Life after Goose: Hall on ‘fighting the good fight’ against ‘Big Cider’
Hall says to me, “what do you think the ingredient list should be on a bottle of cider?” Hall, seated at a wooden farmhouse–style table at Virtue headquarters in Roscoe Village, picks up a bottle of Crispin (a popular U.S.-produced brand of cider that bills itself as “ultra-premium”) and begins reading from the ingredient list: “hard cider, apple juice concentrate, natural flavors, malic acid, sulfites.”
“Brewers—even the biggest brewers in the world—are still using water, malt, hops and yeast,” he says. “Even the biggest wineries are using grapes. The biggest cider makers are using apple-juice concentrate and sugar. Nobody would do that in brewing or wine making.”
via Time Out Chicago.
Breweries: Virtue Cider
He fails to mention that almost all wines contain sulfites.
Actually ALL wines contain sulfites. They are naturally occurring and certain levels are required by law. You cannot produce a wine that has zero sulfites. Not possible. Anything labeled as “organic” just won’t have ADDED sulfites, but will still contain some regardless.
Don’t forget pee as an ingredient Greg 😉
I’ll play devil’s advocate and point out that the domestic apple industry is essentially dead. While shipping grain across vast oceans works fine for brewing, it doesn’t do so great for fruit.
Here in Sonoma County, a region famous in the last century for hops and apples, everywhere you look you seen vineyards. Grapes make more money per acre than either of those, so can you blame the industries that consume massive amounts of those ingredients to look outside of their locale for what they need?
Right now, Pliny the Younger is pouring from taps in Santa Rosa, all the hops came from afar. Pellets can be akin to the juice concentrate of the beer world, and that doesn’t even get into the topic of hop extracts. Meanwhile the vineyards are dead and bare and the local cider company continues to work hard to produce a product that people want and continue to buy.
If anyone is fighting the fight against big business in beverages, I find it ironic that Goose Island has anything to say.
To his credit, he essentially left Goose Island, sticking to his core beliefs. I wouldn’t connect his viewpoints with those of Goose Island’s now nor would I at the time of the original posting.
What about adding honey, Belgian candi sugar, or other adjuncts/ingredients to beer beyond what he mentions? Those could be considered ‘natural flavors’ too. Do ciders have to conform to a different set of labeling laws then beer, since they pretty much all have ingredient lists and nutritional information?
folks… you’re ALL missing the point. He was deriding ‘factory’ cider makers for substituting apple concentrate and sugar instead of just ripe apples.
I’m fairly new to cider-making, and very much low tech. I use whatever apples my little orchard produces, plus what my neighbor (who owns the press) has to share. Most of my batches are decent, a few splendid. Now that more cider is available in my local co-op, I decided to try any who listed ingredients solely as apple-squeezins & yeast. I was encouraged to discover that my homebrew tasted about the same as these old-school ciders.
Other brands are pretty much hard apple soda….
Also – there are a lot of strange state regulations on cider that are separate from those even governing beer/wine. VA recently changed the law to allow for higher ABV ciders to be made and sold (or something similar to that) because our local apples have a higher natural sugar content.