Event

Aims&Selection

The aim of this event is to educate people about cider in a nice and socially friendly environment. It is guided tasting with short foreword and then after opening first bottle just continuing with other ones when talking on the subject of cider and it's making. We provide a high quality selection of ciders focusing on "typical" products, plus we add some really special samples depending what we have available. At the core of the tasting are French ciders, especially from Normandie region and partly Bretagne. From the geographical point of view we generally have at least one sample from North of Spain, Andalusia or Basque. There is cider from England, because of strong connections to Czech Republic we try to have there one from there and generally we include at least one German Apfelweine, the rest depends what interesting samples we get. From the point of view of style of production we are selecting mostly the more "complex" "natural ciders" made from cider apples, if possible without any additives, unfiltered and secondary fermented in the bottle (prise de mousse naturelle). That would be the highest end. It is however hard to make whole tasting in quality like this so we also get small scale bio/organic production. These are good quality ciders which may be for example filtered, some enzymes added, sulfur etc. We generally include one classic big scale commercial cider for comparison. To increase a bit of spectrum of what can be done we like to have some flavoured ciders, like raspberry cider, honey cider etc. We do like to include one or two poirés (perry) into the selection. It happens quite often that it is the first poiré which people had in their life and if you are not in the region or you don't have next to you really good alcohol shop it is really hard to get a high quality one. To finish the tasting we have at least one or two cider related products like pommeau, calvados or vinegar.

Style

This tasting workshop is based on "donation at your will no one turned away for lack of funds" creed. However please keep in mind that samples and ingredients for this event will be around 150-200 eu and ending up in a decent plus would help covering costs related to my (Algoldors) presence at this event. This is a guided tasting. During the presentation we talk about the cider in general as mentioned above. At the beginning of the tasting it is explained how to taste and evaluate the product properly. We talk about the proper shape of glasses, temperature of serving, preparing the pallet and so on. We discuss also the colour, difference of astringency, bitterness and acidity, levels of sparkliness and more. Concerning the products we start with the extra-bruts and we go in the direction of increasing sweetness towards bruts, demi-secs and douce. We try to make a list of ciders which we taste at the event with the contact details so you can get them if you like. At the end of the event we offer Cidrerie Jara's ciders and other products for sale for suggested donation in a legal manner so you can get a receipt, the taxes are paid. However we are trying to avoid "commercialization" of the CCC events, so it is rather about getting a bottle or two and buying more later on through delivery, inviting us to do cider tasting at your place or getting stock of bottles stocked for your local hackerspace.

Most Frequent Candidates

Here you can find some basic tips for nice ciders which I either liked or are introduced at the tastings. Not all of them are always "on" but several of them are core members. It changes of course with time to reflect the seasonality and the specificity of the product.