Kotas Reviews Angry Orchard Summer Honey Cider

It's the first of May...First of May! Outdoor Grillin' Starts Today!

As you may have guessed from the opening line, today is the First of May, which marks the official start of Outdoor Grilling Season!(Apologies to Jonathon Coulton for butchering his song) As everyone knows, the best thing to have at a cookout is a cold, refreshing Hard Apple Cider. 

Cider drinking has exploded in popularity in recent years. For a long, long while, even during the Era of Alcopops it was two...maybe three brands of hard cider regularly available: Woodchuck, Hornsby's, and if you were lucky, Strong Bow, in maybe one or two different versions of each. Today we have well over twice that many brands (local and national) available, in a wide variety of flavor variations and even several attempts at "Apple Ale" and other apple flavored malted beverages. It's a great time to be a cider drinker is what I'm saying. Today's product comes from the popular Angry Orchard and is their summer seasonal: Summer Honey!

Well helloooooooooo tree!

I rather enjoy Angry Orchard packaging in general, as it usually has a very grumpy apple tree on it. Not this seasonal! This emblem is a sassy, sexy tree that just screams "I am Groot for you!" Some might say it is a little creepy, but really, it's a picture of a tree. Let's not read too much into it, shall we? So the outer packaging is fun and flirty, but how does it look out of the bottle?

Crisp, clear and sassy!

The scent is pure summer, with a very nice clean apple scent tinged with....well, possibly honey, possibly just something else sweet. It's very nice. That's why I was so surprised by the flavor. It is a very nice apple flavor, coupled with a sharp tartness and a very crisp finish, with little to no honey to be found. I rather enjoyed it, except that it was totally not what I was expecting in the slightest.

Angry Orchard varieties, in my experience, lie on the sweeter end of the cider spectrum which runs from the very sweet Woodchuck to the very dry Strongbow. This? This was much drier than I was expecting from a variety called "Summer Honey". It is a good cider, and good on a summer's day with, say, a hot dog and some cole slaw, but it simply flipped my expectations on their head. 

On the FACE Rating System, this gets 1 smiley face. I liked it, but the flavor was a huge surprise in a not entirely good kind of way. If you are a cider drinker, you would be remiss if you passed up this beverage, but this may not be the best thing to try for the cider beginner. Don't be fooled by the look of this, it has a bit of bite!