Rusty Bike – Easy Rider Cider

Rusty Bike is a small winery in South Australia’s Adelaide Hills. The company has been making cider for a while but now they have released the Easy Rider range with the Apple Cider and the Pomegranate. I’ve got a bottle of the apple cider, and I’m keen to see how it rides.

Rusty Bikes are a small wine making company, they have been sourcing their juice from Aston Valley Fresh, commercial juice producers in South Australia that supply juice to some of the states’ most award-winning ciders. These guys use the traditional technique of the negatively charged bentonite clay which attracts the positively charged particulate matter grouping it together, like a bike to a peloton, before settling at the bottom of the tank. This mean that the input juice is nice and clear.

Once Rusty Bike gets the juice, they ferment it with a common champagne yeast and ferment until dry, at the relatively chilly 15ºc for about 2 weeks with another few weeks on lees, then racked off. It does get a little bit of back sweetening from sucrose. Sucrose gives sweetness without adding its own flavour.

As I said Rusty Bike are a small company. So small that the most efficient way to force carbonate the cider was to do it in the keg. Basically, the cider is bottled straight from the keg without filtration.

The Nose

Fresh green apples and an old fashioned lemonade. There is a little bit of a yeasty scent maybe a white wine yeast, it’s a bit biscuity. Saying that, there is a bush fire and a dust storm combination outside so my nose is full of dust storm and bush fire smoke, does anybody have some spare rain?

The Taste

This is very drinkable. Up front, there is a solid amount of fresh fruity sweetness, cut by a lemony zest. The tail end has a hit of bitterness leading into a pretty crisp finish. The bottle says “Crunchy Apple Lemon Sherbet” that is a pretty fair assessment of the cider.

Final Thoughts on the Rusty Bike – Easy Rider Cider

Anybody who knows me, know I love riding my bike just as much as cider. I had the best time riding around the UK’s cider heartland last year. So, the thought of a rusty bike … I just shake my head. Just put some WD-40 on it. Anyway.

There is no doubt that Rusty Bikes have made the Easy Rider Cider ridiculously easy to drink. The choice of a 650ml bottle is an interesting one. The Easy Rider comes in at 8.1% AVB that works out to be 4.2 standard in the bottle. It’s probably one to share or it wont be easy to ride anywhere.

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