Nat West, owner of Reverend Nat's Hard Cider in Portland, Ore., is spicing up his cider made from eating apples with ginger juice, herbal tonics, coffee and hops. He has even aged cider in a tank with crushed rock slabs to impart notes of "minerality."
Schilling Cider, in Seattle, uses mostly Red Delicious, Granny Smith and Honeycrisp apples — varieties that "don't have any flavor," in owner Colin Schilling's opinion. That's why he steeps bags of chai spices in one of his ciders, ages others with oak chips and adds Ecuadorian cocoa nibs to another to create a thick and brownie-like beverage only faintly reminiscent of apples. Schilling once even fermented some apple juice over Japanese horseradish for what was intended to be a "wasabi cider."
"That was awful," he says. "We dumped it out."
Unsurprisingly, there are critics of such experimental cider-making.
Steve Wood, co-owner of Farnum Hill Cider, grows about 70 acres of apples on his New Hampshire farm. For him, making cider is less like craft brewing than it is like making wine — a process of tending to the trees, growing the fruit, harvesting the apples at optimal ripeness, blending the juices and fermenting it in oak barrels and steel tanks. Wood uses apple varieties like Kingston Black, Yarlington Mill and Bramtot — varieties too bitter or sour to eat but long used in Europe for cider-making.
"The goal is to bring our fruit to the bottle in the most delicious way possible," Wood says. "It's a very hands-off, white wine-making approach."
Adding anything but apple juice to the cider would go against Wood's most basic principles: "I would never, in my wildest imagination, put jalapenos in my cider. That would be like if a Bordeaux winemaker threw a bunch of hot peppers into his wine."
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