Cider Review: Red Barn Cider

I was fortunate enough to tour the Red Barn Cider and Tulip Valley Wines in Mt. Veron, WA earlier this week and sample their ciders.

We began our tasting with the Burro Loco, which is a sharper tasting cider due to being made from mostly crab apples. This is my husband’s favorite cider from Red Barn.

That was followed by the Fire Barrel Cider. This cider was aged in former bourbon barrels for at least 12 weeks but maybe up to one year. They said this would be most like an English Farmhouse style cider. To me, this was a bit sharper than the Burro Loco Cider.

Next was the Jonagold cider, which is a semi-dry cider and quite possibly my favorite cider that they produce. He said that when it was done fermenting, he sweetened it with Jonagold concentrate juice that he made. This was a sweeter cider than the previous two.

Last of all the ciders was the Sweetie Pie made just from Gravenstein apples, which I also find very nice. As the name says, it is a sweet cider, and probably more of a dessert cider. It was very good with cheddar cheese.

We had an opportunity to try a Perry. However, this was not a traditional perry since it was made from Comice and Tayor’s Gold pears, so malic were added to compensate for the shortcomings of the eating pears. I really liked it, but the thing I really noticed was that aroma was so vastly different than the other products.

All of Red Barn’s Ciders are slightly carbonated. Red Barn also has a line of wines. They allow three complementary tastings of either, and most all their products are priced at about $11-$12 a bottle.

Thing is, this is probably a cidery whose products I really admire and would probably use as a model for making my own cider products.