Miracle Fruit and Beer

After reading the Mad Fermentationist’s blog titled “Miracle Fruit Sour Beer Tasting”, I bought some Miracle Fruit Tablets and decided to try them out at the Portland International Beerfest 2010.

I didn’t consume a miracle fruit pill when I first got there, as there were some things I wanted to taste as is without altered tastebuds. It was when I got a Franziskaner Dunkel-Weisse beer that I finally tried out one of the pills. I didn’t really make that many notes regarding this beer ahead of time, simply stating, “Eh, it is beer.” So even after five 4 oz samples of cider, mead, and fruit beers, I wasn’t really caring to drink beer. Then I took the miracle fruit pill, and then tried the Franziskaner Dunkel-Weisse. It tasted better to me, and I was starting to pick up more creamy and caramel notes, which were probably already there but hidden. Since sourness was being toned down and replaced with sweetness, these characteristics were coming though stronger to me.

Since there were a lot of sour beers there, I tried New Belgium La Folie. I turned to my husband and said, “Wow, this beer must be really sour, because this is syrupy sweet to me right now!” In fact, it was almost too much so, but it was good. When we came back the next day, my husband got a sample of the La Folie again, and it was really sour, but I could still detect the syrup taste on the edges. Again, it was probably always there, but the sourness just put it into balance, and once it was stripped away and converted to sweetness, the syrup taste became dominate.

With my altered taste buds, my husband got 21^st Amendment Double Trouble Imperial IPA, which is a very hoppy beer, too hoppy for my husband. When I tried it with my altered taste buds, I pushed it away. My husband was shocked, “You can still taste that?” “Yes.” He was a little disappointed, as he hoped that with my altered taste buds that I would like it and drink it for him! Also, if I liked it, I might start drinking more beer with him. Now, everyone has different tastes, and everyone reacts differently to the miracle fruit, but this experience is why I believe the CSI: New York got it wrong when they said it makes bitter foods sweet, as the IPA was still very bitter to me.

In hind sight, I should have gone and gotten a porter, which are typically less hoppy and more creamy with chocolate or coffee notes, but I did not think of it at the time. I’ll have to have a miracle fruit tasting sometime in the future, so I’ll try an remember then. I’m excited!

Book Review: Tasting Club

While researching about supertasters, I called up the catalog online for my local library to see what books they had on taste. I came across a very interesting one called Tasting Club: Gathering Together to Share and Savor Your Favorite Tastes by Dina Cheney.

This book starts out covering the basics, including a brief blurb on how the tongue tastes food. This chapter is really devoted to actually having tastings, forming a tasting club, and an extensive section on how to conduct a tasting. It includes how to send an invite, and what to provide your guests to assist with the tasting, such as pens and a tasting grid found later in the book.

From there, the book has a chapter on wine, chocolate, cheese, honey, tea, extra virgin olive oil, cured meats, balsamic vinegar, apples, and beer. For example, with wine, Cheney talks about terroir, how wine is made, different types of wine, location, grape varieties including a table talking about characteristics, finding wine, shopping and storing wine, choosing food accompaniments including a menu and a few recipes, organizing the tasting, learning your palate, a tasting grid for wine, and a wine glossary of terms. This organization and detail is repeated for the other foods, with minor tweaks to better match the subject.

I was fairly impressed with this book and I may try a tasting from it, such as in the balsamic vinegar chapter. However, for something like apples where there are a lot of different varieties out there, this book oversimplified things and only stuck to the grocery store apple varieties.

Further readings on pairing wine, beer, and cheese:

All American Cheese and Wine Book: Pairings, Profiles, & Recipes by Laura Werlin. 2003
Werlin wrote The New American Cheese: Profiles of American’s Great Cheesemakers and Recipes for Cooking with Cheese. Her All American Cheese and Wine Book is basically the same book but with more on wine added. Werlin did extensive research on both topics, and this is a dense book with advice and recipes. After an introduction, Werlin starts talking about cheese and how it is made, how to taste cheese extensively, seven different basic styles of cheese, how to look for and buy cheese by style, and how to serve a cheese course. Next, for wines, she talks about grapes, making wine, tasting wine, types of wine, and serving wine. I’m very impressed with both sections on how much time she takes talking about the actual tastings of both cheese and wine. She then presents the ten basic guidelines of pairing cheese and wine, talks about clues for perfect pairs by cheese style, and gives a chart of cheese and wine pairings at a glance. The core of the book is cheese dish recipes by course with wine pairing, followed by a description and profile of either winery or a cheesemaker. The Appendix alone contains 60 pages, talking about cheese terms, wine terms, cheesemakers around the country, wine makers around the country, resources (information and organizations), and a bibliography.

An Appetite for Ale: Hundreds of Delicious Ways to Enjoy Beer with Food by Fiona Beckett and Will Beckett
A cookbook that either uses beer in the recipes, or has a “best beer match” to go with the recipe. It does talk about pairing, and a lot of the food seems down to earth pub fare. The chapter on cheese is weak, but does have a good page on pairings before offering only a cheese and beer fondue and a gorgonzola and pear bruschetta recipes.

The Beerbistro Cookbook by Stephen Beaumont and Brian Morin
A cookbook using beer, it has three decent pages on pairing beer and cheese, along with a large table on suggested processes for pairing the two. It has lots of recipes, including fondues, and a chapter on making ice cream with beer.

The Best of American Beer and Food: Pairing and Cooking with Craft Beer by Lucy Saunders
This book is a little bit of everything – a reader and a cook book. The first chapter is on pairing cheese and beer, and talks in great lengths about cheesemaking, planning a cheese and beer tasting, and some suggested pairings. The rest of the book goes on to talk about other pairings with beer, regional beers and their pairing trends, and lots of recipes including cheese-stuffed jumbo shrimp with bacon, using a saison-style ale.

The Cheese Companion: A Connoisseur’s Guide, by Judy Ridgway and updated by Sara Hill
This is a cheese identification book that talks only very briefly about pairing cheese with wine. However, for each cheese variety listed, it provides a recommended wine pairing. For example, it suggests pairing Chèvre to with a Sauvignon Blanc wine.

Cheese and Wine: A Guide to Selecting, Pairing, and Enjoying by Janet Fletcher. 2007
This book goes though and briefly suggests strategies for pairing wine and cheese based on texture, intensity, acidity, sweetness, mold, and region. It then tells you how to plan a cheese course, and then how to handle and store cheese. The heart of the book is pages talking about a specific cheese style, including milk type, region, and a lengthy description. At the very end is a sentence or two about what wines would work with that cheese, so this book is about eating cheese, and the wines to enhance that experience. The appendix has two pages showing a table of wines with what cheeses to pair them to, so it is kind of a quick summary. However, there is no index to allow for the quick look up of a particular kind of cheese or wine.

He Said Beer, She Said Wine by Same Calagione and Marnie Old. 2009
This beer vs wine food pairing book does talk about how to choose wine and beer to go with cheese. Honestly, the cheeses they picked for their battles would make a very good cheese platter in my opinion, and are easy to acquire.
Mozzarella: light-bodied sparkling wine, unwooded chardonnay, Belgian White Beer, or Hefeweizen
Goat cheese: Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Nior Rosé, slightly sweet hefeweizen, or a pilsner.
Brie: Pinot Gris, French Champagne, kriek limbic, or Berliner Weisse
Sharp aged cheddar: fortified Madeira, Cabernet Sauvignon, IPA, or English Brown Ale.
Parmigiano Reggiano: Cabernet Sauvignon, Chianti, amber, or IPA.
Roquefort: Amarone, Sautenes, British Strong Ale, or Russian Imperial Stout

Laura Werlin’s Cheese Essentials: An Insider’s Guide to Buying and Serving Cheese {with 50 Recipes} by Laura Werlin. 2007
In each cheese style chapter in this book there is a small section on which kinds of wines to serve with that style and how easy it is to pair with that style. Fresh cheeses are difficult to pair, going with light white wines. Semi-soft cheese paired with fruity unoaked white wines a light red, or a light beer such as a lager. Soft-ripened cheeses, with the rinds removed, go well with sparkling wines, unoaked Chardonnay, or an earthy Pinot Nior. Surface-ripened cheeses are paired with white wines or low tannin red wines. Next, for the easiest pairing semi-hard cheeses, serve them with just about any wine. For hard cheeses, look for white wines or low tannin red wines, or even a sherry. Blue cheeses are paired with port, sweet white wines, and sparkling dry white wines. Last of all, for washed-rind cheese, Werlin pairs them with floral white wines, lighter fruitier red wines, and sweet wines. Otherwise, see Werlin’s other book, All American Cheese and Wine Book: Pairings, Profiles, & Recipes for more in-depth coverage of this topic.

Matching Food and Wine: Classic and Not So Classic Combinations by Michel Roux Jr.
A cook book which briefly talks about wines and suggests three wines to pair with that recipe. I mention this book because it has a few recipes with cheese, which he then recommends wines with.

Mastering Cheese: Lessons for Connoisseurship from a Maître Fromager by Max McCalman and David Gibbons. 2009
Another dense book about understanding cheese, how to become a connoisseur, and talking about great artisan cheeses of the world. This book contains a chapter each on pairing cheese with wine and beer. After talking about wine in general, the book talks about complexity, sensory profiling, balance and harmony, and the finish. They offer good advice on serving the pairings, such as paying attention to serving temperatures, smell, taste, waiting for the finish, refresh your palate with water and bread, follow an order, and reflect on the pairings. They then offer suggested tasting plates of a few cheeses paired with flights of wines, along with a recommended method of scoring the pairs. Next, they talk about some general cheese-friendly wines, and what it takes to be cheese friendly. The beer chapter, although smaller, follows along the same lines, starting with talking about beer, pairing principles and guidelines, cheese friendly brews, and a suggested testing of six cheeses and three beers.

The New American Cheese: Profiles of America’s Greatest Cheesemakers and Recipes for Cooking with Cheese by Laura Werlin. 2000
More of an all around cheese book, it does have a small section on pairing cheese and wine, with an afterthought of pairing cheese with other beverages. Werlin expanded on this section with her later books.

The Cheese Plate by Max McCalman and David Gibbons. 2002
And older McCalman and Gibbons book dedicated strictly to consuming cheese, it dedicates chapter 6 to pairing cheese with food, including beverages. Again, it talks about cheese-friendly wines and wine driven plates. It briefly mentions, “Apple cider – not just the hard kind – as well as grape and berry juices are good [cheese pairing] possibilities. Coffee pairs well with many cheeses. But tea does not. Also, avoid orange and other citrus juices. In fact, I’m quite wary of even the lemon or lime wedge that goes with your sparkling water; it could easily interfere with a good cheese.” Their newer book expanded to talk about beer, which is not in this book.

Webites:

• The Wisconsin Milk Marking Board has a nifty website showing what cheeses go well with what wine, food, spirits, and beers.
• Cheese Cupid has an interactive website, where you pick your cheese, and it gives suggested beverages, or you pick your beverage and it suggests cheeses. It includes beer, cider in general, and some spirits.

Cheese and Beer

To begin the chapter on cheese, the book The Beer Bistro Cookbook by Stephen Beaumont and Brian Morin states:

Forget all that talk you’ve heard about wine and cheese. The real partner for everything from cheddar to stilton is beer. But don’t take our word for it – as a sommelier! Any honest wine professional will admit that the motto in the grape trade is “taste with bread, sell with cheese,” primarily because the fats in cheese will help blot out the tannins and other harsh notes that may show up in youthful or aggressive wines.

Beer and cheese, on the other hand, well, that’s just a match made in gastronomic heaven. The trick, as ever, is simply picking the right style of beer for each particular kind of cheese.

The reason pairing beer with cheese is easier than pairing wine with cheese, according to Tim Smith in Making Artisan Cheese: 50 Fine Cheeses that you can Making in Your Own Kitchen, is that the carbonation of beer helps to cleans the palate.

Probably the best book I saw on this topic was Mastering Cheese: Lessons for Connoisseurship from a Maître Fromager by Max McCalman and David Gibbons. It had an entire chapter devoted to pairing beer and cheese, talking about ingredients, mouth feel and weight, and much more, and conclude with a pairing of three beers with six cheeses. McCalman and Gibbons state the following:

The general principles of pairing beers with cheeses are pretty much the same as the wine-and-cheese guidelines. You’re looking for balance, where neither partner overwhelms the other, and you want to consider both complement and contrast. Once you’ve sussed out a beer’s profile, you can start to look for similar, overlapping, or contrasting flavors, textures, and aromas in cheese… there will be surprises – matchups that should work but don’t and vice versa… I’ve found that wines tend to rely more on finding complements to their flavor components (i.e., harmony), whereas beers seem to be looking more for balance – it is more of a seesaw effect. The beer pairing balance is more about bitterness, in that bitter (hoppy) beers tend to go well with more sour cheeses and vice versa… Cheddars, which have good acidity, are classic partners for various types of beers, from English ales to Belgian wit styles. Salt content is also of prime importance when consider cheese-and-beer pairings. Oftentimes, when you pair a cheese with beers its salt can come to dominate, even with types you don’t think of as very salty. What’s happening is the other flavor components in the two partners are balancing each other out, leaving the cheese’s salt to come too far to the fore. In a beer-and-cheese lineup, as with a tasting of wine pairings, you’ll want to proceed from the lighter, milder lager, pilsner, and pale ale styles to the deeper, richer, heavier, darker, more complex-flavored styles of the brew.

They make the following recommendations:

• Traditional beers of one country pair well with the cheeses of that same country.
• Bigger cheeses such as aged farmhouse-style Goudas can be good partners, but you need a big beer to stand up to them. The full long-lasting flavors of hard Alpine cheeses can work well with bigger beers.
• Washed-rind cheeses often make excellent beer partners as long as the later are big and bold enough. A hoppy ale is a good choice; delicate, subtler-tasting brews likely won’t stand up.
• Another strong pairing is triple-crème cheeses with stouts. Knowing as we do that Champagne and triple crèmes work well together, this might be a bit of a surprise. When you’ve got a rich, buttery cheese in your mouth, a big dark beer that is also dry, bitter, and roasty is a nice complement, forming a “desserty” combo, like ice cream and chocolate cake.
• Some mellow middle-of-the road cow cheeses pair well with more acidic beers such as the Beliner Weisse style, which can be quite delicate and contain a good amount of lactic acid.
• Blue cheeses pair well with stouts and barleywines, which have the heft and inherent sweetness to provide balance.
• Generally speaking, sweeter blue cheeses go better with more bitter beers while more bitter blue cheese go with sweeter beers.

Smith gives the suggested pairings, including:

• Fresh cheese pair well with mellow beers, such as American wheat beers, American lagers, and German lagers.
• Soft-ripened cow’s-milk cheeses, such as Neufchâtel, Brie, and Camembert, are excellent companions for pilsners, porters, and pale ales.
• Washed-rind cheeses, such as Muenster, are complements to English brown, amber, and Belgian pale ales.
• Semi-hard cheeses, such as Cheddar, Edam, and Gouda, as well as the cooked-curd cheeses, such as Emmentaler and Gruyère, go well with pilsners, IPAs, double bocks, and Belgian ales.
• Parmesans and Romanos need a heavier beer as a partner: try a strong ale, stout, or porter.
• Because of their intense flavor, blue-vein cheeses require a beer that can hold its own. Try stronger porters, stouts, and heavier dark beers, such as barely wine.
• Goat cheeses are usually a bit more flavorful, so consider pairing them with IPAs, ESBs, brown ales, and porters.
• Pasta filata, particularly Provolone, are well matched with Bavarian whites and heavier Bavarian wheat beers (doppelweizen).

One other thing to note is that I kept coming across the “ploughman’s lunch,” which is an inexpensive British meal sent with the plough man to serve as his lunch, but can be found at pubs today. It consists mainly of bread, cheese, relish, and maybe other additions such as cold meats, apples, hard boiled egg, or other items. This meal is always washed down with beer, tying it to the cheese and beer pairings.

Further Readings:

• Artisanal Premium Cheese, “Beer and Cheese Pairing Tips”

Pairing Cheese and Alcohol

First off, my instructor for “Le Nez du Vin”: The Nose of Wine gave a cautionary piece of advice when pairing cheese and wine, which I think would apply to all cheese and alcohol pairings. He said that when you are trying to taste and evaluate wine, serving cheese is a bad idea because it has oil that coats the mouth and affects how you taste. However, if you are just drinking a wine, cheese is an excellent accompaniment.

That said, I came across this little bit on page 155 in the Artisan Cheese of the Pacific Northwest by Tami Parr, and I felt like I had to share it.

For the uninitiated, pairing cheese and spirits can seem completed; novices often fear that they won’t do it right. In fact, pairing beverages and cheeses is really as simple as being present to the flavors your mouth is experiencing.

Start out with this principle: a good pairing is one where the flavors of both the beverage and the cheese are enhanced by the combination. In the best pairings, you may find that the pairing produces a remarkable transformation on your palate, and a third flavor revelation emerges. Bad pairings are easy to discern and will almost certainly cause your mouth to screw up involuntarily in an odd contortions as a result of the bitter, awkward flavors generated in your mouth. In fact, bad pairings are one easy way to start educating yourself about the ins and outs of pairing cheese and wine. Try a few pairings of wine and cheese, even random ones, and start paying attention to how combinations fit into broad categories.

Wine is the classic beverage for pairing with cheese, but that’s only the beginning. Some find that beer pairs well, if not better, than wine. Other beverages such as sake, cider, and lambic ales can also be nicely paired with cheese. More recently, people are beginning to experiment with pairing coffee and cheese, as well as whiskey and cheese.

Following are a few basic pairing principles to start you on your pairing adventures:

Trust Your Own Palate

Pairings are very subjective, and despite what anyone tells you, there are no right or wrong answers – really…

Pair Like with Like

Pay attention to the relative intensity of flavors you are pairing. Generally speaking, very strong flavored cheeses paired with light, dry libations won’t work because the cheese will overpower the wine. By the same token, a big red wine… will drown out a subtly flavored soft-ripened goat cheese. Pairing this way does neither produce a favor. That being said, see the next rule.

Be Open to the Unexpected

Whatever rules you might have learned may prove false with any given pairing at any given time. Cheese flavors vary throughout the year due to the diet of the animals and seasonal variations in butterfat content of milk; wines and beers also vary by vintage and by batch. In addition, counterintuitive pairs often work very well. For example, ports typically pair well with strongly flavored blue cheeses. You just never know.

The Wisconsin Milk Marking Board does have a nifty website showing what cheeses go well with what wine, food, spirits, and beers.

Book Review: He Said Beer, She Said Wine

Granted, I’m not fond of any beer that has hops, though I’m not really a grape wine drinker, either, but He Said Beer, She Said Wine by Sam Calagione and Marine Old has given my husband lots of amusement. It was given to us as a Christmas present, and we use it to try and develop our palattes, especially for wine.

Calagione is actually the founder of Dogfish Head Brewing in Delaware, and Old is a wine sommelier friend of his. They would get into debates about what drink pairs better with a given food, which went from their own little private competitions to using the Dogfish Head Pub to host tastings with secret ballots. To their surprise, they got about a 50/50 vote, and it wasn’t based on gender.

The book goes though some basic principles on tasting wine and beer before it gets to the food pairings. About six foods from cheese, vegetables, sandwiches, pizza and pasta, spicy food, shellfish, poultry, meat, fruit desserts, and other desserts are presented. Old goes though and talks about them before offering her suggested wine pairing for that particular dish, and then Calagione has the same opportunity with beer for the same dish.

Most of these dishes are fairly common, which makes it much easier to concentrate on the alcohol rather than worrying about finding that particular food. For example, she recommends a Cave Spring Riesling paired with Kung Pao Chicken, while he recommends an Austrian Doppelbock such as Schloss Eggenberg Urbock 23⁰. Thing is, while the Kung Pao Chicken might be easy to find, rationality makes it a little harder to find the alcohol, so my husband and I would find another Riesling and Doppelbock that might be close to what they are describing.

At the back of the book, they do provide a few recipes to help you have your own beer vs wine tasting parties. While we have not had the parties, we have cooked up a few of the dishes.



In our experience with this book, the wine pairings always seem to work with each dish even though we made substitutions. The beer aspect of this seems to be a bit trickier, as sometimes it is better than the wine pairing, sometimes it ties with the wine pairing, and sometimes it just doesn’t go with the food it was paired with, leaving wine as the clear winner. In fact, my husband recently made the spicy Gulf Shrimp recipe again, which pairs with a Domaine Longval Tavel Rosé wine and a Moortgat Duvel beer. This time, he didn’t even want to bother with the beer, and instead just stick to the regional Chateau Ste. Michelle Dry Rosé we had found. But our previous cooking of the Classic Beer Tenderloin paired with Joseph Phelps Cabernet Sauvignon wine and Chimay Preière beer left us at a draw.

Cider Black and Tan

In the beer world, a black and tan is two beers of different color and densities poured in such a way that they do not mix, but instead remained layered. A tan beer, such as a lager, is usually poured first, and then a dark beer such as Guinness is poured over a spoon into the glass, which causes it to sit on top of the tan beer. It is quite lovely to look at.

Recently, I have discovered that there are cider versions of black and tans, in which the cider is usually poured first. The most common is the Snakebite, which is cider and lager. The lesser known varieties include the Hummingbird, Black & Velvet, and the specialized Oregon Hop Blossom. The Hummingbird is a pear cider and stout combo. The Black & Velvet is cider with Guinness. Wandering Aengus, based out of Salem, OR, told me that the Oregon Hop Blossom is an Oregon Cider paired with an Oregon IPA. Is it just me, or is the Oregon Hop Blossom a bit of a marketing ploy?

Speaking of marketing ploys, Crispin Cider has a list of many more cider black & tans using their products. They have the 3 Velveteers, which is Crispin cider paired with either an amber, stout (usually Guinness), or cream ale. They also have Snakes & Lagers, which is again Crispin cider, the snake, paired with different beers. They have the classic Snakebite, Snakelight (light beer), Snakelight Lime (light beer with a lime wedge), Brown Adder (Brown Ale), Sidewinder (Mexican beer with a lime wedge), or a Rattlesnake (Mexican Amber with a lime wedge). Check out their blends, or at least take a look at the lovely pictures.

Oregon Spring Beer & Wine Fest

Last Friday, I took the day off of work and my husband, his brother, and I took a bus to the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR to attend the 16^th Annual Spring Beer & Wine Fest with the Tour de Cheese. We got there a little bit before noon due to free admission before 2pm, and we had past experience with the Holiday Ale Festival that being one of the first ones in the door means less lines for trying drinks and food.

For being the 16^th Annual Fest, things were not as organized as one would have thought it to be. With most beer festivals, you have to buy a cup. This year, they had a plastic cup, and a glass beer mug and a glass stemless wine glass. We were told that we needed to purchase at least a plastic mug for serving beer, but that the wine vendors would have small Dixie style cups for serving wine if we did not purchase the wine glass. The first wine producer I went to did not have any glasses and didn’t know that they should have. I had to sweet talk them into pouring to me anyway. Eventually, I did find a wine producer who did, and I kept that glass for a bit. If we bought the wine glass, the beer people would not have served to us. How crazy is all that?

The event had a little bit of everything for everyone: beer, wine, cider, distilled sprits, cheese, chocolate, dipping sauces, olive oil, and even some other miscellaneous vendors like purses, windows, pans, and a chiropractor. Most beverage and cheese samples were $1, with the size dependant on the style of product.

One thing I had learned from previous festivals is to pack some food. Food at the festivals is sometimes scarse, and what is there is usually high quality and expensive. I packed a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which doesn’t not risk food poisoning from not being refrigerated, yet doesn’t require heating. I also packed an apple and an orange. At one festival, we saw a man who had little pretzels on a string tied around his neck. Great idea to keep some food in your system when drinking, and also eat between drinks to help clear the pallet, making it easier to taste the new drink.

I will give a review of the tastings in future posts.

Beer makers don’t know how to make cider

My husband showed me this forum called Home Brew Talk. There happens to be a forum on wine, mead, and cider there. I’ve been following all three, learning when I can, and helping others if I know.

What I have learned is that beer makers don’t know how to make cider. Yes, I’ve probably made some enemies stating that, but I have my reasons.

First off, beer makers try to have cider drinkable within weeks because that is how beer is made. Because it is made out of fruit like wine, apple needs to be aged like wine. It is possible with the right materials in the right environment to bottle cider in a month, but it needs time to age.

Secondly, partly because there was an Apple Wine recipe that gained popularity on the site, they think they have to add sugar to make cider. This process is called chaptalising, where sugar is added out of fear there is not enough natural sugar in the grapes or fruit being used. My generic wine recipe calls for it, as wine is at least 10% alcohol. Cider is around 7% naturally, and adding sugar raises the alcohol, and therefore bumps it into the wine category. One person on the forum responded that commercial cider makers do add sugar. My rebuttal is simple – craft cider makers spend soooo much time figuring out what kind of apples to grow, caring for the trees, picking the apples, grinding them, and pressing out the juice that they are not going to add sugar after all that work. They want to taste their labor, not cover it up. It is the ciders who use concentrate juice are the ones that are going to add sugar.

Last of all, there is the idea of cold crashing. It is possible with some strains of beer yeast to kill off all the yeast by cooling the beer in a refrigerator, allowing the brewer to add back sugar without fear of it starting to ferment again. For starters, some craft cider makers working out of their home or sheds or whatever have their tanks outside or in unheated buildings. If it freezes, no big deal – it will start fermenting again when it thaws. In fact, they embrace the lower temperatures, claiming it improves taste. There is even a method called keeving where they strip the juice of its nutrients, and then ferment it at 5⁰C, which is 41⁰ F – about the temperature of a refrigerator. Point to all this is, cider doesn’t cold crash, and so these naïve beer makers attempt it and then wonder why their cider exploded when they added sugar as a sweetener.