The can gives the full name: Maple Cinnamon Spiced Apple. The newsletter subject line gets it down to four words. "Spiced Apple is back."

Dead Horse Cider has returned its autumn cider to cans and taps at its Stanley, Manitoba cidery. It is a 5 percent semi-sweet cider sold in 355 mL cans, available as singles, eight-packs and 24-can flats, with the base of the can noting that it is crushed and fermented in Manitoba.

The cidery keeps the description to one line. Crisp apple, a little maple and just enough cinnamon, semi-sweet and lightly spiced. That is a three-ingredient beverage described in three clauses, which is a reasonable indication of how much is meant to be going on in the glass.

Maple is the part worth pausing on. In a spiced cider it is doing double duty, contributing sweetness while also adding a woody, lightly caramelized note that plain sugar would not. Keeping it to "a little" alongside cinnamon that is only "just enough" suggests the apple is still intended to be the main event rather than a carrier for the spice. The cidery is positioning this as a cooler-weather drink without pushing it toward dessert.

Crisp apple, a little maple and just enough cinnamon. Semi-sweet and lightly spiced.

The timing is not incidental. Dead Horse framed the return as one of the few sure signs the season is changing, and it arrives in the same newsletter announcing that the taproom is moving to shorter autumn hours: closed Thursdays, 4 to 9 p.m. Friday, noon to 9 p.m. Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday.

Spiced Apple is pouring at the Stanley taproom now and is available in cans through the cidery's online shop.

Editor’s Take

Autumn spicing is an arms race almost everywhere else. Every September a wave of drinks arrives carrying nutmeg, allspice, ginger, clove and vanilla all at once, on the apparent theory that the season is a checklist and nobody wants to be caught having skipped an item. Dead Horse has entered the same month with apple, maple and cinnamon, and then stopped.

The maple is the choice worth admiring. It would have been easier to reach for brown sugar or plain sweetener and let the cinnamon carry the seasonal signal on its own. Maple does not work that way. It brings its own woody, faintly caramelized character that sits underneath the apple rather than on top of it, which is why the cidery can describe this as semi-sweet without it reading as candied. It is also the one sweetener in the category that a Canadian cidery can use without anyone raising an eyebrow about where the idea came from.

And the phrase on the tasting note is just enough cinnamon, which is a more confident thing to print than it looks. Cinnamon is the loudest thing you can put in a glass of apple. Saying you have used just enough of it is a claim that somebody tasted this repeatedly and stopped at the point most producers would have kept going.

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.

Spiced Apple Is Back, With Maple Alongside the Cinnamon

Dead Horse has brought its Maple Cinnamon Spiced Apple back to cans and taps in Stanley. Three ingredients, 5 percent, and a cidery that has timed the return to the week the taproom hours change.

Source & Editorial