flavour > challenge! an apricot tale.
Updated: Mar 18, 2022
how the apricot cider made us challenge our challenges.
So here’s the thing…. We don’t usually do stone fruits, until now!
Stone fruits are usually very difficult to juice, their large seeds can easily break our juice press and extracting enough juice from them becomes almost impossible. Plus, getting flavour from stone fruits is a tricky business; You should know by now that we like our ciders with A LOT OF FLAVOUR.
However, a trip to Pagan Cider in Tasmania would change EVERYTHING we ever thought about using stone fruits in cider. Flashback to December 2020, Martin is in Tasmania - the birthplace of cider in Australia, home to amazing cideries and generational apple growers - hopping from cidery to cidery when he stops at Pagan Cider.
Pagan Cider reminds us of ourselves in many ways! They are a boutique cidery in the Huon Valley thinking outside the box with their ciders and delivering in flavour! They say they are a little different and we say we are a little left of centre :)
Tassy has some outstanding cideries, the tastings had been inspiring throughout Martin’s trip, and THEN, he tries Pagan’s seasonal Apricot Cider. The flavour WAS BEYOND and, since then, he has been bugging Kevin and James for funk to give apricot a chance.
240kg of Apricots later….. AND OH MY FUNKINESS! That was worth it!
According to James, the cider maker, the highlight of making this cider was the smell! He said: “You could just about smell apricots from Benara Rd while we were canning it”.
Because of our origins in cold-pressed juice with Michael Brothers, we usually press the juice ourselves whenever we are making our flavoured ciders, like the pineapple or the lemon ciders, for example. Or we might infuse the fruit/produce in a tea bag style like we did with the 180kg of coconut husks that went into the Coconut Cider.
In this case, apricots are stone fruit, and as we mentioned above, stone fruits can damage our precious pressing machines. We couldn’t really risk it, so we sourced the apricots from a grower that could puree it for us, keeping in line with our values of no preservatives and no pasteurisation, just pure, 100% pureed apricots.
Our first trial batch did not deliver in flavour to the extent that we like. So we did it again with more apricots AND IT IS HERE!
As with most of our limited releases, we added honey to boost the fermentable base. The result is a rich medium to heavy-bodied cider that your neighbours will be able to smell the apricots once you crack open that can of cider! The honey balances the tartiness beautifully and the ripe apricot flavour is predominant at all times.
It is a beauty, a work of art and it is now available online, at our venues and at selected stockists.
Once you try it, let us know if you agree that it was worth the challenge!