Carver’s Applehouse
Monday, March 30th, 2009We spent the weekend in the Smoky Mountains with family. There is an apple orchard in Cosby, TN that we have stopped by several times in the past that I think deserves some attention. It’s only about 10 miles off of interstate I40 in Tennessee. (about an hour from Knoxville, 30 minutes from Gatlinburg) MAP.
Carver’s Applehouse is a large apple orchard that has a huge temperature-controlled store with a great variety of apples year-around. They have a restaurant where they serve all kinds of made-on-site apple related products (fritters, juice, fried, pie, butter, etc.).
The thing that got me so very excited was I discovered last year that Carver’s has their own apple press! They sell fresh pressed, unpasteurized cider. Totally raw. They have been perfecting cider pressing and blending for generations! They sell 1 gallon of fresh apple cider for $3.50. That is an amazing bargain for the quality and freshness… not to mention it is absolutely wonderful in flavor. This time I showed up prepared with a cooler and got 6 gallons which will be a dry Hard English Cider by late summer. It’s going into the fermenter tonight.
A few months ago we had a HARD CIDER TASTING at the Shularbrau garage pub. We had a dozen or so commercial ciders (including US, English, and French)… as well as a couple of homebrewed versions I did using pasteurized juice and one using apples from my parent’s tree that I sent through a juicer. The consensus was the homebrewed stuff is up there in quality and style with the English ciders; and most US macro-brewed ciders taste like crap in comparison (think Woodchuck, Hornsby’s, and anything else you can get at your local grocery store). Most US ciders are back-sweetened with apple flavors to please the untrained pallet that is expecting APPLE flavor instead of CIDER flavor (they are drastically different).
If you are a beer or wine drinker who associates HARD CIDER with fruity chick-drinks, I encourage you to take another look. Go find some craft-brewed ciders. Stay away from anything mass-produced (even the English stuff like Woodpecker and Strongbow) and instead find a crafted cider produced is small batches with carefully selected fruit. I love the stuff.
And if you are ever driving down I40 near the Tennessee/North Carolina boarder, stop by Carver’s. It’s a great ma & pa place that has not yet been overrun with tourist crap like so many other parts of the Great Smokey Mountains.