Crispin Hard Apple Cider with Belgian Trappist Yeast & Organic Maple Syrup
This is the second of a couple ciders that Crispin Ciders sent me to review. As I said in my last cider review, I’m not a huge fan of ciders, mostly because the cheap homogenized macro beer versions I had tasted like crap. I told Crispin Ciders this, but would keep an open mind to trying their ciders. The last one I tried was Crispin Honey Crisp Artisanal Reserve. While I did enjoy most of that beer, this one is very intriguing to me, because it is made with a Trappist Ale Yeast with maple syrup. Yup that right, a Cider fermented with a nice strain of beer yeast.
After playing with my camera talking lots of pictures of the cider and bottle, I’m finally down to drinking this 7% abv cider. I started to pour the cider when I remembered there are rules to pouring this beer. Getting complicated already, seriously there are instructions on how to pour this on the side of the bottle. So all the pictures I took were pre-instruction-reading. Okay, so here are the steps for pouring this beer:
- Give a full bottom up tilt to bottle
- swirl to release apple wine sediment
- server over fresh Ice.
Now I need to go back ad try to re-pour this. I’m a newb, sorry. If I don’t like the beer, I at least want to try it the way Crispin intended it. Going to get Ice be back…
Ok, re-poured. it really changes the appearance of the cider. It is now a very hazy blonde drink instead of the clear straw colored beverage of before. So all my sarcasm before, well I hope you enjoyed it. I’m actually enjoying this cider. Now someone answer me this, is putting ice cubes in cider like putting ice cubes in your Pinot Grigio? Having the cider very cold, with ice cubes help cut down some of the sweetness, but also seems to highlight some of the better apple qualities, like the tartness and bring out the maple in the cider. The Trappist yeast is a fairly aggressive yeast making large yeast colonies in my experience and you do get a yeast flavor in the cider which as a beer drinker helps bring it back into my comfort realm.
I think I could actually drink this cider again, interested to try their Fox Barrel ciders.
Great review.
I like this cider a lot – can’t say I’d ever been inclined to pour it over ice as suggested, though. This is a nice, more complex alternative to a lot of ciders on the market and I would happily drink it.
Too funny! I would have made the same mistake I think as I don’t know anything about ciders, but it’s interesting to know if the ice is supposed to be part of the flavor profile or not, or if its just a personal preference thing.