Life in the Slow Lane (The Pearl): Finger Lakes Breweries and Cideries (Part X)

Meier’s Creek Brewing Company is a new craft brewery and taproom located in Cazenovia. Their single mission is to create extraordinary beer with food to match. The brewery sits on 22 acres of beautiful farmland with hops out front and miles of trails out back. adventure awaits. Their core values drive them to achieve their goals and inspire others: “work hard, play hard”, “together, we’re better”, “follow true north” and “dream big.”

Hopshire Farm & Brewery is a family owned business. They've combined their belief in New York agriculture, local foods and great beer into a brewery that uses as many local ingredients as possible to produce high quality beers of several styles.

We spent a beautiful evening listening to Notorious Stringbusters...a foot stompin, rug cuttin, knee slapping, string bustin bluegrass band. We enjoyed a little dinner from a local food truck and tried a few of their beers. I had Mt. Pleasant a crisp refreshing Pilsner and Stan had Shire Ale a malty brown ale fermented with Scottish Edinburgh yeast. Flaked oats and six different barley malts including chocolate, dark crystal and amber malts are used in this rich tasting ale.

South Hill Cider sits on a hilltop just south of Ithaca. The owner has been bottling his own cider since 2003. As a musician firmly grounded in traditional American Old-time music, he can’t help but point out the many parallels to cider: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both cider and Old-time music were staples of American culture.

Most of their ciders are sparkling, which isn’t a favorite of ours, so we both had the Goldwin. It's dry and still (no bubbles) cider. It was inspired by the great Burgundian whites and leaning on ages of winemaking tradition, which blends two American heirloom apple varieties and fermented in barrel and stainless steel. It had notes of apricot, early-picked white grapes, beeswax, grapefruit pith and lemon zest. We thought it was very good. Along with the cider we also enjoyed pizza and the music of a banjo player.

Indian Ladder Farms Cidery and Brewery (ILFCB) makes and serves beer and hard cider on a family-owned century farm located in Altamont, New York, beneath the dramatic cliffs of the Helderberg Escarpment. They produce hard cider and beer using crops such as apples, pears, berries and pumpkins as well as hops and malting barley grown on Indian Ladder and other local farms.

We visited this brewery after hiking the Indian Ladder Trail. We enjoyed a little lunch with our beers. Stan had the Indian Lager Farms an Estate Helles lager made with Tinka Barley and hopped with Nugget, Columbus & Crystal. Hints of pine and grass with a clean bitterness. I had the Chitwood-Style which was a light German lager made to please any beer drinker.