Fruktstereo Cider Revolution

Smell: Strong aroma. Punchy, earthy and acetic.
Initial Taste: Strong bite from acidity and carbonation. Pungent apple and light pear notes. Puckering to start, almost makes you wince. Acetic/vinegar.
After Taste: When carbonation dies, flavour remains almost unchanged. Pulpy, muddled apples are very minimum. Acidity is the key element here.
On ice: Almost the same, mouth-feel is slightly more tonic-like.

Additional Notes: The Fruktstereo Cider Revolution from Sweden is really a funk-stereo of flavours. Very acetic, puckering and dry, it’s an aggressive cider that is not for the faint of heart. One of the sourest ciders we’ve have, it would pair very well with food (as its not sessionable and food flavours might tame the elements). Very unfiltered so you’ll have to swirl the sediment well; and open with care and patience as it has a lot carbonation. The apple and pear notes are very muddled, funky and dank.

We make CIDER (and/or FRUIT PET NAT) from 100% fruit, fermented with its natural yeast and without any additives. After picking, crushing and pressing the different fruits we use neutral containers to ferment the juice, mostly plastic vats. During fermentation we bottle the juice and let the last part of the natural sugar ferment in the bottle, producing bubbles.

2016 was our first commercial vintage and we made approximately 3000 liters of cider and wine, divided in 18 different “albums”.
When we started off our only goal was to simply make nice, energetic, fruit driven, and very drinkable ciders from fruit that we picked ourselves, that came from abandoned gardens and orchards in the countryside around Malmö. We didn’t tend to put much of a focus on what we were using, so long as it tasted good. We began to realise quite early on that not only were we using apples and pears for our product, but we began including other varieties of fruits and berries. With these additions and for those of you who are aware of the Swedish system, it might come to no surprise that we weren’t even allowed to be calling our products “ciders”.

In truth, some of the beverages, even though they included apples and pears, were quite far from the classic style of cider that streams from the cider regions of France, England, and Spain. So we began to think, what do we call what we are making? When we began to export and tell the story of our product, we came to an understanding that we’ve stretched the quintessential definition of a “cider”, that possibly we have to define ourselves in a different category that stretches across boxes and borders as our products do.

A category already existing in the wine world is pétillant naturel or for short “pét-nat”. This is a wine made with the ancestral method which results a sparkling wine. The process, in short, is putting grape juice that is still fermenting in bottles, corking them, and allowing the fermentation to finish in the bottle which will create natural bubbles. Since this method was the most similar to what we use for most of our beverages, we decided to start terming our products “fruit pét-nats”. It felt like a far more defining term of what we’re actually making then calling all of our products ciders. We didn’t stop there, as we began to think that one can even specify the kind of pét-nat, even if it’s made of only one or two fruits. For example: “plum pét-nat”, “cherry pét-nat”, “apple-grape pét-nat”.

Another aspect to our products is that we pick as much of the fruit as possible ourselves, and with family and friends. First years 50% of the fruit were from private gardens and abandoned farms in Skåne. The other 50% were “waste fruit” from different places in Skåne. When the farmers can´t sell their stored apples anymore they contact us and we take what´s left and make our more easy drinking and fruitier cuvées.