The days of sidling up to the bar for a whiskey with your six-shooters on your hip are long gone. Today, drinks culture is more complex and delicious, with women taking the lead in honoring their ancestral heritage, paying it forward for the environment, and bringing good old-fashioned cowgirl fun. Here are some of the trailblazers in the business of brewing, distilling, and winemaking.
CIDER SENSATIONS
First, the basics, and then we’ll get into why you want to know.
Hard cider is apple juice, transformed. To make cider, you start with unfiltered, raw fresh-pressed apple juice. Extraneous pieces of fruit, pulp, and sediment are strained out, yeast is added, and fermentation occurs, producing alcohol and officially creating a “hard” cider. The range of ciders available from that seemingly simple process, however, is profuse, thanks to the thousands of varieties of apples and producers with their own way of blending, fermenting, and aging those apples.
We’ve got a lot of practice, after all: Humans have been turning apples into cider for millennia. According to archaeologists, we have been enjoying hard cider in some form since 6500 B.C.
In the
