Archive for the News Category

It has been a long time coming- we have been doing blending trials and looking for the best natural fruit for awhile, but we finally have released a truly unique and great tasting cider- our new Plum Cider.

We call it Porch Plum, thinking of sitting on the porch on a late summer day, drinking a cold refreshing beverage.

Our Porch Plum is made from a blend of apples including hewe’s crab, jonagold, browns, somerset redstreak and ellis bitter. This early season blend of apples imparts sharp, balanced acidity and the red plums provide a refreshing sweet flavor. It is fermented medium sweet and lightly carbonated.

This cider is just getting onto local store shelves, and a few breweries and pubs are starting to tap it, we hope you can try it soon!

Crooked Cat Caramel Apple Cider is on tap and on shelves for the season

Hard to believe we are into September already. We had some better planning this year, and our fall seasonal cider is just now getting on tap and on shelves in eastern Iowa. It is a medium sweet cider, with a strong hint of natural caramel flavor and crisp finish like all of our ciders.

We are going to be happy to see some cooler temperatures in the orchard, and picking apples has started based on ripeness. The earliest ripening apples have been picked and we will continue picking as they mature. We try to pick at peak maturity for the most flavor that we can get from the cider fruit.

Try a Crooked Cat cider before they are gone for the season!

It’s the first of August, and the trees have all developed lots of new apples. They are still a bit small but some of our early varieties are only about 30 days from harvest. We have a wide mix of varieties and that gives us an early and a late harvest. Usually we also press the apples for juice twice in the season as well. So, the first pressing is about the end of September, and the late pressing will be mid November.

We have run out of just a few flavors of our cider, and we are waiting for these apples to mature! The 2023 batches of cider will be ready in the winter when it will be cold outside!

It’s the first of May and many of the trees are starting to have pink buds, and some are starting to blossom! Our last frost date still hasn’t passed, so now we start hoping we don’t get any nights below freezing or that will tend to freeze the new blossoms. The forecast all seems to be above freezing the next 10 days so we will hope all is well. In the next few weeks the blossoms will become the start of small cider apples.

In the cidery, we have finally introduced our full Fruit series of ciders- now we have four fruit-forward blends- cherry, blood orange, wild blueberry & lemon, and peach & ginger. The newest introductions are Wild Isabel and Ricki’s Backyard. Check them out at local stores, or a few local breweries or taverns.

Our latest flavor… and the cider that almost wasn’t…

On a beautiful Fall day we got our rack & cloth press running on our last batch of apples for this year.

It doesn’t look like much yet… just several full tanks full of fermenting juice, this will all turn into a new series of fruit-forward, tasty semi-sweet ciders.

Rick is enjoying Liquid Gold, a small batch dry cider up at the Lake in Hallibuton, Ontario.

We are excited to announce our new Fall seasonal cider: Crooked Cat!

On October 8th, we’ll be serving up some of our best ciders at the Village Hops Event.