Welcome to Bad Rider Reviews!
This is a review blog for beer and cider, focusing on products local to the Pacific Northwest area. Your hosts are Andrea and Phoebe — Andrea is Canadian and will be reviewing craft beers; Phoebe is American and will be reviewing ciders both craft and commercial. We don’t believe in points or star ratings, or in going on and on for pages and pages about what we’re drinking. We’re here to tell you what’s good to drink and what’s better to avoid.
About Andrea
Luna (right) will probably not chime in on these reviews.
I’m a newspaper reporter in interior B.C. who never really cared much about domestic beer until I moved out of Alberta about four years ago. Before that I was more of a hard liquor fan, mostly gin-and-somethings, or Irish whiskey. When I bought beer I went for Hoegaarden or PBR (yes, I realize those two beers have nothing in common).
Then I got a job in Nelson, B.C. and promptly fell in love with Liplock, Nelson Brewing Co.’s long-defunct seasonal wheat beer. If you ever happen to be reading this, N.B.C. reps, bring back Liplock! It’s the least you can do for turning me into a beer geek.
These days I love a good hefeweizen, and will basically buy anything with a weird ingredient in it out of a perverse sense of experimentation. That’s why I suggested the blog to Phoebe in the first place — if I’m already buying five different pumpkin ales (hello, Thanksgiving 2013) for a comparison test, I may as well tell people about the results.
Also, I really like parenthetical asides. Expect more of those.
Want to request or recommend a particular beer for review, or just to say hello? You can reach me at andrea@badrider.reviews!
About Phoebe
I live in Seattle with two cats, having relocated here a few years ago from the eastern side of Washington state, and one day I realized that my drink of choice was so often cider that I’d become known for it — friends and people around me were starting to ask me my thoughts and opinions about ciders.
I kicked around the idea of starting a cider review blog for a while, and then one day Andrea suggested we should join forces and start a review blog together so she’d have an excuse to write about craft beers as well. Thus was Bad Rider Reviews born.
To give you an idea of my tastes: I like cider because it’s an increasingly readily available alternative to beer, which I have never liked due to the yeasty, hoppy, bitter taste. In addition to cider, I also enjoy red and white wines, rum, vodka, and pretty much all “girly” alcohol, though I’ve never developed a taste for tequila or “serious” drinks like whiskey, bourbon, and scotch.
I’m not big on fancy terminology and my palate’s not particularly refined — I’m not going to be able to tell you if a cider has notes that are more like nectarines or tangelos, I’m just going to say it’s citrusy (though one of my long-term goals, though this blog and other means, is to better train my palate).
I am going to tell you what I enjoy and what I don’t enjoy, briefly but hopefully with enough detail about the character of a drink for you to figure out if it’s something you might enjoy.
Want to request or recommend a particular cider for review, or just to say hello? You can reach me at phoebe@badrider.reviews!