Bushwacker Cider

I’ve been trying to come up with “festive” things to do this fall and since I’ve been drinking fresh apple cider by the gallon this year, I decided to give the hard stuff a try.  There’s a little shop over in SE Portland called Bushwacker Cider that’s been on my list for a while, so Sunday afternoon my best bud, Gloria, and I went for a little girl talk and drinking.

This place is cool because it ONLY sells cider.  It reminds me of Bottles in NE Portland except it has a huge selection of cider instead of beer.  They have nine taps and two big coolers full of bottles.  Some of them looked pretty fancy in champagne-style bottles with corks.  I didn’t check the prices, but I bet they are pretty spendy.  It reminded me of senior prom in high school.  We went to Atwater’s for dinner (now Portland City Grill) and the server suggested sparkling cider for our table.  Smart man.  Our table of 8 knocked back about 15 bottles of the stuff that looked just like the facy bottles at Bushwacker.  Our cider bill was around $150, much to the shock of our table of 17-year-olds used to Martinelli’s $3 bottles.

The sample tray is $7, getting you pours from the first five taps on the menu. (Pay no attention to the labels on the tray, it’s obviously a beer tasting board.)  The only drawback is that they are not ordered by flavor, so sweet ciders were in between dry ones.  But it’s not really that big of a deal. Our tastes both proved to be pretty girly, both of us liked the sweet pumpkin cider from Woodchuck the best.  Yumm…  I could have drank a whole pint of that stuff, but since I was still a little hung over from the night before, and it was a Sunday afternoon  we decided to call it quits after the tasting.  I left wanting more, so I’ll probably be back.

BUSHWACKER CIDER
1212-D SE POWELL BLVD.
12-11 SUNDAY-THURSDAY, 12-12 FRIDAY-SATURDAY