Schilling Cider House Has the Craziest, Most Impressive Cider Selection in Portland

It’s Disneyland for cider lovers, with the caveat you also have to pay Disneyland prices.

(Emily Joan Greene)

First, the good news: In the chi-chi new Goat Blocks development on Southeast Morrison Street, the brand-new Schilling Cider House (930 SE 10th Ave., 971-352-6109, schillingciderhouse.com) offers the most impressive cider taplist that Portland has ever seen.

It's not just the boggling 50 cider taps, which give the bare-bones, wood-slatted Portland outpost of the Seattle-based cidery plausible claim as the "world's largest cider bar," but what's on tap. The list sports rare Oregon farmhouses from E.Z. Orchards and Baird & Dewar and Runcible, two different types of Basque sidra, double-taps from Finnriver and Cider Riot, and an almost unseen Portland keg from Salem's 1859 Cider—makers of our 2017 Cider of the Year.

(Emily Joan Greene)
(Emily Joan Greene)

It's Disneyland for cider lovers, with the caveat you also have to pay Disneyland prices. With a few exceptions, pints bottom out at $7 and spike to $10; instead of giving you an option to pay $6 for 10 ounces, they charge you $9 a pint. The oddly cramped space seems designed to handle cattle drives of tourists, with optimistically tight-packed seating at communal tables and side bars, not to mention a bizarre rope maze preventing customers from simply walking up to the bar. The porch—one side looks out onto the Market of Choice entrance and what appears to be a bike-rack police outline of a Belmont Goat—is a rooftop patio only in that it's located on the roof of a Chipotle.

Related: The Top Five Ciders Released in Oregon this Year

(Emily Joan Greene)
(Emily Joan Greene)

But nonetheless, I'll still probably be here at least once a month, eating $5 red-hot Zenner's corn dogs made gluten-free for the wheatophobes. At $2 a taster, that lovely and experimental taplist more than rewards getting a sampler tray of some of the rarest, most expensive and most exciting cider in town.

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