Little Fat Lamb Alcoholic Hard Apple…

Little Fat Lamb Alcoholic Hard Apple… no it’s not a cider. It doesn’t use the word anywhere on the bottle. They were careful about that. The marketing department blur the lines and the retailers straight up chuck it in the cider fridge.

I take issue with every line in this part of the label.

So lets get this clear, They want you to thinks its a cider. It’s not a cider. They call it a “brewed wine product” … um WTF Mate? At about $1 per standard drink it’s cheap, $9 for 8 drinks in 1 bottle. One possible explanation for the cheap price is that it is taxed as a wine product and not as an RTD (Ready To Drink spirit and mixer, think vodka and soda in a can). This means that the Little Fat Lamb’s parent company Drink Craft (I’ll get to that name in a moment) can sell the product cheaply because they aren’t paying fair share of tax. More Fat Cat than Fat Lamb.

The other way that Little Fat Lamb can make the drink so cheap is they use cheap ingredients. Sugar is cheap, water is cheap, what ever “Alcoholic Hard Apple” flavour is, that’s probably pretty cheap too.

When I talk about craft drinks, I am referring to small producers with interment relationships with the apple growers, they’re often the same person. These companies are so small that a late frost could spell the end of the label. Craft producers pour their heart and soul into their drinks and they will shout it from the rooftops. Drink Crafts obviously trying to pretend they are a craft company. After some digging they are anything but a craft producer.

Little Fat Lamb’s website is where I would expect to hear a bullshit craft back story like what happened with Little Green Apple Cider. However the Little Fat Lamb website was incomplete so I looked up it’s registration. I found myself asking who is “THE TRUSTEE FOR FLUID BEVERAGES TRUST” ?  It seemed like a dead end so I looked up the Drink Craft domain. Sorry I’m revealing I’m also a computer geek as well as a cider geek. Drink Craft don’t have a website only a domain (the web address) which is registered to UNITED DISTILLERS PTY LTD the former name of a distiller company now owned by Diageo one of the biggest booze companies in the world. Yet drinkcraft.net.au  is listed on the bottle.

What they lack in websites they make up for in Facebook posts encouraging dangerous drinking

Drink quality not quantity. I’d rather save my money for a decent pint.

The Nose

Sweet, like its going to attract ants and insulin dependents. The only fruit like smell is some medical grade tropical fruit just like your granny’s over powering perfume.

The Taste

A horribly monotonous bombardment of sugar. There is nothing that tastes like cider. There is nothing that tastes like apples, hell it doesn’t even taste alcoholic. I’m sure that’s the point of it. The only thing with an actual flavour is the clear and present notes of cough syrup. As you would expect from such a sugar heavy beverage the aftertaste hangs around like snot on a toddlers nose.

It was so sugary I pored some into a test tube, I wasn’t going to drink any more of this rubbish. I dropped in hydrometer. It revealed the sugar content was at least 97 grams per litre. Wow.

Final Thoughts on the Little Fat Lamb

I really had to think about publishing this review. That they don’t call it a cider but lean heavily into it and this website is about the real cider. Your average punter doesn’t know that this isn’t cider. It’s giving good cider a bad name. The UK has a generation of people who drank too much similar cheap “ciders” in their youth and vowed never to touch ciders again. That is a road we don’t want to go down in Australia

There is only one reason this product exists – make money off drunk kids. That doesn’t sit well with me. Don’t waste your money on this.

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