One of my first memories involves harvesting bushels of apples in the backyard with my mom on our farm in Rehoboth, MA. We would make a game of depositing overflowing armloads of apples into baskets as fast as we could, my father at the cider press crushing the fruit with his hand-crank machine. I can still see Dad slopping the amber liquid down a funnel into gallon containers, carelessly swatting lazy yellowjackets as they buzzed drunkenly from apple to overripe apple. The addition of the cider to the Cider Press Sidecar was inspired by those wasps in bacchanalian flight.
— Little Bitte | Willa Van Nostrand
APPLE CIDER. We simply cannot get enough of it! Right now it’s fresh and fabulous, so embrace this nectar while it’s truly in season. Imagine, one in every ten farms in New England operated its own cider mill by the time of the American Revolution.
Today we raise our glass to Johnny Appleseed!
The Cider Press Sidecar is a variation of a traditional Prohibition-era sidecar, made with Calvados (apple brandy from the Normandy region in France) instead of Cognac and the addition of fresh apple cider. Use local cider and experiment with domestic apple brandy such as Laird’s Applejack Brandy as your base spirit.
The Cider Press Sidecar
1½ ounces Calvados or apple brandy
½ ounce fresh apple cider from your local orchard (We like Jaswell’s)
½ ounce Cointreau or dry Curacao
½ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
Granulated sugar for rim
Pour ingredients over ice, shake hard and strain into a chilled cocktail glass rimmed with sugar. (To prepare a sugared rim, coat the outside lip of the glass with a lemon wedge and roll the edge of the glass in sugar.) Add an optional twist of lemon or orange in homage to a classic sidecar.
Cheers! – <3 Little Bitte