This is Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I am Roger, I work in beer, cider, an ever-expanding beverage category. Every time there's a beer episode that's not a beer episode, he has to say how he's actually related to it. What else he does, yeah. I do beer, but other stuff. Also smooch. Smooch. Smooch, never speak its name. Thankfully, I think it's gone. Is it? I'm Lexi, I'm on social media. We're definitely gonna get hate mail for that distant smooch again. Jim, communications. Greg, communications at Binny's. All right, on this latest episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, we're gonna talk about hard cider. Cider? Cider, yep. Fresh off of the 2025 Cider Summit, America's first drink. Is that true? I thought it was rum. You know, rum would be the first distillate, but as much as people like to tell the whole, like, the pilgrims landed because they ran out of beer, you know, in the sense. That's great. All those Puritans. I like that bit. When you think about it, apple cider is pretty simplistic when it comes to ingredients. You're really just relying on apples, and they weren't pitching yeast or anything. They were just relying on the wild yeast. So everybody could make hard apple cider, and they did because it was safer than drinking the water. So we were a cider drinking nation until Prohibition. Prohibition killed the cider industry. Yeah. Okay. And now here we are, 100 years later. Nearly on the dot, and cider is finally starting to recover. So like in giving service to America's roots in cider consumption, let's have one that's flavored with passion fruit and mango. Exactly. If only they knew what they were missing out on. Okay, cider. All right, let's rock and roll. What do we got? I brought a variety to Greg's point. Hard cider these days is oftentimes more than just apple flavored. But in the spirit of the traditional apple cider, I have a mix. So you will be drinking some apple flavored apple cider. All right. It's coming back around slowly but surely. But what also this could be cider's time is they should piggyback and seduce some of the people that are drinking what are essentially FMBs that they're being called IPAs from people like New Belgium, Goose Island, your Voodoo Ranger Juice Force, your Neon Beer Hug. I mean, they're fruit flavored and 9 percent alcohol. So if you like juicy stuff, it doesn't get much juicier than actual juice, which is what you're getting from these hard apple cider. Let's unpack the onion layers of contempt you just expressed. First of all, FMB is flavored malt beverage. So Roger is comparing hazy IPAs to Bartles and James, basically. Which is what they're becoming, because if you read your can of this stuff, you'll often see in the fine print that it has flavors added, which here at Barrel to Bottle, we like to refer to as flavor blasted. So you're playing at home. Roger says, if you like your beer to taste like juice, how about juice? Exactly. No joke, the most growth that we've seen in the cider category has been this recent influx of imperial ciders. So there are all sorts of hard ciders that are 8% and up, and they are absolutely geared towards people that are digging these really juicy flavor blasted IPAs. I can support this. We're not going to start there. Instead, we're going to start with Original Sin, which is a craft cider from a producer that we've long been fans of. I also thought it was apropos to start with them, because kind of a turning point for cider in the US was in 2011, when the National Cider Association was formed, and Original Sin was one of around 40 people that attended the first meeting that they held out in Oregon. So it's really been through a concerted effort of a small group of cider-ees partnered with orchardists, with farmers to revive this style, because as I mentioned before, Prohibition killed cider in this country. What I mean when I say that is that when you see the pictures of the Prohibitionists with their little hatchets, one of the things that they destroyed were cider trees. So some of the best cider is made with a mixture of apples, many of which are what's referred to as cider apples or bitter sharps. These are the kind of apples which aren't really good for eating, but they're great for making cider. So think of it the corollary with grapes. You would sit and eat table grapes, you might not want to eat the kind of grapes that you use to make some of the finest wines in the world. Venice Venifero. And that brings us to our second point is that cider is wine. So it's been kind of revived and packaged in a way that appeals to the beer consumer. But at the end of the day, we're talking about wine just made out of apples as opposed to grapes, or there's obviously lots of other fruit wines that can be made from different types of fruit. So when you talk to cider makers, one of their little, they often hold brewers in contempt because they jokingly go, oh yeah, you brewers, you get to use 90% water. Whereas, you know, all the liquid in a cider has to get squeezed out of an apple, for your good ciders at least. That's a lot more expensive. My mantra has always been that cider makers are very guilty of not talking about the apples enough. So it is a wine made out of apples. Can you imagine if we were talking about a wine and I said, hey Greg, what kind of grapes are used for the wine that you brought in today? I'm like, wine grapes, purple? Red, another red, don't worry about it. Or like it changes sometimes, so I don't know. We can't possibly tell you what they are this time. So cider purveyors, depending on what type of cider you're buying, they might be using pre-sqoze juice that's- Sqoze. Sqoze. Sqoze then. Pre-juiced apples, that's just an amalgam of a lot of varieties. It might not be even from the US. So that cider is worst, but a lot of these purveyors are doing, they're putting in the work, they're acquiring apples that are true cider varieties. You know, in the past, we've talked about some of these apples. They have funny names, Cox Orange Pippin, Dabinet, Arkansas Blacks. There's all sorts of great apples that you can make cider out of. Ashmead's Kernel is a great one. Like these things have hundreds of years of heritage. Nobody knows about them. I'm always trying to get cideries that use them to talk about them. Real quick, can we pass the first CIDR while we do the Roger Schold's The Industry Segment? Yeah, sure. This is one from Original Sin. How cute. Beautiful in color. So I brought this in, it's called Dry Rosé. A few years ago, CIDR was making some good inroads when we were, if you cycle back in the Barrel to Bottle catalog, I think we have like a Summer of Rosé podcast where everybody was all in on Rosé. And CIDR smartly was realized, hey, we have an opportunity here. So often with Rosé CIDRs, they're incorporating some sort of berry component or hibiscus. There are red-fleshed apples, they're kind of rare and expensive though. So there's usually a little bit of an addition there to capture this lovely Rosé color and feel. But depending on how your cider is made, what type of yeast you use, many ciders are fermented with champagne yeast. There is definitely some corollary to drinking a sparkling Rosé cider and drinking sparkling Rosé wine. As I was starting to say before and then went off on my tangent, Original Sin was one of those first people at the meeting in 2011 of people trying to get cider back on track. Gidan Cole is the founder. He is really into preserving these heirloom, antique apple varieties. They've been planting them out in New York. Again, this is a cidery that is very much using whole fruit, fresh pressed fruit, and really trying to preserve this heritage of the apples that make excellent hard cider. It's venous and dry. Yeah, it's so much like wine that I thought the aftertaste is very much apple, but the initial is like drinking a sparkling rosé wine. It's got a really nice dryness to it. So that's the anchor chain that's always been dragging behind the cider industry is this perception that all cider is sweet. When cider disappeared after prohibition, it took a while for it to come back in any way, shape, or form. It started to have a moment in the late 80s, early 90s when FMBs really took off. Greg mentioned good old Bartles and James. The FMB movement was actually preceded by the wine cooler movement. So, essentially, fruity, malternatives, you sometimes hear that term as well. Malternatives. You used to. It was essentially in a beer industry in the 80s, you have to remember it was the darkest days of the brewing industry. There were like less than 100 breweries in the whole country. So, most beer in America was macro, yellow, fizzy, not that exciting. There are a lot of people that didn't want to drink that. And for some reason that usually got stereotyped as women. Well, maybe it's that women have good taste and they were bored with macro beer and how terrible it was. But a lot of the early cider was always marketed to women, like, oh, this is for the women, which is ridiculous. Hey, ladies. Some of the early ciders then were trying to kind of match the flavor profile of wine coolers and eventually FMBs, which are crazy sweet. So, it's taken a while for other cider purveyors to emphasize that, you know, you can make a cider as dry or as sweet as you want. It all depends on how long you ferment it for and if you back sweeten it. So, if you add any sugar after it's fermented. So, some ciders you'll see are fermented completely dry. They're very low in calorie, but they might be too dry for people. So, usually it's the cider maker's job to decide what type of cider they want to produce and how they want to kind of tell that story to people. So, you'll see terms like dry, semi-dry, brute even makes it on to some stuff. So, it really does vary by producer and by release. So, again, there's everything under the sun. If you want sweet stuff, that's out there, sure. But there's also bone dry. Bricks is the way that they measure sugar content. There are ciders that are 0.0. They have fermented, the yeast is fermented all the sugar out completely. It's got to taste like brute champagne. Yeah, it's not for everybody. So if you don't like sweet stuff, or heartburn, you might not like the brute stuff either. The brute stuff, Seattle Cider, for example, made a name for themselves with their brute, and I like it, but I totally understand when people drink it and make a face and go, what's this? Like, there's not any sweetness in this. We went to the complete opposite end of the spectrum, and that's not for me. Usually, the most enticing, irresistible ciders are the ones that combine sweetness and acidity. So people do want sweetness there. They just want something to balance that out, which is acid. So again, depending on the type of apples that are used, what kind of acid content they have in them, if there's any tannins, these are all the things that are going to balance out that level of sweetness. There is a rose on the can. Not a lady. That's good. There is a rose on the can. It really evokes the floral qualities here. That's apple. Is that just from the cider, or is that actually some kind of additive or flavoring or botanical or something? They use in lieu of adding a berry, as I said. Berry and hibiscus are two of the most common things that are used. What I think when a lot of you are picking up on the venous nature of this, they use a natural grape skin extract. Oh, okay. So it is actually amped up with mine a little bit. It really does seem floral on the nose. I really like this. I mean, anybody, if you like sparkling rosés, you need to try this. It offers some acidity. It's not sickly sweet. It comes in a 12-ounce can, which is a nice, comfortable size. Right. Six packs, 12-ounce cans, 13.99 and it is 6.5 percent alcohol. So again, it offers something that's a little lower ABV, if you are used to drinking wine or something a little higher ABV if you're used to drinking run-of-the-mill 5 percent alcohol beer. If you're into getting a can of sparkling wine to take to the, it's the dead of winter, it's one degree right now. But if you're taking it to like Ravinia, or like some outdoor, you'd take it on the boat. It's a half the alcohol of a sparkling wine, so you're going to last a little bit longer, and it's a smaller serving size, you don't have to drink the whole bottle. Yes. That's a good angle on that for sure. Don't hate it. This is also, if you're a fan of making mimosas in the morning, this makes a really nice mimosas. Every morning before work. Before work? Yeah. You obviously didn't see the orange juice in our work fridge. A lot of purveyors who are making apple cider are sourcing either their juice or the apples from a farm. There are a few rare examples where we actually have a farm making the cider from the apples that they grow. And our next cider is one such example of that. Sorry, Roger, this gets me every single time. How are we supposed to take a company seriously if they call themselves JK's Scrumppy? It's an odd way to go. My theory as to why they did this is that cider died in America. It lived on in other countries, one of those countries being England. And in England, they still grow a ton of those really cider. You would never eat them fruit. They're just totally for cider making. Scrumpt cider is rough around the edges was the initial meaning. But what it morphed to mean was this is cider the way it used to be made. This is like farmer made heirloom as opposed to a mass made, mass marketed like if you were in England and you grabbed a strong bow, that's like the equivalent of drinking a macro beer. There you'll still see some ciders marketed as scrumpties in England. And people kind of like, wow, this is a little different like in the spirit of the natural wine. I know you dig that. Yeah, it's here. This is all just from no pitched yeast. So this is unlike many of the ciders we're going to try today are pitched yeast, oftentimes champagne yeast. This is fermented just with the yeast that's on the skins of the apples. Doing it that way, it takes much longer. It's a much lower slower fermentation. You also know that this is stylistically not as bubbly. So this is a very subtle kind of carbonation because of that and then there's going to inherently be a little bit of funk, a little bit of, you might even taste like a touch of acetic character to it. It smells a tiny bit like vinegar. It smells a little bit like the loamy dust that you get when you're picking apples in the fall. I like the funky nature of it. I think that this could appeal to, you're right, the natural wine people I think would love to give this a try. Or apple cider vinegar. I mean, this is literally the very beginning of that. They're getting just a teeny bit of that on the back end as opposed to, and I love that. I like that acidity that it brings and just a little bit of that. You either love it or hate it with that stuff. You're getting into a pretty niche audience here. You're like, okay, hear me out. If you really like Madeira and you're looking for an apple beverage, this is the one for you. Yeah, that's fair. There's a lot of these new pop alternatives that are teetering on that functional beverage or whatever, hula-bula. You're talking about prebiotic sodas. Yeah, like things that are- The adaptogens. You've got adaptogens. Slice. Prebiotics and probiotics. Slice is back as some sort of quote unquote healthy. They're like, how about, you remember Slice, but now it's 350 a can. Yeah, basically. So, I mean, a lot of those are using apple cider vinegar, because apple cider vinegar has purported tons of benefits. I'm not- I'm making no claims here. Don't sue me like they sue the brag people. But it's proven to be somewhat healthful to a degree. So Original Sin, for example, they started making- they're really famous for a cider called Black Widow, which is a blackberry flavored hard cider. They make one called White Widow, which is their answer to all these new sodas that are better for you. It's a non-alcoholic hard cider. So non-alcoholic cider. Damn it. But it's not apple juice. Not to be confused with just apple juice. It's a nice day for a white widow. Well put. Yeah, it's totally zero-zero. The apple base is apple cider vinegar. So it's pretty refreshing, pretty interesting drink. So again, if you want something that is about as legit old school as cider gets, this JK's Scrumppy is organic. There's no sorbates. There's no sulfates. It's kosher. And like all ciders, it's gluten free. So this cider is screaming to me, screaming Logan Square. This is something I go to Logan Square and I'm like, Oh, my gosh, you guys, you've got to try this. And everyone loves it. I agree. I mean, there's a lot of complexity. Just like you show up like a town crier with a bell and just be like, scruppies, scruppies, scruppies. I do like that they totally embrace that by making cider this way, it's never going to exactly taste the same. There's always going to be variance from batch to batch. I also like in their description that they say that this is a family run farm and that cider saved their farm during the Great Depression and now we can produce it legally. Again, JK's Farmhouse Cider, this is their Scrumppy Cider. They make lots of other varieties as well that are all excellent. We had a Paw Paw One. Well, yeah, I forgot about that. Featured the Hillbilly Mango, the Hoosiers Delight. The Banango. Yeah, the Hoosier Banana. They really do a wide variety of great ciders. This is 6% ABV, comes in a four pack, 16 ounce cans, $15.99. Lexi, you're from Michigan, you should know all about Pawpaws. I know all about Pawpaw. That's what we're talking about. The place. Oh no, not the place. Right next to the fruit. Less about the fruit. The foraged fruit that, see even in, even Michiganders, it's such a wild kind of, you need to be in the know. Again, hipsters should be all about that. I hate to let you know, but I am not much of a forager. Yeah, yeah. Few people are. Roger, get on to the next one. All right. He is entirely in his element right now. This is like his Roger River episode. Wallowing in his own crapulence. I love it. This is Roger's against. So, the next cider is local. So, speaking of Logan Square, these folks are located right nearby. This is Right Bee Cider, and it's with Chicago bees as well. Beads? Beads. You guys are insane. So, we're trying this semi-dry. So again, this is fermented dry, and then it's back sweetened with just a touch of honey, which comes from the bees that are kept on the roof of their cidery in a very hipster way. It doesn't get much more hipster than this. They are in an old Schwinn bicycle store. And they're raising bees. Yep. So, I'm sure you've heard about Ares. They get a lot of attentions. The local cidery, Right Bee even predates them. So, Right Bee started planning in 2011, opened doors in 2014. It is owned by Charlie Davis and Katie Morgan. Again, there's this adorable story of wooing her with making a cider for her, and they fell in love, got married, and now they bring you these cute little ciders with a little cartoon bee on them. Yep. Right Bee side her. It's so cute. I like that on the side here, they have a little metric between dry and sweet. So, that gives you a sense of what you're in store for. So, they also make a brute. So, if you want it real dry, they have a brute that's fermented all the way. I never noticed their logo was a bee with an apple head. Indeed. Oh yeah, it has an apple head. I thought that the bee was puzzling as an element because I thought they were a meadery for a while. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. But knowing that they use their own honey for this. This is a charming, bright, easy little drink. Yeah. I'm an avid fan of their dry, which is even more so than this. If you think this is too sweet. It's a tiny bit too sweet, but it's not overbearing. Yeah. It's not bad. I'm going to be honest, I was going to pour the dry, but I wanted to pour the semi-sweet so I could talk about their bees. Yeah. There's no honey in the semi-sweet or in the dry? No. I drink that one maybe once a month. With your Logan Square friends? With my Four Moon Tavern friends. But yeah, this is really cool. I do think it's important to highlight it. Besides the synergistic, the bee thing is cute, but bees are absolutely necessary basically for all agriculture, but especially for apples. Anyone who's an orchardist will tell you how they would have no fruit if it weren't for bees. It is really cool that they go the extra mile and actually have this apiary. They have 10 hives on the roof, and the bees pollinate all the wildflowers around the cidery. If you see wildflowers growing around the tracks over there, cute little bees on the roof. We love a roof bee. I think that this really, it has some nice balance between sweetness and acidity. The honey is not super, they're in a balancing way. It's not right up front. I agree. What's the- Nice lingering tartness also. Yep. What's the bulk? Six. Six. I would say in general, six, six and a half is kind of, whereas with beer, beer tends to be around five percent. Cider is usually around six, six and a half. Some of the really big purveyors will kind of water it down to a five percent. But if you're just fermenting apple juice, usually. But you can make them however you want. The next one we're going to try, for example, goes the other way. It's more sessionable. It's four and a half. If cider is balanced or dry, it's pretty easy to drink. So you can get in trouble if it's seven or wait until we try some of these 8.4. I am waiting. Yeah. The next cider is from Stormalong. If you thought, Ripe You is a cool story. I got another even more historical and to me, cute story. Stormalong was started in 2014. The cider that we're gonna try is their farm stand unfiltered. So the first thing you're gonna notice when you pour this out, it's a little more hazy, it's not clear, but this is all fresh pressed apples. There's no sulfites. No, it's not from concentrate juice. It's gluten-free and it's right in the middle between, they have a slide rule as well. So between dry and sweet, medium sweet and, or medium dry and medium sweet, it's right in between all four. Why do they all have to be apple puns or references? I mean, like at a certain point, breweries stopped talking about the Ryan Heights guboat in the names of their products. Yeah, it took like 30 years. It did. Yeah, you're right. Trying to get attention. Give them time to get it all out. Yeah. They're like, hey, you like apples? Also, it seems to me like a lot of these really popped off in the late 2000s, 2010s, right? Yeah. So, add 30 years, we got a ways to go. This one smells like apple sauce. Oh yeah, cheese. It smells like apple sauce and apple cider, like roadside back of a pickup truck cider. So this has got some culinary apples in it. That's probably making you think of that. It's got Macintosh, the beloved Honeycrisp. It's got Gala, Empire, Courtland and Macoon. Anyway. This tastes like apple sauce. I mean, it's like, it's not only smells but tastes. I love it. I like it. Yeah, I do too. It's delightful. Storm Along, founded in 2014 by Shannon Edgar in Sherbourne, Massachusetts. So here's the story behind that. In the late 1800s, the largest cider mill in the world was located in Sherbourne, Massachusetts, exporting a champagne cider to England and other places abroad. Around that time, there are 40 orchards in the town. The owner of the cider mill convinced the railroad to alter their tracks through the town and to write to the cider mill. Hugely rich history of cider in this town and then it just all but disappeared. So the whole mantra in Storm Along is to bring back this rich history of cider, cider apples and how it was this truly American beloved drink. So it's pretty cool that they even chose this town to kind of underline that point. Probably because there were so many apple trees left over. You would think so, but again, like there literally were whole orchards that were cut down. If you were a farmer and you're growing apples and you need to have someone to sell them to, so if you have a bunch of orchards full of cider apple fruit and that it's, you know, prohibition times and no cidery can use it anymore, you literally can't, that's fruits arguably useless because you can't eat it, really. It's not the kind of apples that are appealing. So either complete orchards got ripped out or most of the trees got ripped out, and then they just planted different varieties that were better for eating. So tragic story, but Jim's cracking up about the word appealing. Oh my God. That's punny right there. Roger, maybe this is not even possible to know, but has anyone ever determined how many species of apples might have been lost during prohibition? That's a good question. I'm not sure, but the number of different apple varieties is mind-boggling, because if an apple grows from seed, it's going to be a new variety technically. You have to graft from an existing tree if you want to completely replicate an apple. So that just makes for so many new mind-boggling number of varieties because of that. Well, if they're pollinated by bees, they're very difficult to control. Right. Yeah. You see how hazy this is? Yeah. There's somebody out there who would order this and think, wow, this is a really juicy IPA. I know. Definitely. They might be like, oh, is this like a... Because there's a little acidity here too. They're like, oh, is this like a pastry sour? Have we had Storm Along on the podcast before? I think we have. We might have What's New or something, but... Yeah. I'm a big fan of their ciders. I think they're doing some excellent stuff. They're also totally committed to talking about the apples. Yeah. That's what I've noticed about them is... They have like a whole Heirloom series. They have a Ragtime Reserve cider that's excellent. So they did one recently with Arkansas Black. That's a great cider apple. That was the apple that Greg Hall has tattooed on his arm. One of the apples, the Greg Hall. Yeah, fair enough. So when they started making these pastry sours, there are many pastry sours that are like apple crumble. Sure. So I mean, if you like an apple crumble pastry sour, you should just be drinking a well-balanced apple cider. Yeah. Then there's some ciders too that they incorporate sweet spices. So if you're a big fan of pumpkin spice season and you like pumpkin spice lattes and stuff, keep an eye out during the fall for that's kind of the OG, along with pumpkin pie is like anything apple goes perfect with nutmegs, cinnamon, allspice. Chris isn't here, but he just felt a little tingle. Yeah, that one again, 4.5% comes in a four pack, 16 ounce cans, 13.99. We are going to now talk about some of these Imperial Ciders, which are all the rage right now. First one we are going to start with is one that we have had on the podcast before. This is one of my personal favorites, as far as one of the space giraffe. This is kind of one of the first ones to do an Imperial. This is Schilling Excelsior. Excelsior. Yeah. When I think about goofy ciders, this is the one that comes to mind. Well, I remember we did an episode on Session summer beers and then Roger threw this. Nine percent. That's not Session. Sometimes you got to go a different way with it. It might taste sessionable and easy to drink, but it's not. Well, it was summer beverages. Yeah. All right. The other ones happened to be sessionable for the most part. And I was like, yeah, or you could drink this in the summer because it's awesome. So Schilling, this one in particular is a blend of fresh pressed Pacific Northwest apples. And then they also source fruit from Europe. So they're spending the money to bring in some of those famous, Bitter Sharp apples from France or England. That depends from year to year. But not only do you get the acidity from those, you just get a really whole different level of complexity as well. There's more than apple, right? Like pineapple and nectarine? In the series there is, but in this, this is just apples. Seriously. Wow. Very cool. So a Bitter Sharp is, I assume, bitter or more acidic? Both. So tannic. So some of the sharpness is both acidity and tannins. They vary by the apple. And obviously that will balance the sweetness of the other apples. In the world of ciders, this is the malt liquor. Cider liquor? That's a different thing. You know, it's just like anything else. I mean, two countries that kind of have always believed in cider and have made them for centuries are France and Spain. So like in the Basque country in particular or around Normandy, they love cider. And some of those can be pretty funky. So they're not always for everybody. But it wouldn't be uncommon for some of those. Again, it's all up just to the vintner how they strong or weak they want to make it. But some of those were stronger. So this isn't just an American like, yeah, but could we turn it up? We like getting drunk around here. Like could we do one that's a little stronger? But those often ship in wine bottles too. Right. And whereas this comes in a six pack and it's $13.99. I wish you hadn't told me that. I mean, it is. I'm going to have such a damn headache. It's kind of crazy. This has also had to, I think, Venice quality, almost like a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, kind of like tropical-ish. I know what you're saying. Like a tart, tropical tartness. I would like it more to a Chardonnay in that it has like creamy apricot, dried apricot, baked pineapple tastes. And it's just like really rich and broad and intense. I like the acidity. I think it's a little bit of a roller coaster of acidity on there. I'm glad you brought a pineapple because I think that is like very pronounced kind of and you nailed it with like grilled or baked or makes you think of like pineapple upside down cake kind of. It makes you think of that, Roger. Well, I do love it. The rest of us have just been waiting for like five or six years for you to make a pineapple upside down cake. Yeah, I know. Because I have a half one in forever. I'm not good at baking. We got to get Chris to do it. He's better at baking than I am. I cook. But yeah, check out Chilling Stuff. And then again, this has become such a popular cider for them that now they do do fruited riffs on it. So mango is available all the time and that's delicious. But then they just recently did a pineapple one and then they're going to do a pineapple passion fruit is coming out soon. That's up my alley. Sounds good. That one I recently was suggesting like, these can be really effortless cocktails. Like if you dig making tea drinks and you don't like the 20 steps that most of them require, try using one of these shillings as a base. So use the mango Excelsior as your base, and then you're incorporating fruit, but it also has some alcohol. Then you could add a nice dark rum, something like a OFTD plant array or pussers or limitless. You want some funky Smith and Cross, one of those bright red cherries. You got like a little tropical stone fence. Yeah, just real quick and easy. Add a splash of rum, you could even add a dash of bitters, and bing, bang, boom, you got a whole different drink. So Shilling Excelsior, six packs, 12 ounce cans, 13.99. This is a must try. It's worth mentioning too that again, this is fermented enough. They place it right in the middle, like dry between dry and sweet. So I mean, this is 190 calories. So some of those other ciders, they're even less. What? This is 190 calories. Yeah. It's so rich. It's so decadent, but it's not sweet. Wow. And there are ciders that are like almost 300 that are way lower in alcohol. There's all these malt beverages where they're like under 100 calories. You're like, yeah, well, it's 1.8% alcohol. Yeah. This is legit. So yeah, this is what happens when you ferment like most of the alcohol, or most of the calories in this are coming from alcohol, not from that they're sweetening it. Crazy. It's basically a diet in a can. We'd be crazy not to drink it. Don't sue me. That's not medical advice. I think Jim Budibest, you'd be crazy not to drink it. In that same vein of another Imperial, also 8.4, and again, well-fermented to the point of Seattle Cider has always put the Bricks on there. So again, it's kind of an unknown concept, so let's explain it for a second. Bricks is a measurement of sugar content and liquid. When apples are milled and pressed into juice, and the sugar is measured, so then one degree Bricks is equivalent to one gram of sucrose in 100 grams of solution. So this is the same measure used in the wine industry, if you are in the wine, also in the fruit juice industry. And it's pre-fermentation measurement, so not residual sugar, but sugar that can potentially be converted to alcohol. Right. But then they'll also measure it afterwards, so then that will give you a sense of how sweet or dry this is. So Seattle Cider made a name for themselves as they were probably the first big purveyor that did a brute that was just 0.0. Like it was, when they say dry, they mean we fermented it all the way and we put nothing back in. So again, I use it as an example. I like it a lot. It's too dry for a lot of people. They might hate sweet cider, but then you give them that and they're like, well, that's a little intense. Can we meet in the middle a little? Seattle Cider heavily awarded cidery. They just clean house because they do such a good job of balancing sweetness and acidity, so a lot of their other ciders are also relatively low in sweetness, but they have that perception of fruitiness, whether it's from additional things they add to the cider or just the apple sweat, the way that it's fermented. I wanted to highlight their latest release. It's a seasonal for the wintertime and spring called Raspberry Blossom. If I owned a cidery and I made a really sweet cider, I'd call it, she's a Bricks House. Oh my God. Oh my God. That's a good one. If you ever need a punt, now always go to the gym. Oh, yeah. Look, that's the company culture, OK? So beautiful color here. Yeah. We have a coral-y salmon. Salmon. Almost looks like a white Zinfandel. Almost. I don't want to, you know, put any cast aspersions, but. Smell that. It's like a little flower. It is like a little flower. That is because it is fermented with elderflowers. How about it? Elderflower, bartender's ketchup. Indeed. But without the sickly sweetness of an elderflower liqueur, this is just the floral component of the elderflower. Oh man, that's good. Well, it smells pretty. How's it taste? Acidic. Yeah. It's like a raspberry sour. I like that. It's just like a raspberry sour. What's that? With a less grainy breadth. Yeah. It's more vinous than it is like a beer. Then there's no funkiness. It's all flowers and fruit. Yeah. Love that. Great. Perfectly put. 0.8 bricks. You can get this in a six-pack 12-ounce cans for $11.99. That's wild. This is a work of art. It's also razor sharp. Like acid. Have it with cheese. It is a sharp beverage. I think this could pair well with so many dishes. If you're a fan of salads, it would work with so many different, think of like vinaigrette's, like that way that you cut their richness with acidity, like salads that incorporate blue cheeses, like this would work well with so many different. What do you think if trying it with a fruit salad? Like do you think it would get out sweet? Because it's bone dry. Right. It's going to like contrast with that. You know what would be cool is with that fruit salad, watermelon and feta, that would be cool. I still don't think that that exists. He says it does. Oh, it's so good. And the mint leaves. Watermelon, feta and mint. It's great. Oh, it's so good. Seems crazy to me, but it's come up on this show. It has, yeah. I mean, it sounds okay. When it gets warm and they allow us to have a back door, I will make it and we can sit outside in the summer, have a watermelon salad. What about this? Just make a clover club with just this instead of, just put gin, add gin. Oh, I'm in. I don't know if you'd want to do an egg white. Probably not. No, definitely not. But I think this would pair really well with gin. I mean, you nailed it. Like people use St. Germain and all sorts of stuff, bartenders' ketchup, so. And this is dry instead. Right. It would just be, yeah, like honestly, just like adding a fizz component to gin that actually has some alcohol and some flavor instead of just bitterness. It might be cool. So with the French 75, yeah. Subbing this in instead of champagne, you can make that drink two different ways. So there's kind of a debate whether you should be made with gin or cognac. Raspberry could be really interesting with cognac. Or Arminiac. I bet it would even meld even better with a fruity Arminiac. Wild. Yeah. Big, big fan. Seattle, again, if you go on their site and click awards, it's like a laundry list of metals. They really do an excellent job. So I wholeheartedly endorse everything that they do is fantastic. So if you're curious about cider and you're looking for a great place to start and just sort of try a variety of things from sweet to a lot of cool flavored adjuncted ones, highlighting different botanicals and fruits, check out Seattle Cider. Woo. How many more we got? Two. Two more, okay, that sounds about right. Next, we're going to try a cidery for our Michigander in the room. What's rounding out the mix, and again, this is for the people that are on the fence, and if you are big fans of the juicier, fruitier, be it pastry sours or these fruited IPAs, Blake's has been selling like crazy, it's become quite beloved. It's giving even some of the big people, like your Woodchucks and your Angry Orchard are running for the money. Blake's is up in Michigan, family run farm. They're the agricultural tourism. Lexi, you mentioned you've been there. It's a family affair. You can bring the kids, there's all sorts of different things to do, see all the stuff. Hay rack rides, corn maize. Doughnuts, the whole shebang. Food court, which is cool. Couple trucks and things. Shooting apples out of cannons at big metal structures. Yeah. Yeah, love that. In the spring or whenever lavender season is, they have a nice lavender patch. Lavender patch. Like $5 to roll around in there. Just fall asleep for like two hours. It's a cute, it's a fun time. Okay. You'll just drink a lot. Where is it at in Michigan? Armada, Michigan. Which part of the mitten? Towards the thumb. It's 45 minutes to an hour 20, depending on traffic from Detroit. All right. Get to the nut here. What do we got? So they're making some ciders, as I said, are just people are really digging them. They are more on the sweet side typically. It varies by the release. But so if you do want sweet, you should check out their stuff. One of my favorite ciders from them is Black Philip, which has a little more acidity in it. It's a blood orange cider and it is also a reference to the Eggers movie, The Witch. It's extremely obscure reference. It's good though. It's a good cider. So that is a little less sweet and fruit forward like some of their stuff. But I figured we should at least try these two because they're so popular and the one is brand new. So Triple Jam is their cider flavored with strawberry, blackberry and raspberry. That's like the whole IHOP syrup coaster. Yes. Boysenberry. So they grow a lot of different things on their farm including berries. So another nice color, very similar to the last one. This is even more ruby, it appears, with a salmon cast. Even though it has the three in there, to me, the standout is strawberry. So if you're a fan of, you like your strawberry jam, you're eating fresh strawberries, strawberries and champagne kind of deal. The label art is a strawberry, blackberry and raspberry cars. Very much like a Richard Scary vibe. It's a traffic jam. Yeah. If you go in the fall to the lovely Armada, Michigan and you leave when the place closes after everyone's been drinking cider for hours and hours, you will be stuck in a traffic jam. In a triple traffic jam. Triple traffic jam. Yeah. Oh yeah, there's so much strawberry there. Whoa. Yeah, I mean, delivers as promised, sweet, jammy, fruit forward. Yeah, this is the oops, all berries cider. Yeah, the apple kind of gets lost. It's very berry forward. But the one thing I will say about it that's cool is that it tastes like natural berries. It tastes like real fruit jam as opposed to so many berry FMBs and stuff like that are just total fake. Yeah, not cloying either, I don't think. It's sweet. It's not cloying. Yeah. All right. So answering the call of the people that said we want this kind of thing, but how about you kick it up a little? How about you do make it cloying? How about you give it some heft? This one is new, right? Yeah. So this is new. This is big jam. Same exact thing. You just got big jammed. What was the last one? Six and a half. So it's not even like that huge of a jump. I'm actually kind of a little puzzled as to why they didn't do eight. A lot of them have landed on 8.4. I don't know if that's some kind of like tax thing or something. Yeah. Instead of Richard's Gary cars, this has Richard's Gary fruit rockets? Yeah. I like the coloring. It's a little bit different than the last. This one's a little more my jam. I feel like the sweetness is a little more restrained. I also think it's a little more raspberry than the strawberry. The strawberry is still the leading fruit. I definitely get more raspberry in this. I agree. Yeah. This also doesn't taste like it's 8 percent. It does not taste like it's 8 percent. Could be alarming in the summertime. This tastes like a reformulation of the other one, not an Imperial version of the other one. Yeah. That's true. Same stuff, but not exactly in the same way. It smells more like raspberry on the nose and it has like a dusty, dry quality instead of just being all jam, which is neat. Not to say that there's complexity here. It's a big old fruit wad. If you ever have to drink a Ker Royale we've talked about in the past, that usually is with black currant liqueur or a cassis. It's not easy to find, so usually a lot of people bars restaurants sub in Shamborg, which is a black raspberry and raspberry liqueur. So if you like that dumping berry liqueur into your sparkling wine, you will like this. This is that with less acidity. Yeah. That's nice. That's pleasant. Yeah. That's pleasant. Yeah. That's a punchy ending there. Right? That was pleasant. Gets you in trouble. Which one of these can we make a stone fence with, though? Which one would be the best? Probably the scrumpy, right? That's the most, I would say that would be the most... The scrumpy or the Excelsior? I make with Excelsior a lot. For our friends, our friends listening at home that may not know what a stone fence is, what is that? The stone fence is, again, another one of those, you could argue it's one of the drinks that made the nation. The drink that took Fort Ticonderoga, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys were getting drunk on it as rascals. The hard cider was the ubiquitous drink in America, and then it was typically, depending on if you did first runnings or not, five, six percent, they would just make another cider and make weaker ones. Even kids were drinking cider because it was safe to drink a really weak cider and then to just drink water. Then colonists also like to freeze their cider. That's what Applejack is, which it's not legal to do because if you just keep freezing it and freezing it and freezing it, the methanol has nowhere to go, so you could end up blinding yourself. Yeah, distillation through freezing. So the safer thing to do is to just take your apple cider and add some spirits to it. Yeah, put some rum in there. Put some Applejack, Apple Brandy in there. In the early days, it was rum. Then we started figuring out to distill Apple Brandy, and then eventually whiskeys. We started to plant grain for whisky. In the Versh household, with the apple picking, the jug of cider from the place, about 75% of it goes into stone fences with rye, and a healthy shake of Fee Brother's old-fashioned aromatic bitters, because it's just adding cinnamon to the whole mix. And that's great. And some of us like it warm, and some of us like it cold. You can enjoy it either way. And as simple of a drink as it is, you can use hard cider in the fall. I do like using that fresh pressed cider, the good stuff. You can add any mixture of those spirits I just mentioned. So you could just stick with Greg Loves Rye. You could just do rye alone. You could mix... I got an idea. How about we do a Long Island stone fence? Yeah. I often make them with four different liquors. Of course you do. Yeah. I'll do rum, rye, bourbon and apple brandy. White cake flavored vodka. I mean, the scrumpy would probably be a little more authentic for the times. For sure. Or the farm stand one that tastes so much like apples. Yeah, definitely. Nice. It's a great drink. And if you want to... You know, the true bartender's ketchup is all spiced ram. Uh-huh. Got it in the podcast. Adding a little bit of that in there then adds some of those fall flavors, but also sweetness. So, to Greg's point, if you have a bitter, especially Fee Brothers Aromatics Roast Cinnamony, you're adding some spice. I didn't ever know there was a name for that. So, there's no real agreed upon, you know, why is it called that? But what I believe is the reasoning is that a lot of land was divided by, you know, before they were doing like split rail or anything, the easiest fence to build would be a stone fence, and you wouldn't really want to sit there, like they weren't making it out of mortar, they were just like stacking stones, so they're usually pretty low. So, think about if you were like running full blast and then just tripped in the stone fence and went flying. So, I think it's like it hits like a stone fence. Interesting. That story gets more vivid every time you tell it. Okay. There's nothing bad here. There's nothing bad on this table. Yeah. It's really the enjoyable line up we got here. I think we took a tour. Yeah. Cider's got some literally something for everybody. So, it's just like, again, it's a category that is very misunderstood. And again, it's just suffers from this stereotype of that they're all this and that they're all sweet. But just like all wine is different, it's a type of wine. If you like dry stuff, then we have that. If you like sweet and everything in between, including, you know, now it's a lot of cool fruit flavors. So again, if you're digging some of these beers that are very fruit centric, or you like drinking mead, there's lots of opportunities here to drink something that's similar but different. Thanks, Roger. My pleasure. I love hard cider. I love talking about apples. With all this cold weather, as it starts to warm up, it's gonna feel like fall. So, that's a perfect excuse to drink some cider. It's the beginning of March. It feels like fall. Roger was a hit at Cider Summit, as always. Lens, not at the Binny's table, just to speak to Roger. Cool. All right, wrap it. So, thanks again for listening to this episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. If you liked what you heard, please leave us a review. We'll be back again soon in your feed with something new from the world of beer, wine, spirits, cider, and beyond. Tell your friends to give us a listen. And until the next episode, I am Roger, I'm Lexi, I'm Greg, I'm Jim. Keep Tasting.