Marshmallow in a hopped cider

Most of the hopped ciders you will find are built dry — closer to a West Coast IPA, where the bitterness is the whole point. That is a fine thing to make, it just isn’t what I was after. I wanted the other end of it, the soft hazy New England kind, because I think it’s the more fun drink. The trouble is that a hazy IPA gets its body from grain — oats, wheat, sometimes lactose — and cider has none of that to work with. If the hop character was going to come forward instead of the bite, it needed a sweet backbone from somewhere else.

The answer was marshmallow. The sweetness and the body are the obvious half of it. The gelatin is the half worth knowing about, because gelatin is a fining agent some cidermakers dose on purpose — it is listed for exactly two jobs: reducing astringency and bitterness, and unmasking positive aromas. That is the whole problem with hops in cider, and it is sitting in a bag of marshmallows.

We have tried making it without the gelatin. Vegan marshmallows, Fluff — both have gone through the series, and neither one gives you the pillowy thing the real ones do.

Pillow Hopped isn’t one cider, it’s a series. The marshmallow stays where it is and the hop is the part I keep changing, which is the whole reason I built it this way to begin with — once you’ve got a soft backbone that isn’t fighting the hop, whatever hop you put in there has nowhere to hide. So we swap it. Same base, same idea, and a genuinely different drink on the other side of it, which is a lot more interesting to me than making one recipe forever.

Right now it’s Mosaic, and it’s doing exactly what I hoped the base would let a hop do. Juicy grapefruit and fresh pine mingle with soft, creamy marshmallow and a smooth touch of vanilla. The next one won’t taste like that, and that’s sort of the fun of it. Check our menu to see which hop we’re currently pouring.

— Ray