All apple drinks start with pressing the fruit for juice, but a variety of products—other than plain cider—can grow from there:
Apple Juice
Kid-friendly! Filtered! Pasteurized! And often packed with excess sugar.
Cider
The stuff that farmers-market dreams are made of: raw, unfiltered juice left au naturel, though “flash-pasteurizing” (a light bacterial cleanse) is common.
Apple Brandy
Commonly known as Calvados (French) or applejack (American). Juice from apples is distilled to make a po-tent spirit that’s delicious in—you guessed it—mulled cider.
Hard Cider
Raw juice fermented using yeast. Some are “single varietal” from one type of apple, while others are made from a blend of juices. They can be still or sparkling and dry or sweet.
Ice Cider
A specialty in New England and Canada, where apples are left to freeze through the long winter, pressed, and fermented for a product similar to dessert wine.
This article appears in our January 2016 issue of Washingtonian.
Anna Spiegel covers the dining and drinking scene in her native DC. Prior to joining Washingtonian in 2010, she attended the French Culinary Institute and Columbia University’s MFA program in New York, and held various cooking and writing positions in NYC and in St. John, US Virgin Islands.
