ever had.
I love it. I’ve got a couple of posters saying that Woodchuck just tastes like alcoholic apple juice, and two others saying it tastes nothing like apples.
If Woodchuck doesn’t have enough of an apple taste for you, ciders probably aren’t your thing. Try an appletini made with vodka and soft apple cider. (That’s not meant to be flippant.)
I loathe beer, and don’t feel that the Angry Orchard has a beery taste.
Yeah, Woodchuck is certainly very “apple-y”. I really don’t get the comparisons to beer at all. OK, here’s one. Find a JK Scrumpy. If you’re in the Midwest, they should have it at a Whole Foods, at the very least. It doesn’t really get more apple-y than that (and it doesn’t taste like alco-pop to me, either. That said, it’s not one of my favorites, being a good bit sweet for my tastes, but I’ve found the sweetness varies wildly from bottle to bottle.)
Seriously, try a Normandy cider. If champagne were cider, this would be it. There is absolutely nothing beer-like about it, and it’s not a cider you want to chug by the pint.
As I said earlier in the thread, I enjoyed the cider I had in the UK. It’s just American ciders that taste of beer.
That’s just an odd thing to say, in my opinion. The first ciders I ever had were in England, and Woodchuck is much more apple-y than almost any British cider.
I couldn’t tell you why that is. I don’t notice a beery taste at all. That said, I’m still hunting to find an American cider I really love. There’s some I like, but I haven’t really found one that knocked me over, but I guess there’s some private reserve stuff from the cideries like Crispin, JK Scrumpy, and the such that I haven’t gotten around to trying yet.
I absolutely agree.
Maybe it’s a cilantro-type thing and elfkin477 and me are in the equivalent of the “tastes like soap” camp.
I’m not saying that Woodchuck doesn’t taste like apples. I’m saying it tastes like apples and beer.