/ck/ - Food & Cooking

The thing about american cider is it's all 100% made from throwaway/surplus apples intended for the fresh eating market, eg fujis/honeycrisps/galas/etc kind of shit you can find at the store. These are great for eating but shit for cider because they're full to the tits with sugar and have zero tannins, leading to a profoundly unbalanced cider that tastes like a jolly rancher slurry. For good cider you need to craft it from bittersweet cider apples and there are no bittersweet orchards in America.

Bizzarely, even these massively sweet american ciders can't fully satisfy americans' sweet tooths, so many cider companies have taken to adding straight cane sugar to their cider bill to sweeten it up even further. Seriously, check your favorite cider, if it's not advertised as 'extra dry' there is a good chance that it's 50% cane sugar swill.

One of the few widely u.s.a. available macro ciders that used british bittersweet apples and had an excellent balance of sweet/tart/bitter/funky was Crispin Brown's Lane, but they discontinued it in the mid 201Xs because amerilards couldn't appreciate the complexity. Now it's just gone massively to the other extreme where cider has simply become another vehicle in which to deliver bizarre, overblown artificial fruit flavors like Mango Guava Passionfruit and Bitchin' Berry Blast, the exact same trend that's happened in craft beers, kombuchas, and liqueurs. The endgame of all alcohol is basically massively sweetened, flavor blasted grain alcohol, because that's the LCD of americans' tastes and tastebuds.

Cider in America is frankly a fucking joke. Just eat a honeycrisp and take a shot of vodka and save yourself the embarassment of drinking this rancid garbage.