I Try It So You Don’t Have To: Redd’s Apple Ale

I make no secret of my love of drink. After last weeks Straweberita mess, I was inspired to try a few other alternative cold summer beverages.

While I prefer beer, an icy cold gin and tonic or perhaps an alcoholic lemonade, I’m always on the hunt for alternative, portable drinks. Hard cider can be a hit or miss proposition, but I like it enough to give an alternative apple beverage a try.

Enter Redd’s Apple Ale. I have heard their commercials for a couple of months and was intrigued, but not so much that I was prompted to run out and get some. But, since I was in need of inspiration, today was the day.

Not much fanfare here. I tried to do some research online about the product, and their website has zero details about how it’s made, what makes it different from hard cider, or anything to sell you on this product. “Crisp like an apple, brewed like an ale,” doesn’t actually give you any information. Oh, well, I popped the top and gave it a whiff. It smelled like a slightly off hard cider, not bad, just a little off. It almost smelled yeasty which makes some sense, considering it is brewed.

It poured pretty well, carbonation was visible but no head to speak of.

The smell of apples was much more distinct in a glass. Time for a taste.  It tasted about like it smelled. A lot of apple up front with a flat, oddly bitter beer taste on the back end. If you poured a few shots of apple juice into a Coors Light you would be able to replicate this at home. While it wasn’t terrible, it pretty much failed as a cider, none of the sharp crisp sweetness that can make a hard cider a refreshing change of pace. I don’t like most of the fizzy yellow beers on the market, and making one of them oddly sweet was not a step in the right direction for me.

I cracked a hard cider I had kicking around as a comparison, and preferred  it over the Redd’s by a huge margin. It had all of the crisp refreshing flavor I found lacking in the Redd’s.

I suppose if you like beers like Bud Light or Coors Light this might be worth a try, as an alternative summer drink, but if I want apple I will stick with cider. Redd’s Apple Ale gets a “You Don’t Have To” from me.