Cider Love: An Introduction
Dear Readers,
Let us start with a confession: I do not like beer. In fact, for the longest time, I did not like the taste of alcohol at all. My first alcoholic drink that I remember ever fully trying was a Zima my elder brother had procured for me. I was maybe 16 or 17. I made a face after every sip of the blasted theoretically fun and fizzy drink and followed it up with another sip of soda to drown out the taste. I only made it half-way through the bottle, after which my brother swore I was intoxicated and started cussing up a storm (I did not cuss in those days) but I believe this to be an exaggeration stapled on to the story over the years in order to give the tale some flavor. The drink certainly had none.
There were other forays into the world of alcohol, but all with similar outcomes of choking down the stuff with bewilderment that drinking was such a popular activity. Then someone gave me a mixed drink, blue in color and sweet-and-sour in taste, filled with more sugar than an 11 year old at a birthday party, and my taste buds began to shift. It was a needed shift as I had spent much of my early twenties feeling like a social pariah, the odd one out who never played a game where the point was to force your opponent to drink alcohol likely tainted by a ping pong ball or quarter, who never bought a pitcher of some pale yellow substance to share with friends in some sort of bonding ritual of bad decisions, and who spent every party trying to hide the fact that I was the one that consumed the last of the “mixers” which is why everyone was now doing ill-advised shots.
Then a dear friend handed me a bottle and changed my social drinking life forever: a bottle of Magners Irish Cider. You cannot imagine the complete relief I felt after discovering that there was an alcoholic drink that I actually enjoyed, and that came in a pack that I could buy and bring with me to parties. No more would I have to try to find that one beer that tasted the most like (filthy, gross) water and shove lemons and limes in it and nurse it with the same enthusiasm formerly reserved for eating Brussel sprouts. No longer would I have to buy a six pack of whatever beer I happened to last see a commercial for and present it to the party like an entrance fee while only actually consuming the fruit punch flavored water I brought with me.
No, in Magners I had found that rare beast of party-acceptable beverage that I actually wanted to consume myself. It didn’t even matter if no one but me drank my proffered prize – it just meant more cider for me. I also had a reason to prefer one drinking establishment over another based on how they answered this question: “do you have any hard cider?” Bottle or pint in hand, I could walk among my fellow drunken revelers confident in my ability to fit in with the throngs while also remaining somehow unique, which is the ultimate goal of most twenty-somethings.
My palate for alcohol has sophisticated since my first sip of Magners, and the discovery that I liked both wine and whiskey has ensured that I can always find a drink appropriate to the social occasion, but my love of hard cider as a category has only deepened. Thus, every month I will pick one cider to review for you, my dear readers, so that you may share my enthusiasm for all things fermented apple.
Next month: Magners, my first cider.
Libation-fueled love,
J. M. Phillippe