Hard cider brewery comes to northeast Minneapolis with Sociable Cider Werks

As Minnesota’s craft-beer landscape grows faster than your holiday-season waistline, the local hard cider scene has stayed undesirably thin. However, Wade Thompson and Jim Watkins are throwing their hats into the bushel with Sociable Cider Werks, a new cidery in brewery-fertile northeast Minneapolis.

“Being in the neighborhood that we are, there are a lot of great breweries around, so we’re bringing something different to the experience,” Thompson said last month.

While the duo’s hard ciders and apple graffs (a mixture of beer wort and cider) aren’t quite finished, they quietly opened their 1,100-square-foot taproom on Black Friday, offering nano-batch beers brewed on a two-barrel system. Until Sociable’s ciders are officially ready in late December or early January, Thompson said it’s more of a soft opening.

Once the Northeast cider house is fully functioning, the plan is to have six to eight taps with a selection of two or three graffs, plus a few small-run, taproom-only beers. Sociable’s core flavors will be a dry apple graff called Freewheeler, and Broken Spoke, an apple graff/milk stout mash-up. “Nobody’s really been doing graffs before, so there’s a lot of different directions you can take this stuff, and we’re pretty excited to explore it,” Thompson said.

Thompson said graffs usually take about two months to produce, with a secondary aging process that lasts four to six weeks. He hopes to add a canning line in late January and distribute apple-based blends.

Located at 1500 NE. Fillmore St., just blocks from 612Brew and Indeed Brewing, it stands to reason that Sociable Cider Werks, with its 900-square-foot patio and bocce court, could become a regular stop on the popular northeast Minneapolis taproom tour. From the sounds of it, both Thompson and Watkins have been making microbrew excursions themselves. “Jim and I have been living in Northeast for the past three, four years, so we’ve been hitting up all those places since they’ve been opening,” Thompson said.

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/dining/234634801.html

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