Tasting: Potter’s Craft Cider

If you are a single twenty-something gal, walking through Whole Foods on a brilliant Saturday afternoon, and two very dapper young gentlemen offer you a drink, more than likely you will happily accept the libation.

[In fact, even you weren’t single, or twenty-something, but just a female of drinking age, it would be hard to turn down a glass of anything from two charming cider makers.]

Affable and endearing, Daniel Potter and Tim Edmond not only have the personality to sell their product, they have a product that truly needs no PR. One sip of Potter’s Craft Cider and you’ll know you aren’t in woodchuck territory anymore.

After leaving behind an engineering career in North Carolina, Daniel Potter began work on a farm outside of the Richmond area. It was while transporting apples to local markets that his collegiate passion for homebrew sparked a plan to make a grown-up apple juice that takes what you think you know about hard ciders and flips it on its idiomatic head. He found a business partner in Tim, and together the two have taken the science of microbrew and turned it into an apple-based art form.

Locally sourced from orchards in the Blue Ridge, Potter’s Farmhouse Dry is brewed from fresh cider apples, including Pippin and Winesap. Bottle by hand, and sold for around $10 a bottle (and available on tap) throughout the Charlottesville–and now Richmond—area, Potter’s Craft Cider is a crisp, slightly sweet cider, seasonally perfect for the approaching fall and its demands for apples in any form.

Oh, and for those of us who choose our drinks by the label, the hand-drawn logo is intriguingly irresistible. [And made for mountainside glamour shots. ]

For a full list of retail locations, check out the company website. Find up-to-date tasting information by following Potter’s Cider on twitter and facebook.