Frozen: Making Ice Cider

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2014 issue of Zymurgy Magazine

By Nathan Williams

Ice cider, like ordinary hard cider, is a fermented drink made from apples, but the juice from the apples is concentrated before fermentation by freezing—that’s the ice part—and fermentation is halted prematurely, leaving significant residual sweetness. The resulting product is clear, usually still, with a nearly syrupy viscosity, and interplay among sweet, alcoholic, and tart flavors.

The final flavor profile is more recognizably apple than that of most dry ciders. It’s not something you drink a pint of—ice cider is more akin to an aperitif or dessert drink, similar to eiswein or botrytis (noble rot) wines such as Sauternes.

Note: Ice cider is not applejack, which is what you get if you freeze regular hard cider to concentrate the alcohol. Applejack tastes completely different and concentrating the alcohol can put you on the wrong side of the home distilling law.

Ice cider is a fairly recent innovation, generally credited to Quebec’s Christian Barthomeuf and Pierre Lafond in the early 1990s. Barthomeuf owned a struggling vineyard and winery and had tried making ice wine without much success. Looking for something new, he realized that a similar process could be applied to the locally-abundant apple crop…