Tag Archives: hard cider

Cider For Thanksgiving. It’s A Thing.

While Thanksgiving may be the most All-American of holidays, its history is deeply rooted in our more local New England heritage and traditions. A meal of turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce could only have come from New England (after all, they weren’t shooting wild turkeys in the vast cranberry bogs of El Paso).

Every year people ask us, “What’s the best wine to pair with Thanksgiving dinner?” The answer is, honestly, almost any wine that you like! Pinot noir, Cotes du Rhone, and malbec are all great, safe choices, and all offer extremely tasty wine at a variety of price points. But the one beverage that gets short shrift each year, and couldn’t be better aligned to our New England Thanksgiving traditions, is cider.

One thing New England has never been short on is apples. And when you’re facing a harsh new England winter without any modern conveniences, it makes a lot more sense to turn your surplus apples into safe-to-drink cider, so you can save your barley and wheat for baking. Which is what our forefathers did.

After prohibition, we lost our taste for cider, and many of our orchards were given over to the cultivation of eating apples. Thankfully, the recent resurgence in craft beer and spirits has reversed that trend, and many long forgotten cider apple varieties are making their way back onto our shelves.

Here are nine of our favorite ciders for a Thanksgiving meal with friends and family. Many come from cideries right here in our backyard, but we’ve also included some classics from the great cider making nations of Europe.

We hope you find something new to try in our list, and are inspired to branch out with your Thanksgiving feast. Remember, it’s not wine, and it’s not beer – it’s cider!

Nine Great Thanksgiving Ciders

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Stormalong Cider The Grand Banks – Sherborn, MA
A new-comer to the Rhode Island market, Stormalong makes an excellent dry cider, and a very tasty dry-hopped variety. Our choice for Thanksgiving is their cider finished in Boston’s Bully Boy Distillers’ rum barrels. The cider coaxes beautiful flavors of vanilla and baking spice from the oak casks, and provides a welcome counterpoint to the bracing acidity of the cider. Extremely well made.

Shacksbury Classic – Shoreham, VT
Made with both eating and cider apples from Vermont and England, this slightly sparkling cider has subtle earthy notes and an off-dry finish that’s the perfect accompaniment to turkey’s dark meat and fatty skin.

Eve’s Cidery Albee Hill – Van Etten, NY
Made with a hodgepodge of traditional cider apples like ‘Stembridge Cluster’ and ‘Wickson,’ this is a cider for wine lovers. Bone-dry, with nuanced flavors of stone fruit, peaches, and sage. With a slightly bitter finish, this cider goes with everything on the table, especially stuffing and gravy!

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Aaron Burr Cidery Appinette – Wurtsboro, NY
This one is a bit bonkers, but the juice in the bottle is phenomenal. A Champagne lover’s cider, Appinette is made from 30% Traminette grapes from the Finger Lakes, and 70% cider apples. A little cloudy and ruddy, it has vibrant, bubbly aromas of grapefruit, apricots, and rose petals. Truly delightful.

Oyster River Winegrowers Dry Cider – Warren, ME
Unfiltered, bottle conditioned, naturally fermented cider – it’s about as natural as it gets. Bracingly tart, with lively, persistent bubbles, this is a light bodied cider for a toast and a first course.

Sandford Orchards Chestnut Cider – Devon, England
Made with fun-to-say English apples like ‘Sweet Alford’ and ‘Dabinett’, this cider is fermented and aged in chestnut casks before bottling. The chestnut adds a creamy weight to the cider, which retains a little sweetness and residual sugar.

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Etienne Dupont Cidre Bouché Brut de Normandie – Normandie, France
A strikingly beautiful cider with a ridiculously understated label. Very lively in the glass, with a frothy head and complex flavors of apples, pears, citrus, pine, leather, anise, and oak. An elegant cider for an elegant meal.

Rekorderlig Spiced Apple – Vimmerby, Sweden
Rich and fruity Swedish cider, infused with cinnamon and vanilla. It’s apple pie in a glass – perfect for dessert!

Guzman Riestra Sidra Brut Nature – Asturias, Spain
A secondary fermentation in the bottle creates this naturally sparkling beauty with a Champagne-like dryness and body. It has bright fruity pear and banana notes, but is not at all sweet or cloying! The bubbles and tartness of the apples will cut through heavier flavors of mashed potatoes and stuffing without getting in the way.

Happy Thanksgiving!

-Liam

Bottles’ Hot Spiked Cider

Cider Drinking. It’s a rite of passage for us New Englanders. It pairs well with football watching, apple picking, pumpkin carving and post leaf-raking relaxing. Bottles’ go-to version is a grown-up affair, made strong with a slightly-boozy cider and a few drops of allspice dram*. Fill a thermos of the warm concoction before heading to the game, or let it simmer in a crockpot when your house is full of friends.

We’ll be making a great big batch of it in-store on Saturday, October 15th for you to enjoy, alongside crazy good cider donuts from Greenville RI’s Appleland Orchard. We hope you can make it in, between 1-3pm, for a Bottles’ taste of fall!

*Allspice dram is a slightly bitter, strongly spiced rum-based liqueur. It’s infused with the allspice berry, which lends the spirit warm, winter-spice nutmeg-y/cinnamon-y flavors. St. Elizabeth’s Allspice Dram is a Bottles’ best seller.

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Bottles’ Hot Spiked Cider
Yields ~ 4 cups

1 btl (22 oz.) Doc’s Original Apple Cider
1/4 cup (2 oz.) St. Elizabeth’s Allspice Dram
1 cup (8 oz.) apple cider (non-alcoholic)
1/2 cup (4 oz.) water
1 diced apple
1 cinnamon stick (optional)
Have fun with these ingredients, and adjust to taste. You could add maple syrup or brown sugar for sweetness, nutmeg, cinnamon and cardamom for pumped-up spice, or more dram for a more bitter-herbal flavor.

Stovetop method:
Simmer the chopped apple in allspice dram until the dram begins to reduce and thicken. Add Doc’s (or another hard cider of your choice), non-alcoholic cider, cinnamon stick, and water. Turn heat to high, stirring often, until liquid is just about to boil. Set to a simmer and cook uncovered for at least 15 minutes. The longer it simmers, the richer the flavor!

Crockpot method:
All of the ingredients can go in at once with your crockpot set to low for 3 hours or high for 1.5 hours.

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The Hard Cider Revival (Learn all about Cider)

Farnum Hill Ciders

Ask someone to name a hard cider, and you’ll find that most folks are familiar with names like Woodchuck or Angry Orchard. More similar to beer than wine, these fizzy beverages are on the slightly sweeter side (one of our very favorites is Downeast Cider, made in Boston).

But did you that there’s a whole range of cider styles out there? In this video, Liam talks about cider history and the differences in styles.

He also paid a visit to Farnum Hill ciders in Lebanon, N.H. to chat with cidermaker Stephen M. Wood, and to get a behind the scenes tour of the cider making process. Farnum Hill is worth the visit — they grow their own apples, press, ferment, and blend them to create their cider.

More similar to wine than beer, Farnum Hill ciders are made from heirloom apple varieties (too tart for snacking!) that are grown specifically for their juices and high tannins, resulting in a dry style of cider that is aged and then blended in small batches.

Apples - learn about hard cider styles

Now, go drink some cider!

Cheers!