Uncommon Crop Cider - Wild Blackberry

About

Of course blackberries are a well known crop, so in general they are not as uncommon as the other crops in this project. However, harvesting wild blackberries for a commercial product in Wisconsin does seem relatively uncommon, so in many ways we were assessing these wild berries for use in a cider. There are actually multiple blackberry species that grow in Wisconsin, so that’s why we didn’t include a scientific name.

Harvesting Wild Blackberries

While not quite as common as blackcaps in Southwestern Wisconsin, they do grow, they are fairly abundant in fields, open woods, forest edges, and roadsides. Picking the berries is quite time consuming and slow since the wild berries tend to be significantly smaller than most cultivated varieties. It took one person 3 days of picking to get enough berries for one small, 50 gallon batch of cider. Making larger batches would require quite an effort and a lot of connections to good picking spots.

Making the Cider

To make the cider we froze the blackberries, thawed them, squished them by hand, and put them in the cider whole along with their juices. We left them in for 2 weeks during fermentation and then removed them. We lightly sweetened this cider with honey when it was done.

Tasting the Cider

The wild blackberry cider was popular, and in our consumer tasting survey it scored a 7.63 out of 10 making it one of the higher scoring of the ciders in the project. It had some very unique flavors and aromas come through with some resembling expected profiles of blackberry while others were more funky and feral, likely from the fact that we used whole wild fruit with seeds, imperfections, and all. The apple word cloud below includes descriptions of the wild blackberry cider from our focus group tasting.

Conclusions

The wild blackberry cider was quite enjoyable, but the logistics of harvesting greater quantities of wild berries for a larger batch of cider would be a little daunting. There could possibly be opportunities for a community cider wherein a lot of people harvest blackberries to contribute to a larger batch. If not, we’ll probably continue doing occasional small batches of this cider to enjoy it when we can.