ok, WTF is going on with cider these days?

I like Stella Cidre.

I like Black Rat mentioned above also or Thatchers Gold.

I also like Magners.

I’ve also been known to drink Strongbow.

Flat cider tastes like rat piss if you ask me!

Individual preferences innit?

+1 (to im above, you can’t shorten his name) though I had meant to post it without needing support, my main tipple is stongbow & has been for 10-20 years. The rise of magners, et all has been brilliant in my book no more choice between just strongbow(yum), dry black thorn (grim stuff), or woodpecker <shudders> as the only cider you’d find in a pub, (those halcyon days eh?)… if you’d find any at all.

Fair enough if you want to drink fermented rat 😛 , your welcome to it, I’ll happily enjoy the all the perry’s I can find.

Look for the real picture

The reason all the big breweries are pushing cider, is that the duty is lower than beer, but retails for the same price.

Stella Cidre is great for Snakebite and Black, it makes it a much more classy drink when at a hockey festival

Not a huge cider fan, although I quite like the Spanish Asturian stuff… any “real” cider fans tried it and able to compare it to English cider? It’s a flat, cloudy cider, no bubbles…

You all need to get to the Cider Bar in Newton Abbot. 3 pints of diesel and your legs dont work. Nice fruit wines too (14%) or mead if thats your thing. Nothing but cider, fruit wines and mead sold. Snuff available if that takes your fancy. All recommended apart from the Suicider. It tastes like burnt straw and whiffs like a farmyard. Made from a horsedrawn press in Wiscombe, Devon.

Henry Westons/Sheppys/Aspinals ARE better ciders than… Bulmers/Magners/Cidre

FACT

people may prefer the taste of the others, personal preference, yes . . .

but the FACT remains

I love cider but hate all that ‘trendy’ shite which has wormed it’s way into the market. that’s not cider!

Merrydown and Special Brew snakebite FTW

Aspinals

They’ll do you a nice handbag, but Aspalls will do a nicer cider 😉

Tomorrow night I will be sampling some bee sting, in the 3rd pub on my Thursday night ride 🙂

Aspalls in the first, stowford in the second!

if you see a wobbly ciderinsport around the new forest say happy birthday 🙂

What Edric said. Thatchers stuff is all good but the Traditional is very good rural cider. Am currently drinking a gallon container of Rich’s which is still fermenting. Awesome. Don’t touch that Hereford pish BTW. Somerset all the way.

I used to drink Strongbow as a kid. But now it tastes a bit watered down. I wonder if they changed it to be a bit more like Magners.

Bulmers Original tastes like I remeber Strongbow tasting when i was little. (and its very cheap in Asda)

Is it true that the vats at Westons were bought secondhand when the company started up and have actually been in use since the Napoleonic wars? (I heard that on radio 4 once).

Get yerself to Roger Wilkins Mudgley proper stuff soaked up with a gert hunk of bread and a gert slab of cheese . Proper ‘and some tis n all !

Someone presented me with a load of Koppaberg pear cider and even though I drink ale it’s really quite palatable. Made a bit of a hole in it on Monday celebrating and all that, it was a bit biblical-like turning Koppaberg into Thatcher’s.

As a recent returner to drinking (spent about 15 years T total), and only to cider (can’t abide any other alcoholic drinks!), it does amaze me just how much piss is sold as cider…

Ok so some of the scrumpy’s are probably better off being used as paint stripper, or being turned into vinegar, but all these trendy new ciders that either have stupid amounts of sweeteners added calling themselves mixed fruits or some such, or the likes of Stella Cidre which is basically just lager with a slightly apple-y hint, are total crap! Thatchers Gold is bearable in absence of nothing else, as is Stowford Press, but get hold of some Weston’s Vintage, Wyld Wood organic, or some Aspall’s organic or even one of the Thatcher’s special varieties (such as Katy or Cox’s) and you’ll see what proper cider is like. It’s not about being rough enough to turn your stomach inside out (though I know of scrumpy houses that will insist it is), for me its about 2 or 3 nice tasting pints with a meal, and a gentle relaxing evening. I still drink soft drinks when I go out generally, cos the availability of decent cider (not the piss the marketing people want you to drink) is crap in pubs, that and I don’t want to be pressured into drinking more than I want to anyway.

Ciderinsport, have a good birthday, sounds a very genteel way to spend the day, a pint in each of a few pubs and a ride in between.

magners, swiftly follwed by bulmers, stitched us all up like kippers. ‘serve over ice’, so you can’t taste it, and charge well over 3 quid at the bar for a pint with ice in it, they pushed the price of all other cider served in pubs up equal to, or even greater than, actual beer.
until they came along a pint of cider was usually by far the cheapest pint to buy in a pub. ba5tards. 😐

To be fair, Magners was sold in pint bottles and you got a glass with ice in it.

The Wilkins Diet, drink a gallon and lose 3 days!!

Thistly Cross still. Produced in Dunbar East Lothian. 7.2% of pure apple based voodoo..

.after my coeliac diagnosis I’ve become a cider drinker. It is now an affirmed vow of mine to make a trip to the West Countryand fill my boot with jerry cans of locally produced rocket fuel.

ciderinsport – Member
Tomorrow night I will be sampling some bee sting, in the 3rd pub on my Thursday night ride

You’re unlikely to make it to the 4th pub. It’s 8% but tastes like it’s 2%.

Very sweet, but very smooth. Highly refreshing. 🙂

I too am an Aspall Premier Cru drinker. Also partial to a Bounders from Bath Ales.

Y’all might have seen that I’m away with work at the moment, and as I’m at a loose end this eve I went for a wander with this thread in mind, popped into a couple of boozers, pretty standard fare really, and nothing to speak of cider wise. On the way back to the hotel I nipped into sainsbos and found this one that’s new on me

[/url]
Interesting[/url] by tom.howard.562[/url], on Flickr

Very drinkable indeed, though a little too fizzy really. That said, I’ve quaffed couple of bottles this eve….

Then, as I’m walking through the hotel bar, arriving back from my wanderings I see, nestled in the back corner of the fridge, three bottles with a label that I haven’t seen for getting on for 6 long years. It’s a drink that was by far and away the best thing I drank at uni (I drank a LOT) but since leaving uni and returning north, I’ve never seen it again in pubs or supermarkets. To be honest I thought they’d stopped producing it.

Ladies and gentlemen of stw I give you:

Henry Weston’s Medium Sweet Oak Aged Herefordshire Cider
[/url]
Dear diary. Jackpot![/url] by tom.howard.562[/url], on Flickr

Say what you like about it, this is without doubt, my favourite alcoholic drink. Possibly favourite drink full stop.

Not that I don’t appreciate dirty great flagons of cloudy flat paint stripper with bits in, it’s just this you can drink all day every day (would if I could…) and it won’t kill you quite as quick at the latter!

Anyway, must dash, those remaining two bottle need drinking!

magners, swiftly follwed by bulmers, stitched us all up like kippers. ‘serve over ice’, so you can’t taste it, and charge well over 3 quid at the bar for a pint with ice in it, they pushed the price of all other cider served in pubs up equal to, or even greater than, actual beer.

Too true. Its not even good cider.

P.S. I can’t believe this thread is missing this.

And nobody has mentioned ….

Henry Weston’s Medium Sweet Oak Aged Herefordshire Cider

Personally find it too sweet! It is without doubt, the sweetest cider I’ve tasted anyway… I can manage a bottle after I’ve already drunk a couple of very dry cider’s, but on it’s own, it’s too much I find. Personally I way prefer the Vintage (goes down WAY too easily for something 8.2% strength alcohol!) and the Medium Dry, but my absolute favourite is the Wyld Wood.

Good find on the Thatcher’s Rose though, I was expecting it to be way too sweet, but it’s not. For something that looks like gay pink wine, it’s a very nice drink indeed!

Oh forgot to say…

Mini PSA… If you’ve got a Home Bargains[/url] store near you then they did have Henry Weston’s variety packs (4 bottles, 1 each of Vintage, Medium Dry, Extra Dry and Medium Sweet) on offer for £3.99! Yes, £3.99 for 4 bottles of lovely cider!

Anyway, sorry to those of you in Stourbridge, unless they’ve restocked since (doubt they will have as I think they were selling it off cheap cos it was short to sell by date) the GF and I cleared their entire stocks last weekend! 😉

Rich’s Cider Farm

Some of the nicest cider iv’e tried- and you can order it online 😉

+1 for Aspall’s and Weston’s Vintage (2 for £3 at the local co-op at the moment 🙂 ).. and the Welsh cider at Glyncorrwg last month was very tasty too (Taffy Apples and another)..

Pure North cider of the Holme valley. Believe.

Couple of pints of Black Rat went down a treat last night..
BUT!
There is nothing finer than Jack Rat from the Lyme Bay Winery – OMG is that seriously quaffable….

Got through quite a few bottles of Rekorderlig Strawberry Cider(?!) on my recent birthday – I was as lashed as a loon. Nice drink, but if I wanted that real cider taste I’d just sod-off to my mates place in Taunton and down a glass of Natch – cloudy and still and makes you blind…

LOL Natch!!

We used to drink bucketfuls of that as Devon teens.. 😀

Probably out of the bucket, too, eh…

🙂

If you ever get the chance visit the farm at Burrow Hill (get someone else to drive), you can easily walk away feeling a little tipsy!

Somerset Cider Brandy

Bee sting…

Last night after about a gallon of normal draught cider I a few stings..

It made for a very interesting ride home 🙂

Just picked up a couple of bottles Weston’s vintage for tonight’s suppage. To go with the other 4 bottles of medium sweet that were liberated, yet not consumed, from the hotel bar last night 😀

There may be random posting from me tonight. Blame Henry Weston.

Ahh the joys of living in the West Country, drive 20 miles into Somerset, pick random lane, follow it until you find farm selling dubious orange cloopy liquid in 5 litre containers, pay farmer token sum of money for said liquid, return home, pour a glass and watch worldly problems fade to nought.

“when the moon shines….”

most of the main brands are dire… Magners in particular is a rip off …expensive Woodpecker reformulated… Strongbow is nasty……

as for the Cidre, Kopen…. and the Carlsberg stuff its only fit to clean paintbrushes with..

the so called Perry being sold by the big firms is nasty too, real Perry shouldn’t be a blend …….
there are lots of independents who produce create cider for all tastes…

Gwatkins are excellent as are Dunkertons (bit pricy though)

Anyone ever been to the Dorset Cider Museum on the Wareham road to Dorchester? Crickey I was terrified – got back to the car and had scary visions of the tank having been drained and getting stuck there to be invited for dinner in the dark and scary farmhouse – where the main course would transpire to be – US!

Makes me shudder thinking about it…

Another thing that makes me shudder – in my local shop the other day I espied Builmers Bold Black Cherry flavour “cider”… I know i shouldn’t have – but i couldn’t help it… I had to buy one… It was like drinking one of those Cherry flavour ice pop things they sold in thge school tuck shop…

Bleugh

Nice healthy pint of Aspalls in my local for me I think tonight, made of fruit and vitimins…