COMPARATIVE LIT ESSAY:
So we’ve got three "dry" ciders from the West Coast (Portland’s Kinda Dry), middle of the country (Missouri’s City Market) and East Coast (half of ANXOs apples purportedly come from DC but the other half from Washington state—granted when I spent a summer at the Library of Congress I don’t remember seeing any apple trees in the nation’s capital). We have three different takes on "dry cider," one is your American version of a "Kinda Dry" that is a bit sweet but not very nuanced or imaginative, but very drinkable. The second comes from a brewery and, as expected, it feels like a brewery making a cider with a beer yeast (and flavor), but it is the most complex of the three and pretty dry. The last cider is really a farmhouse that is fairly acidic and aggressive, and not what most Americans think of when they think of a dry cider. However, it is good and drinkable, the best from ANXO I’ve tried so far. If you’re interested in a soft entry into a scrumpy, try the ANXO, if you just want to throw back a few with some friends and have a cider that is kinda sweet and barely on the dry side, go with Portland Cider Company. But for me, on this day, I’m gonna go with City Market. Even though I don’t like beer and don’t drink it, this is interesting and nuanced enough to ponder over, but still enjoyable. It is similar to how the great pianist Bill Evans described the difference between jazz and cocktail music: one puts a thinking mind to work and is meant to be listened to, the other is just background noise.* Here the City Market is jazz and Kinda Dry just adds a nice ambiance.
*Pettinger, Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 128.