Presenting Our Greatest Hits

Since we opened five years ago, the tasting order for customers has been a constant topic of discussion. Every time a new cider or a new vintage enters the lineup, we puzzle over  how to give customers the best possible experience of each one.

In the earliest days, I was too afraid to follow the traditional driest to sweetest protocol. Charred Ordinary was SO dry, I wanted to lead with something more approachable so that people didn’t give up after the first sip. With some sage advice from Uncle Myles, we went ahead and put it first. And of course, he was right. Customers’ perceptions of Charred Ordinary was, on the whole, significantly improved by tasting it first. (We know this because people started buying it more!)

A more current debate among our team about tasting order has been how to present apple-only fine ciders alongside more experimental infusions. I often worry about the criticism that “they all taste alike” to customers who are accustomed to mass produced ciders with lots of added flavorings. So we have tended to intersperse the apple-only among the infusions and vice versa.

However, this spring we are making what feels like a bold move. We are splitting the apple-only ciders into their own flight in the tasting room. This is in part to recognize how hard we have worked to get full croppings of rare cider apples like Hewe’s Crab and Harrison. And it is also intended to give consumers the opportunity to put themselves in the path of history. These really were cider’s greatest hits available to everyday people, born high and low, back when Virginia was still a colony. So we are going to trust people to take the time to really soak that in and appreciate it.

Experimental ciders will still be an option, of course. They are among our best sellers and Blue Bee broke new (regulatory and flavor) ground on infusions in the early days. We are proud of that too! So while we have the ciders in stock, you can expect to see these ciders on the menu:

Heirloom Fine Cider Flight:

Hewe’s Crab Apple
Harrison
Charred Ordinary
Aragon 1904
Harvest Ration