How to Taste Cider

How do you evaluate the cider you are drinking?

While reading Ben Watson’s Cider: Hard and Sweet: History, Traditions & Making Your Own, 2^nd Edition and Annie Proulx and Lew Nichol’s Cider: Making, Using & Enjoying Sweet & Hard Cider on how to host a cider tasting, the books gave excellent advice on how to evaluate the ciders.

A cider evaluation can be broken down into three parts – appearance, aroma, and taste. Ben Watson remarked, “Each of these individual components contributes to the overall quality and drinkability of the cider, and each should be taken into account when you evaluate it.”

When looking at a cider in a glass, you want to take the following notes:

• Is it a still cider or is it carbonated?
• If it is carbonated, is it a natural carbonation or a forced carbonation? Ben Watson describes the difference between the two as, “Naturally sparkling cider will foam up as it hits the bottom of the glass, and the bubbles that swirl up to the surface are smaller and longer-lasting than those in an artificially carbonated cider.”
• What color is it? Example of color descriptions include pale straw, golden yellow, salmon, apricot, or amber. Ciders that have a green, gray, or orange-red tint may not be drinkable, as the color would be evidence to oxidation or cider sickness.
• Is it hazy or clear? Words to use include brilliant, clear, slightly hazy, hazy or cloudy.

For the evaluating the aroma, Ben Watson explained, “A hard cider’s aroma or bouquet usually comes from the percentage of fragrant apple varieties that were used in the original cider blend… Yeasts, both natural and cultured, plus other fruits, spices or adjuncts… can also contribute to the complex aroma of a good cider. To evaluate the aroma, put your nose near the top of the glass and take a good whiff; the cider’s bouquet should be a preview of the flavor. If it smells bad or is excessively sharp or vinegary, don’t even bother tasting the cider” (page 103).

Last comes tasting the cider, in which the evaluation can be broken into feel in the mouth and how it tastes on the tongue. Take some of the cider in your mouth and do or note the following:

• “Chew” on the cider a bit or roll it around in your mouth to get a feeling for the body. Full bodied ciders will feel heaver and richer, and thinner, watery ciders will have little sensation. There is no right or wrong to this, just an observation. However, watery ciders will not be as flavorful.
• Is it a sweet or dry cider?
• Is there a nice balance between sugar, acid, tannins, and alcohol? That is to say, are all the elements balanced in the tasting, or is there an element that over powers the other elements? For example, if you pucker, it may have too much tannin.
• Is the alcohol content strong or weak?
• After you swallow, does the aroma linger on?
• Please do not fault a cider because it does not taste like apples, as grape wines do not taste like grapes.
• Other descriptors?

Most importantly about tasting ciders is, “Do you like it?”Remember, it doesn’t matter how you scored a cider in relationship to others, but that you liked the cider, as your tastes will be different from the next person’s.

Bottle Conditioning

Cider, beer, and wine are all naturally still unless carbon dioxide is somehow added to make it sparkling. With a keg system, this is easy, as the drink is held under pressure, forcing it to absorb CO2. However, to make a drink in a bottle be sparkling, large bottling plants force carbonate their drinks, a method not available to the home brewer. Instead, the home brewer needs to employ a technique known as “bottle conditioning.”

Bottle conditioning can be done with near dry (1.005 or less) wines, ciders, or beer or a dry wine, cider or beer with a small amount of sugar, usually referred to as “priming sugar,” added to the batch. The batch is promptly bottled without preservatives. The yeast will begin eating the sugar and releasing CO2, but there is no place for the CO2 to go, so the liquid absorbs the CO2. For beer and cider, they are drinkable in about two weeks, and not waiting to consume the beverage helps reduce exploding bottles from building pressure from the CO2.

One can tell if the drink was force carbonated or bottle conditioned by looking at the bubbles. Bottle conditioned bubbles are smaller, more consistent in size, and last longer.

One draw back to bottle conditioning is that there will be a little bit of lees that form in the bottle. The trick is to not pour the lees when pouring the cider, as the lees will create cloudiness in the drink, and can affect the flavor when drinking the cider. Otherwise, the lees can be removed with a champagne technique called degorging. After being bottled in champagne bottles, which can handle higher pressures, and then allowed to age for a year, the bottles are slowly turned upside down, allowing the lees to collect in the neck of the bottle. The necks are submerged into a very cold solution that causes the necks and their contents to freeze, allowing the bottle to be opened, the lees to be removed in the frozen ice, and the bottles to be recorked before the majority of the gas to escape.

Due to the addition of yeast in the presence of residual sugar in a sweet cider, bottle conditioning is tricky and recommended being avoided on the small scale. It is possible after adding the solution and waiting a few days to pasteurize the bottles, but as Andrew Lea cautions, “I suggest goggles and strong gloves for this an a rehearse procedure for dealing the broken glass since burst bottles are a very real possibility.” Instead, consider using a keg system or forced carbonation for a sweet carbonated cider.

For more information, read:

• Andrew Lea – Dry Sparkling Cider
  
• Cider Workshop – Champagne questions
  
• Wikipedia has pictures of riddling and degorging.
  
• http://www.winemakermag.com/stories/issue/article/issues/114-dec-09jan-10/893-sparkling-wine-from-kits-wine-kits
• More on priming and bottle conditioning.
• Bottle Fermentation of Cider and Perry
• Bottle-Conditioned Perry and Cider