Action Figures & Their Beers -- Not. Too. Shabby!

by Beedo Sookcool
on 2023-11-07, 10:25:42

ORIGINAL SIN BLACK WIDOW CIDER

Okay, let's get this over with first: I know I already used Blackarachnia for DuClaw's Dirty Little Freak, but that was when she was in her robot pole-dancer gentlemen's entertainer mode. And this is the perfect alcoholic beverage to match up with her beast mode. It's still one of the best spider alt-modes of any Transformer, even though it's fragile, doesn't hold together very well, and looks like a hot mess from underneath or face-on. But she turns into something approximating a black widow, so there ya go.

Anywho, his 6% ABV, medium-fizzy, violet-red cider touts that it's made with "freshly-pressed New York apples, blackberry, champagne yeast, & sulfites to protect flavor." I dunno, though, I think the sulfites mar the flavour a bit. I know they're used as preservatives, but they also add an acrid, struck-match / farty kind of whiff to the drink. Maybe my nose and palate are a bit more sensitive to these things; I can't say for certain. But every time I drink something with sulfites in it, it's a couple points off in the final evaluation, as far as I'm concerned. But if sulfites don't deter you, you'll be fine.

How does it taste, though? Well, it's funny – we got a 6-pack of this stuff a while back, we had one each, and I wasn't terribly impressed. My wife didn't like it at all. Now, I love apples, and I love blackberries, but this was sour. No, no . . . this was SSSSSSO-OU-URRR. As in, I was honestly worried that I couldn't finish the can I was drinking, let alone the rest of 6-pack. So damn' mouth-puckeringly sour, I thought I was going to wind up looking like the comic book character, Arseface. That kind of sour. British cider-style sour. So I put the rest of the 6-pack aside for several months and forgot about them.

And then last week, I stumbled across them again while reorganising the pantry, and realised I could get an article out of them. So I popped a couple in the fridge for research-drinking and review-drinking . . . and they weren't nearly as bad as I'd remembered. Sure it was still sour, but it was more like a summer-fruit-cobbler kind of sour, that's tempered by a bare-minimum amount of sugar. It was actually nice and refreshing after a couple hours of hard work, rearranging shelves and hefting crates around. I'm not sure if letting the rest of the 6-pack sit around for a few months helped it mellow, or being hot and thirsty helped realign my perceptions, or I just got a bad first can, or what.

But I liked my most recent can a lot more than I did my first. Goes really well with some microwave pork rinds, too. (Yes, you read that right. They make pork rinds in popcorn bags that you can stick in the microwave for 90 seconds, and pull out hot, salty, snap-crackle-popping, fluffed-out, crunchy, bacon-smelling little porky clouds. Truly, Dr. Pangloss is correct, and we live in the best of all possible worlds. And they're called Lowrey's Bacon Curls, if you have a sudden urge to order them online.)

My recent change of heart aside, their marketing tagline – "The last cider you'll ever love" – is laying it on a bit thick. I mean, I like it more than nearly all British ciders (which isn't really saying much), but whereas there are times I would kill for a nice Woodchuck Amber or Elderflower Suffolk Cyder, I would probably only go so far as to bestow a wedgie or a noogie for one of these Black Widow Ciders.

Drink this if you also like: British cider, fruity and berry ciders, sours, chemical preservatives.