Mondays, if we’re being honest, are best met with something a little subversive — a reminder there’s a whole world beyond your inbox and that sad third cup of coffee. Enter our Monday European-style Cider Flight: four distinct glasses of liquid passport stamps, each steeped in centuries of orchard gossip, political intrigue, and terroir so vivid you could almost taste the soil. From an Italian rebel reborn in the shadow of Mont Blanc, to a Yorkshire pear waltz in silk gloves, to Normandy apples dressed for a rain-slicked promenade, to Willamette Valley fruit channeling its inner French poet — it’s a tour of the Old World without leaving your barstool, and without a single TSA line to sour your mood.
Peaks & Pints Monday European-style Cider Flight
Maley Cidre du Saint Bernard
3.5% ABV
Maley — a name plucked from both the ancient Valdostano whisper for apple (Malus, if you’re feeling Latin) and one of Mont Blanc’s pre-20th century aliases (Mont Malais, if you’re feeling alpine and mysterious). It’s Gianluca’s delicious resurrection of a cider tradition Mussolini stomped out in the 1930s because it wasn’t “Italian” enough — cider being, in the fascist mind, a frivolous French affectation. Today, Maley stands alone in Italy, coaxing liquid poetry from heirloom apples with a devotion that borders on heresy. The result? A flirt of funk, a wink of fruit, a glass that tastes like defiance.
Samuel Smith Organic Perry
5% ABV
Imagine an English orchard in full pear-drunk bloom, every tree humming something just slightly indecent to the summer air. That’s Samuel Smith‘s Organic Perry — dry and sparkling, pale gold as dawn over Yorkshire, slipping across your tongue like an orchard ghost in silk gloves. Brewed with heirloom care and actual conscience (read: certified organic, gluten-free, vegan, halo optional), it pirouettes between crisp and lush, a delicate perfume of ripe pear tangled with the faintest floral sigh. It’s the kind of drink that doesn’t just pair with blue cheese or pear tarts — it pairs with moments you’d rather not explain.
Dupont Cidre Bouché Brut de Normandie
5.5% ABV
From the rolling, rain-kissed orchards of Normandy comes Dupont Cidre Bouché — the kind of cider that’s been whispered to by centuries of wind and woodsmoke. Pale gold and shimmering with tiny, aristocratic bubbles, it’s a living postcard of French terroir: apple skins still warm from the sun, citrus curled in the corners, a sly kiss of pine resin, leather, and the faint funk of an orchard in full, unapologetic bloom. Naturally fermented, unfiltered, vintage-dated, it drinks like a conversation between elegance and earthiness — one in silk gloves, the other in muddy boots — and you’re invited to sit right between them.
Heartland Tomber Dans Les Pommes
7.1% ABV
Heartland Ciderworks’ Tomber Dans Les Pommes is France by way of the Willamette Valley, an orchard sonnet pressed from bittersweet Marie Menard and Reine des Pommes apples with a few historic American rogues — Harrison and Roxbury Russet — slipped in for mischief. It pours like golden dusk over a Normandy hillside, smelling faintly of caramel, fig, pear, and the ghost of vanilla-laced apple butter cooling on some imagined farmhouse stove. Medium tannins and sly acidity give it both backbone and bite, while the finish whispers of earth and old wood, as if the orchard itself wanted you to linger just a moment longer before the autumn fog rolls in.
LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory
