Schilling Cider – Grapefruit

A bottle & glass of Schilling Grapefruit Cider

A bottle & glass of Schilling Grapefruit Cider

For this review I actually went out and got a Steigl Grapefruit Radler to compare with, even though beer is gross, because I couldn’t quite believe how much this grapefruit cider doesn’t appeal to me.

Turns out Stiegl Grapefruit Radler is not all that bad to an anti-beer person, really. (Which has cued subsequent curiosity for me about whether hopped and yeasty ciders are eroding my hardline resistance to ALL BEERS EVER.)

There’s certainly a lot of grapefruit taste in this cider, even a grapefruit aroma stronger than any aroma I get from most ciders. But it’s not a good grapefruit taste, it’s bitter and sour and tart, with no balance. My original notes on this cider started with “blech.”

Perhaps grapefruit and apple is just inherently a bad combination, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true without additional data points. Instead let’s chalk this up to a learning experience for Schilling, a new local company I’m otherwise fond of — their Oak-Aged is one of my go-to ciders and will show up in a later review.

Schilling’s Grapefruit Cider is a cloudy pale yellow and has an ABV of 6.0%. Schilling seems not to acknowledge that this cider exists anywhere on their site, so I’m not sure where you can find it — in my case, it was at a small deli/convenience store that opened up just down the road from where I live.