When opening as Chicago’s only cider-focused bar in 2016, The Northman knew it needed to educate customers. It did so by creating a down-the-middle house cider to hand to patrons upon taking a seat: a few ounces of not-too-sweet, not-too-dry, not-too-tart, not-too-acidic cider made expressly for the bar. From there, customers could tack whichever direction they chose.
The Northman continued tweaking that house cider, and as it did, a surprising thing happened: rather than use it as a starting point to order something else, people increasingly ordered a full pour of it. Bar operators kept pushing the cider drier, which both customers and their own palates favored.
“We luckily and inadvertently had a huge testing ground to work on it for years,” The Northman co-founder Aaron Zacharias said. “When you get a majority of people saying, ‘I want to stay right here and drink this,’ it’s a little bit of a eureka moment.”
By the time Zacharias and his partners closed The Northman’s original North Center location in 2020 to focus on a version along the Chicago Riverwalk, there were big plans for that house cider never envisioned when The Northman opened: putting it into cans so it could be had anywhere, anytime. This spring, it finally arrived.
Just as Frontera Foods grew out of Frontera Grill and the legendary Home Run Inn branched into frozen pizza, The Northman has turned what started as a pub to a brand on store shelves. Northman Cider Co. launched in 2020, but only as a draft product at a handful of accounts until canning began this year.
Northman Cider Co. has sent two ciders into Chicago bars, breweries and liquor stores: Original Pub Cider — named for its origin story — and Rosé, which has a slight addition of wine for a lightly rosy hue. Both are made in southwest Michigan from Michigan apples. Rosé gets an addition of Michigan grapes.
Zacharias’ partner in the venture is Ambrosia Borowski, a former chef who worked as general manager of The Northman and founded the annual Chicago Cider Week. Borowski is the cider maker for Northman Cider Co., working with several Michigan apple farms to create the juice that is fermented and blended at Fenn Valley Vineyards in Fennville, Michigan.
Both ciders are refreshing on their own, expert pairings with food, and in a world of sweet cider, notable for their dryness.
“I don’t like a lot of sweetness,” Borowski said. “A little dab will do ya, and a little is very advantageous.”
The emphasis for Northman Cider Co. is “a little.”
In major brands, 12 ounces can be sweetened with 20 grams of sugar or more. Original Pub Cider has one gram of added sugar and Rosé has three.
The Pub Cider is unapologetically dry, though hardly one-note or austere. It boasts tart and zesty citrus notes, punctuated with mild funk. Rosé is notably rounder and sweeter, though without quite qualifying as “sweet.” It’s also tart, but fruitier and more approachable, with more muted funk.
Zacharias said dry cider was always Northman’s mission.
“There’s a place for sweeter ciders and dessert ciders and we don’t begrudge it for anyone, but it’s not how we want to do it,” he said. “And it’s not how you have to do it if you have the right fruit. Let the fruit shine.”
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Zacharias said his interest stretches back to opening Bar on Buena in 2003. Zacharias also has a stake in Montrose Saloon and The Green Post, a forthcoming restaurant, bar and coffee shop that opens at 4749 N. Rockwell St. in Lincoln Square this month. He was also a partner in Fountainhead, a Lincoln Square bar whose 2020 closure was “entirely pandemic related,” Zacharias said.
“It’s a product I thought was very underserved for a long time,” he said of cider. “It offers such a different experience than everything else, and clearly.”
Borowski came to the world of cider as a former chef and culinary school graduate who was trained to see wine as the pinnacle of fine drinking. But she came to prefer cider, which she said is as interesting and nuanced as wine, but part of a more welcoming culture.
“Wine is full of pretension and class and oftentimes about how much it’s costing rather than the fruit or farmers or the community drinking it,” she said.
The cider world, in contrast, felt more like home, she said; a place of “truly good people that want to see a good, fun product succeed.”
The Northman Beer & Cider Garden, 233 E. Riverwalk; thenorthman.com; northmancider.com
