Castaway Low Carb Cider

Castaway Low Carb Apple Cider is a cider owned by Woolworth, one of the biggest supermarket chains in Australia. “Produced in Western Australia” not made nor fermented, yeah um, suspicious.

Normally if you want to reduce calories in a cider, the cider maker would be aiming for a longer ferment and a dryer cider. More time for those little yeasties to eat the sugar in the juice.

But here, with the weight of a marketing machine behind them and maybe even a food scientist or two, if one so desired, a beverage could be created that had never seen the sunshine of an orchard. Instead one could hypothetically combine fizzy water, some colours and flavours and a dash of “specially fermented” alcohol. Now maybe they did this, maybe they sourced local apples but oddly, don’t want to talk about it.

The Nose

The Castaway Low Carb has an odd lemon scent the type of morning fresh lemon scent that really makes your dinner plates sparkly. Other than that, there isn’t a lot to smell. Like most politicians, these days If you don’t do anything you can’t do the wrong thing. none of the light apple aroma the label mentions.

The Taste

This could be the driest of the mass market ciders on the shelves at the moment. An achievement about as difficult as Jason Momoa winning an arm wrestle competition at the local primary school.

That lemon tang is the only thing here. I thought there was going to be a heap of that horrible artificial sweetener, but they have been good and restrained, perhaps even catering to the female market tending towards a drier taste in recent years. Not a lot to talk about, it’s all a bit of a watery one.

Final Thoughts on the Castaway Low Carb Cider

Overall, this feels like it has been inspired by a bottle of soda stream that hasn’t been washed out properly and still has the lemon dish soap in it. If this were made in your mate’s garage, you’d tell them they forgot to rinse their bottles properly. But without that flavour it would have nothing.

After finishing the bottle I’m looking back at the label and wondering if Castaway is a brand name or a serving suggestion?

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