Name: BEET BOX
Brand: North Country Hard Cider
Availability: InStock

Beet, carrot, cucumber, orange, and lemon reads like a juice-bar order rather than a cider recipe. That is more or less the point. North Country Hard Cider's Beet Box is out today at the Dover, New Hampshire tasting room. It is a collaboration with Amelia, owner of local juicer Everyday Boost, and it is built on her cold-pressed blend of exactly those five ingredients.

Everyday Boost presses without heat, which leaves the juice raw and unpasteurized. The operation works with local farms and turns up regularly at farmers markets around the New Hampshire and Maine seacoast. Handing that blend to a cidery is a fairly direct route to a drink that tastes like where it came from. North Country is not stretching for claims, describing this one only as medium sweet.

Beet is the ingredient doing the unfamiliar work here. A fruited cider usually reaches for berries or stone fruit, which sharpen apple's acidity from the same direction it already runs. Beet comes at it from underneath instead, adding earthy sweetness rather than brightness. The orange and lemon in the blend are what keep that from settling. It would go well with something salty off a grill, while the weather still allows for it.

Beet Box is available now on tap and in cans to go at North Country Hard Cider in Dover.

Editor’s Take

There is a long tradition of cider names built on puns and a considerably shorter one of ciders that taste like the produce aisle, and Beet Box is quietly both. The pun is free. The genuinely interesting part is the beet, an ingredient most drinks spend their entire careers avoiding, sitting in a blend where it actually has a job to do rather than just supplying the color.

What I like about this one is the credit. The label carries the juicer's logo next to the cidery's, which is a small thing that most collaborations of this shape do not bother with. A cider made from somebody else's cold-pressed juice could easily have arrived as a wellness drink that took a wrong turn. Instead it reads as two local operations who were going to run into each other at the farmers market anyway.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.

Beet Box Turns a Juice-Bar Order Into a Hard Cider

Beet, carrot, cucumber, orange, and lemon is a juice-bar order in every respect except one: North Country turned a local juicer's cold-pressed blend into a medium sweet hard cider. It is out today in Dover.

Source & Editorial