Braxton Brewing Company never really hid the fact that they were extremely interested in the cider market.  They’ve been slowly releasing the results of their experimentation with it recently, and it shouldn’t be a huge surprise to you if you’ve been watching that their next packaged product is ready to go – and that it’s a pair of ciders.

So… What Took So Long?

You can’t rush the Braxton process.  They have spent the time that you’ve been thirstily waiting on endless tinkering, tasting and tweaking.  They’ve been watching their customers, gathering feedback on each experimental release to see what the exact level of desired sweetness was going to be for the people who would be buying this cider.

You can trust that this is going to be a great cider, after all… Braxton’s got Richard Dubé as their Brewmaster.  Richard knows beer… but Richard also knows cider extremely well… in fact, you might have tried a few of the projects that he worked on when he was on board with Sam Adams when they started pioneering the ‘Hard Cider’ market here in the United States.  He’s excited, to say the least.  In his words:

We had the idea since starting the brewery, but we were just not ready, nor satisfied with our recipe.  Now over the past few years we’ve nailed it.  A real cider with tones of fresh cut apples, slightly sweet, finishing mildly tart.  A beautiful melody of culinary and bittersweet apples.  Refreshing.  A great alternative to beer.

The Ciders

Braxton is rolling things out with two ciders available on draft and in cans, their Kickback Apple Cider and their Kickback Rose Cider – both products of an insane amount of testing and market research to perfect.

Kickback is their “standard”, semi-sweet apple cider.  The brewery takes a mixture of culinary and bittersweet apples and give them a fermentation with Champagne yeast to produce a clean, light and dry base.  Second, the final offering is reconstructed to balance out the sweetness, acidity and mouthfeel.  The resulting cider is pale, straw colored with an elevated carbonation that brings forward a fresh cut apple aroma.

Kickback Rose shares the same base as the regular Kickback, but is reconstructed to impart a beautiful delicate rose color with a hint of additional acidity.  The brewery says that this cider maintains the perfect balance of acidity, sweetness, and tannins to ensure that nothing comes in the way of the undeniable fresh cut sweet apple aroma and taste.

The Release Event

If you want to get your hands on cans of these ciders, you will be seeing them soon.  They’ll be releasing the cans across their entire distribution network starting the week of July 23rd.  If you want to do things in true Braxton fashion, though.  You should hit up the “garage” (that’s what we Braxton geeks lovingly call the taproom) on the weekend of July 27th-29th because they’re going to have some really fun things going down to help kick things off.

Friday:

The brewery will kick it all off on Friday at 7:30 in the morning with a Holtman’s donut pop-up shop featuring Kickback Rose Donuts and apple fritters.  At noon the cans will be available for purchase, and from 7-10pm there will be live music from Arlo McKinney & The Lonesome Sound

Saturday:

At noon on Saturday they open up with ALTO Pizza Kitchen’s special Fig, Arugula, Poached Pear and Chicken pizza… Cider’s Best Friend.  From 1pm-4pm there will be live music from Rucca and from 6-9pm live music from Floyd and the Walkmen.

Sunday:

Don’t skip out on a stop on Sunday too – because Graeter’s Ice Cream is showing up to put together a make your own Caramel Apple Bar.  Yeah.

Let the cider game here in Cincinnati go to a new level… I want more.

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