Cider Industry's Grassroots Beginnings

Cider Industry's Grassroots Beginnings

Cider Industry's Grassroots Beginnings

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

Tieton Cider Works' cider operations manager and cider maker, Marcus Robert, says the state's cider industry has been built on small, local craft cideries.

ROBERT: And a lot of the large ciders have come in behind us and they're fantastic - these large cideries that produce a lot of marketing dollars and everything else - but a lot of it really begins with grassroots here. And we do all of our due diligence and our effort into producing just great ciders for the marketplace.

Some of the great ciders Robert is talking about that I had a chance to try at a recent cider tasting event include Tieton Cider Works' cherry cider, smoked pumpkin cider, a pommeau, which is a fortified cider, and a dry hopped cider.

ROBERT: You know the dry hopped is kind of a play on what they do in the beer industry, only we don't go through a boiling process that produces that bitterness out of the hop; we're just looking for some floral fruity notes out of that hop to kind of match up with the ciders that we produce.

Robert explains how they come up with new and different ciders.

ROBERT: We get feedback from the public, we get feedback from our market area and then we start dreaming up these ideas. And it usually takes us about a year to really sit down at the table, go through bench trials - look at everything that we need to look to to match-up the profile that the market really wants. We're producing ciders that people want to drink and people want to eat food with, and that's really what we're going after.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray with the Ag Information Network of the West.

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