Malted Musings

Cider for the holidays

As the holidays roll around lots of  folks have their minds turned toward pairing foods with holiday ales and with opening all of those special bottles that you’ve been saving for awhile. There are certainly loads of options out there for special end of year beers but I’d like to encourage folks to give cider a try this holiday season.

Cider, unsurprisingly, is produced from the fermentation of apples.  Although Ratebeer.com has only divided the world of ciders into two categories… ice cider and regular cider, the world of cider is substantially broader than that division would suggest.  The first cider most people have with cider is usually cider of the draft variety.  These are usually made from surplus dessert apples (apples are generally divided into three categories; in decreasing order of sweetness these are dessert, cooking, and cider apples) that have been fermented, pasteurized or sterile filtered, then artificially sweetened with some acid added to balance the sweetness.  There is nothing inherently wrong with these products – they are widely available, they are crisp and clean and they make a refreshing drink.  It is helpful to think of ciders like this as an aperitif… just a simple drink to get the appetite going before you sit down to eat at the holiday table.

Draft cider, English-style cider, ice cider

The history of English cider is a long and distinguished one and the product made reflects that history.  Produced primarily from cider apple varieties with interesting names like Dabinett, Kingston Black, Ribston Pippen, or the seasonally appropriate Christmas Pearmain, these ciders are defined by their rusticity.  They have a lightly spicy nose, a subtle wild funkiness and an inherent dryness.  They can be either spontaneously fermented, using wild yeasts present on the skin of the apples, or they can use a commercial cider yeast.  Often there will be a contribution from both types of yeast and this complexity during the fermentation gives the finished cider a dry but complex flavour.  This dryness in particular makes these ciders pair wonderfully with food and, in general, they can be treated like white wine and they make a fine addition to the dinner table, pairing very well with the traditional turkey and trimmings that define the seasonal meal.  Although this style of cider originated in England, there is a fairly robust movement in the United States and elsewhere to apply this artisanal approach to cider making. This is reflected in the fact that there is a wide variety of craft ciders that are widely available throughout North America.

Dessert presents a great time to try some of the wonderful dessert ciders that are out there.  When the subject of dessert ciders comes up the first thing that comes to mind is ice cider.  This cider originated in Quebec in the early 1990s as an attempt to make a product that would resemble ice wine, which was then gaining a great deal of attention in nearby Ontario.  Ice wine is produced when outside temperatures drop to the point that the grapes freeze on the vine.  These grapes are harvested while still frozen and the concentrated juice they contain is squeezed out. The result is a juice in which the concentration of sugars is very high and it produces a sweet, fruity dessert wine with a lot of complexity.

Ice cider can be made in two different manners termed cryoconcentration or cryoextraction.  Cryoextraction is the analogous process to the making of ice wine, in which the apples freeze on the tree and are collected and pressed while frozen.  Ciders produced by this process are quite rare, for the simple reason that, unlike grapes, apple trees tend to drop their fruit as the season progresses, leaving very few apples remaining on the tree into weather where the temperature is low enough to freeze the fruit solid.  Cryoextraction begins like regular cider making where the fresh cider is extracted from the fruit.  The unfermented cider is then chilled until it begins to freeze.  The ice, which contains more water than sugar, is removed leaving the remaining cider more concentrated in sugar and other flavour components.  This cider is then fermented, resulting is a sweet but very aromatic and flavourful dessert cider.  If you are new to the world of ice cider, I encourage you to give it a try.  The product is completely unlike anything else out there and I have yet to meet anyone who is not impressed by their first taste.  It is unsurprising – given their origin in Quebec – that the best ice ciders continue to be made there, but commercial examples are available from New York, New England, the Midwestern states and the Pacific Northwest.

Although there will always be a place for beer at the holiday table, I hope that I’ve managed to pique your interest in the world of quality artisanal cider.  It makes a fantastic change of pace from beer and it can open up a whole new brewing culture at your table.  Happy Holidays everyone!

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