Fifty West is going to make a lot of you “non-beer drinkers” very happy with their latest news – They are introducing their first cider. I am always extremely curious to see what breweries do with the category – from the uber-sweet to the crazy flavors that stray as far as you can from ‘Apple’ – there are a lot of places that you can go with cider, and as a city we have just started to scratch the surface of the category.

This currently named ‘Fifty West Cider’ is making it’s debut at their next Coast to Coast beer dinner (you can read about that series here) and if you attend the dinner to snag one of the first tastes of the product, you’ll even get a little bit on input on the direction that it goes from here. So far, what I’m hearing is that this cider is all apples, without any added fruits for flavors in the mix. The brewery is pushing it a little towards the drier side vs the overly sweet like you’ll find in a lot of American ciders.

I recently wrote about what’s happening locally with cider – but in case you missed it, Fifty West now joins a growing group of local breweries that are looking towards ‘hard cider’ as their foray into alternative categories for people who might want to hang out at the taproom, but aren’t really digging a beer for whatever reason. Other local breweries that are producing their own (there are several others that serve other people’s ciders – just not their own) are:

The Current (2019) State of Cider in Cincinnati

  • Braxton
  • Christian Moerlein
  • FigLeaf
  • Fretboard
  • Listermann
  • MadTree
  • March First
  • Queen City Brewery Of Cincinnati
  • Rhinegeist
  • Sonder
  • Sons of Toil
  • Wooden Cask

I think that it’s safe to say that not only is Cincy taking their cider game pretty seriously right now – they’re kicking it up a notch or two, and that the coming years are going to be exciting for cider fans.

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