How To Bridge the Cider & Wine Worlds Together: A Harvest Handshake

18 months ago an ambitious Brewery and Cider House opened its doors in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles. Benny Boy Brewing & Cider House is the first of its kind, producing beer and cider on the same property. This posed a conceptual challenge to permitting administrators, who are famously known to make alcohol permitting decisions based on post-Prohibition law, and not based on logic. With persistence comes triumph, and finally Chelsey Rosetter & Benny Farber pushed the right buttons to accomplish their goal of bringing handcrafted beers (brewed with whole flower hops!) and ciders to the east side of Los Angeles, and beyond.

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Benny Boy Brewing houses a 15-barrel production brewery, and is home to the only Tank Bar in the city, where beers are poured directly from the the tanks they are crafted in. The separate cider house is across the sprawling outdoor beer garden, which doubles as a hotspot for LA's top pop-up food vendors. Following Old World traditions, Benny Boy Brewing produces world-class beer and dry California cider with quality ingredients straight from the farm, less processing, zero filtering, and only natural carbonation. So what happens when someone visiting the property wants a glass of wine? Enter Pali Wine Co.

The collaboration began with Pali Wine Co. crafting natural Chardonnay & Pinot Noir with Benny Boy Brewing, both of which are available on tap to drink when you're on property! The creative juices began to flow, literally, and what came next pushed the limits of cider with a wine mindset. What would happen if you aged a top quality cider with grape skins macerating on top of the juice? Fraternizing. Obedience. Alchemy. Harvest Handshake mingles the excellence of 100% Newtown Pippin variety apples with Pinot Noir skins, farmed to perfection from some of the top vineyard sites in California. Wild fermented on the the grape skins, no yeast is added, naturally carbonated, and there's no filtration. The texture is alive, with juicy notes of ripe apple and raspberry, and a floral undertone of violets and cherry blossom. It's a fizzy explosion of flavor, friendship, and ingenuity. A true harvest handshake.