You put ice cubes in your alcohol?
I'm a Scotch, neat and smokey kind of guy, but I love a nice dry cider to compliment the grim and peaty fist of a Laphroaig 10. It is the main gauche to compliment the cleaving broadsword of a heavy handed whiskey.
For the love of all this is decent, stay away from
Wyder's. it is clearly the sugar sweetened urine of the fruit tree. Truly the British Isles is where the promised land of cider lies, as their accursed weather and rotten soil makes them desperate to always be drunk in a land where it is difficult to grow anything, so they have learned to make decent alcohol out of everything. British Prison Wine probably puts ours to shame.
The point is that my favorite cider is
K, from Gaymer's, that you used to be able to get at BevMo, although I haven't seen it in a few years. The joy of a crisp fruit cider to go with my whiskey is somehow a comfartbale tribute to good BBQ to me (something about a smokey and sweet sauce, you know?), so I often experiment with other cider, particularly during warm summer months where a good stout can be a bit stifling in the heat.
Angry Orchard is a bit sweet, but really drinkable and not bad and easy to get these days, because Sam Adams. There are different flavored versions, but stay away from them. They tend to get weird and taste artificial, much like
Hornsby's, which also isn't bad. It may sound fun to try the, "Green Apple," version of either, but they tend to taste like someone just dropped some Sour Patch Kids into the regular stuff.
Ace is really a decent bottle, I prefer the Pear as it seems to be the best combination of crisp and dry. The Apple is also good, but has a fuller mouth, so it comes across as sweeter to me, which I prefer to avoid. The Joker, Honey, and Berry ones are all not so good to me. Part of the real appeal to me is that the Ace brewery is local in Sebastopol. They have a taproom there at the brewery and you can drop in and have a pint with the owner on some evenings, an older drunken Briton who is super happy to hit on any spare chicks that you brought in your group, which is super funny to me and a fun local experience that adds quality to the experience of the drink in my opinion.
Again, most of these oddball flavored ciders are products being marketed to drunk teenagers and not really the traditional grown up alcohol for the advanced beer palate of the Britons, so unless you want a glass of Halloween Candy, stay away from it as it also makes for ugly hangovers in excess.
