So to start this off, this is more an opinion post than a fact post. It is quite obvious that there is little to no cider culture in Los Angeles county. If you go north to Ventura county there is a bit of a boom in the cider industry there and further south in San Diego it seems as though there is a burgeoning cider scene.
What little community of cider enthusiasts are in Los Angeles seems to be spread out and almost elusive. But while there are quite a few cider lovers outside of Los Angeles (and especially throughout the US) there are a few here. And it’s for those that I hope to not only build a community around but also hope to expand our stylistic qualities to the other regions throughout California.
Still cider, as I know it, is a more traditional style. Much like cask beer, low to no carbonation and served cool rather than cold or even chilled. And while this is not a common practice here in the US for any alcohol beverage, I do appreciate this tradition.
I have noticed that when a cider is room temperature, much like a red wine vs. a red wine, you can’t hide any mistakes or flaws. If it takes good room temperature or cellar temp, then it is almost certainly going to taste good chilled. Now, not all the time, but in my opinion, most of the time. And its not even so much that it tastes better, rather it just has different expressions chilled than it does at room temperature.
If I had it my way, this is how I would recommend that our enioyers would drink our ciders, at cellar temp. But we have designed them to be enjoyable all the way from refrigerator temp to room temp with each degree having it’s own set of characteristics. Making our cider more of an experience that something to just get drunk with. Becoming inebriated while discovering our ciders is more of a happy coincidence than the end goal.
Our hope is to influence others in the Los Angeles area to enjoy a more traditional style cider than store bought or made for the masses ciders. They tend to be one dimensional, flat, not complex, uninteresting, overly sweet, or gimmicky. We want to represent Latinx culture and indigenous or long since appropriated ingredients.
We want to be able to bring these ingredients to a new culture of people and offer more of ourselves to appropriate. Because once we all live the same things, and find commonalities we can bond over the more easily accepted “differences” become.
I think our larger point here is that if we can bring fermented apple juice with Latin ingredients mixed in, to all the people in Los Angeles and throughout California, it’s going to be a progressive step to changing the culture and landscape of this great state again like so many other cultures have in the past.
