ciders
Today I went to an event at a local cidery. I think they have national distribution, or at least regional-- Ninepin Cider. They're based in Albany, NY, and they have a like, tasting room kinda situation there.
Anyway, for years they've done this project-- it started off with an organization called the Rensselaer Plateau Alliance, who were a bunch of conservationists up on the east side of the Hudson River. (You may, dear reader, be shocked to discover that there is in fact a geographical feature called the Rensselaer Plateau, where the land rises steeply from the valley of the ancient Hudson River and levels off for a bit before finishing its rise into the Appalachian remnants that make up the Berkshire and Green Mountains, to the east.) That's old farmland, mostly, and as such, there's a whole collection of old apple trees kicking around in hedgerows and backyards and stuff. The project started off as volunteers collecting apples from all these semi-abandoned trees and whatnot, and then Ninepin would brew and bottle a cider and split the profits with them.
Well, that's grown, and the RPA renamed itself and is now Hudson-Taconic Lands. And so this event, the cidery had teamed up with several other local organizations. HTL was there, the Shaker Heritage Society participated (they're the site of the first Shaker community and have a collection of ancient cider-apple trees on premises), a land conservancy in Columbia County participated, another one in Saratoga County, and then the Agricultural Stewardship Association participated. (The ASA is a group that coordinates the preservation of farmlands as farmlands in Rensselaer and Washington Counties, fighting the inevitable leaching of those lands irrevocably into endless subdivisions, and they helped my folks get this farm-- raised funds to get a grant to buy off the development rights so the farm was affordable for an actual farmer.)
Apples from the feral apple trees in the hedgerows of this farm have always been in the RPA/HTL cider, and were this year too.
So the event today-- at the cidery, they had five taps set up, and everybody who bought a ticket got a souvenir glass, a notes sheet, and a slip of paper with the ciders' numbers on them, and then everyone got a sample of each cider, and then at the end could use their paper slip to vote for their favorite. It was all blind, nobody knew which cider had been made with whose apples, so it was just on the merit of each cider.
We had a great time sitting and tasting them all and making notes. All of them were lovely, none of them were spectacular; the weakest were just sort of pale, immature, not complex, but competently made and pleasant enough. All of them were reasonably crisp. Ninepin knows how to make a cider.
My favorite one was number four, which to my dismay turned out to belong to the Columbia Land Conservancy, to which I have absolutely no connection. But my close second was number five, which was, sure enough, from those venerable cider-apple trees at the Shaker Heritage socity. (My grandmother was a volunteer there for decades, and has done a great deal of the research that underpins their archives. Her father owned the general store closest to the Shaker community, and did a great deal of business with them; Grandma knew a lot of the Shakers personally as a child.)
The one that won was the Saratoga one, which I did think was pleasant-- more robust and rounded than the earlier ones, with a really striking honey fragrance. It didn't taste like honey but it really did smell lovely.
Unfortunately Hudson-Taconic Lands' blend was the first one we tried, and it was-- pleasant but not very robust, not a lot of character. It placed fourth in the voting. And the ASA's blend came in dead last, but it was Middle-Little's favorite, and was perfectly pleasant as a drinking experience. (The woman announcing the votes pointed it out before she announced the results: the last place finisher got very few votes but one of them was her son's, and he had one of the most experienced and refined palates in the place.)
Which goes to show you, really, that they're competent enough to make a perfectly decent cider out of any old apples really. But I think with a little aging that Shaker one could be really special.
We're kind of cider freaks in this household, though. Farmsister has a subscription to Eve's Cidery from Ithaca and they mail her boxes of the absolute weirdest shit every quarter, and every single one of those weird-ass funky ciders and pommeaus and whatnot is a solid banger. They're weird as fuck and I'm spoiled and really like weird-ass hard ciders now.
We bought a few bottles of each of the three we cared about though.
I can't find a webpage about this to link to here, because nobody fucking updates a real webpage anymore, it's all on Instagram or Facebook and is thereby basically-inaccessible to the not-logged-in Internet, or those of us who keep all Meta products in strict containers so we can't be spied on. Alas. Anyway, it's a real thing and it's fun.
