Cider Tasting

Posted on 2012/07/16 22:46:50 (July 2012).

[Tuesday 3rd July 2012]
Tonight was the cider and perry tasting which I'd been planning for the last few weeks. It was to help out my friend and former colleague Robert, who was one of the organisers of a software engineering conference (really nothing to do with cider whatsoever!), and this was a sort of fun "diversion" event as part of that. Apparently they do something like this every year, and try to pick a different drink each year to keep it interesting. They've already covered beer, whisky and even champagne, so when asked if I could lend a hand this year I proposed cider.

This had seemed like a good idea at the time, cider being something a bit out of the ordinary in London, and enjoying a bit of a resurgence at the moment. There's a large number of really small cider producers and just about every batch they make is different, so it seemed like a really good opportunity to introduce people to something which would just about be guaranteed to be novel to them. I had visions of people who'd never really had "real" cider before, having an epiphany during the tasting, and leaving the event as converts.

What I hadn't really accounted for was how many people just really don't like cider.

In fact pretty much the entire evening was taken up with people telling me how much they didn't like any of the ciders or perries I had brought along. There was quite a lot of fervent criticism of the tasting notes Kyle and I had laboured over the evening before.

Despite all of that I remained upbeat, and somehow actually rather enjoyed the event. I particularly enjoyed doing the "reveal" at the end (it was a sort of blind tasting) and giving the little speech about each cider, and it did feel as though people softened somewhat once they learned a bit about each of the things they'd been drinking. Real cider and perry are uniquely artisan products, the antithesis of mass produced drinks. All of the ones I'd brought along were effectively "single estate" family run businesses, and in several cases some of the varieties of apples/pears used were unique to their orchards.

It's the first time I've ever done anything like this "professionally" (by which I mean not just for friends - I didn't get paid for it or anything) and so obviously I was having to marked it up a bit as I went along, but pleasingly at the end one of the attendees asked if I'd do something similar for his company. I assume this meant, at least in that one person's opinion, that it actually went quite well. It's just a shame that most of the attendees really didn't like cider!

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