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Scrumpy was the original craft cider of West Country England the same way moonshine was the original craft whiskey of Appalachia—a local, unfiltered, uncarbonated, often steeply alcoholic and sometimes tooth-kickingly bitter concoction of wildly variable quality.
These days, it's either a quaintly backcountry B & B quaff or the malt 40 of England and Oz, a cheap drunk sold in plastic one-liters to cheap drunks.
And so Portland Cider Co.'s Crooked Cock Scrumpy, with its hefty 13 percent ABV, is marketed with a picture of a drunk chicken—or, as the British press would have it, a chicken that is "tired and emotional."
But it's not particularly cheap ($6 for 6 ounces at Hawthorne's Portland Cider House), and it doesn't taste cheap either. Despite its hefty alcohol fortification, Crooked Cock is both filtered and aged in bourboned oak, which makes it a lot like a tawny port made of apples instead of grapes. It is a bracing, if not comforting, winter drink—good for a pop into the cider pub for a cheek warmer before you return to the cold and unforgiving streets of Hawthorne.
Willamette Week