Cider Twenty Six

Savanna Dry Premium Cider

South African; 6% Alcohol Content.

$3.00, 6 for $18.00 (AUD); Beaufort Street Merchant (Highgate, WA)

In the process of trying many new ciders and sampling several old favorites it has become quite apparent that I like most hard apple ciders. There are clearly a few out there that I absolutely hate, but for the most part I am attempting to parse varying degrees of "good." With that said, Savanna Dry is a really nice cider. Not the best I have ever tasted, but a solid pick that is well above average. It is a true dry cider with only hints of sweetness; it is very crisp and well carbonated. Savanna Dry almost has a bit of the enjoyable sourness on which some other ciders seem to overdose. This is a good pick that I recommend; bonus points for having a unique bottle.

Rating 8.7

Update

For the record, these are my favorite ciders thusfar:

5 Seeds (9.2)
Kepplers (9.1)
Castaway (9.1)

And my least favorites:

Crumpton Oaks (5.4)
WKD (5.1)

23-25; A Quarter of the Way Home!

Mercury; Draught, Dry, and Sweet

Australian; 5.2% Alcohol Content.

$2.99 (AUD) each; LiquorLand (Mandurah, WA)

Draught- The first words out of my mouth after taking a sip were, "Oh, that's good!" The draught range is my favorite of the three, but is probably a little sweeter than I would have expected considering that Mercury produces a sweet range. With that said, Cate interjected her two cents, "I guess the fact of the matter is that ciders are just sweet." I could not agree more, the sweetness of the draught is not a drawback, but something interesting to note.
Rating 8.4

Dry- Now, I am generally a fan of the drier ciders, especially when they are very crisp. The Mercury dry was certainly crisp, but almost too crisp; there was hardly any apple taste at all, almost no taste. Very odd.
Rating 7.4

Sweet- I drank the draught first, so I was expecting the sweet line to be overpoweringly sugary, yet it had a relatively standard taste; perhaps generic might be the better word. Certainly not a bad cider, but nothing to write home about either.
Rating 8.0

Cider 22

Crumpton Oaks

English; 5% Alcohol Content.

$9.95 (AUD); Botanica Liquor Barn (Innaloo, WA)

Your eyes are not deceiving you; that is a two liter plastic bottle of hard apple cider! I was dumbstruck when I came upon this modern marvel of cidery, even had I not been compiling this list of ciders, the sheer value of Crumpton Oaks would have been enough to convince me to buy a bottle (they also had a three liter bottle, but I opted for sensibility).

With that said, one of the strongest consumer messages that my father instilled in me is, "you get what you pay for." Crumpton Oaks is five dollars a liter! For five dollars you can't even get a pint of beer in Perth, so I never should have expected much at such a bargain basement price. This is the worst non- scrumpy, non- alcopop cider I have tasted... maybe it had been sitting on the shelf in the plastic container for too long? maybe it is just not a high quality product? but the cider tasted weak; not as if it had been diluted, but rather just some of the taste extracted. There was a bit of scrumpiness or perhaps it was just that hint of vinegar taste, but no matter what the source of the unpleasantness, it was there. This was a neat experiment, but definitely not one to be replicated.

Rating 5.4