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Alchemy Cider crafts dryish ciders with subtle complexities inside its dark, cavernous and templelike new confines. Its owners embrace fermentation’s mythic, magical and mysterious ability to transform fallen fruit from seed into something intoxicating and addictive. Alchemy Cider opened in August in a garage space behind the former Doug Fir Lounge, which previously housed small craft Brewery 26.
Craft breweries are closing—like Culmination Brewing and Assembly Brewing back in January and May, respectively—but cideries like Alchemy and its nearby neighbors Bauman’s on Oak have both supplanted former brewing spaces, mimicking the order of death and resurrection. Alchemy Cider shuns the light and bright cider brands and instead conjures up images of cults, sorcerers, and the pre-Christian pagan culture often mistakenly tied to witchcraft and satanism.
Pagans and Wiccans who practiced magic didn’t worship deities, but the earth and the natural world. That’s why apple trees and cidermaking were so connected to folklore and traditions like wassailing to ward off evil spirits. Cider was treated as a mythical elixir, capable of healing and rejuvenation, promoting vitality and digestion. So prized was cider that it was said to attract faeries and tricksters to steal or help in the magic of fermentation.
Cider had been produced for about 1,300 years before the Book of Genesis described Eve eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Artists of the Renaissance often depicted that fruit as an apple. In the Latin translation of the Bible, the word for “apple” (mālum) is similar to the word for “evil” (mălum.) Alchemy ties these iconic elements of alternative folklore stories together in its most interesting flavor, “Forbidden Fields.”
On the surface, the pink Forbidden Fields cans depict Eve lying on a bed of strawberries while enjoying the fruit as a serpent reaches down from an apple tree behind her. And in the glass, this strawberry-infused apple cider teases with the supple flesh tones of a luscious peach, and behind candlelight it shines pink like the scales of a salmon navigating upstream. But this is no one-note temptation, as Alchemy weaves in yuzu fruit and hibiscus to create an intoxicating tonic less sweet and more complex than what you might expect from Scripture.
In Japan, strawberries are a delicacy, and yuzu fruit is as ingrained as lemons and oranges in America. While hibiscus flowers are a popular housewarming gift and a staple of teas and tonics. Though evoking Christian fables, for me Forbidden Fields calls forth Japanese folklore of the supernatural shape-shifters yōkai whose spirit may reside in all things, even an apple.
The potent potion of potpourri wafts out of the glass and flickers at the edge of the tongue like a different dimension on the edge of perception. At first, the aroma elicits images of strawberry fields still green on the vine before that’s washed away like the crunch of a crisp red apple from the orchard. The body of the cider is light, juicy like a ripe apple, yes, but with the minerality of a fresh spring brook and the rounded full mouthfeel of a chardonnay with a kiss of acidity.
The yuzu citrus and the hibiscus float in the background like apparitions, barely perceptible but their presence felt. The yuzu, used only in zest, lends a tropical pithiness with gingeresque spiciness unmistakable if you look for it. Hibiscus, a close relative of rose petals, has a gentle florid warm and soothing spice flavor on the finish.
Sitting at the bar sipping a cider and mulling over history lost and retold, I am reminded of the pagan cider ritual of the Franklin Nights of Dartmoor. As the story goes, Franklin was a beer brewer experiencing a startling decline in interest in his ale as cider was increasing in popularity. After exhausting all options to recover, he made a pact with the devil, trading his soul for three severe late frosts to damage the apple blossoms and deplete the supply of cidermakers’ golden nectar.
In contemporary celebrations of Franklin Nights the cidermaker is the hero, often depicted fighting off the devil in protection of the natural world and all its fruitful bounty. It might not be a shock that a company called Alchemy Cider uses esoteric branding—especially when its chief product has such a mystic reputation—but its owners owe their inaugural batch’s success to no Faustian pacts. Probably.
DRINK: Alchemy Cider Co., 818 SE Ankeny St. 3–8 pm Wednesday and Thursday, 3–10 pm Friday–Sunday.
