This year, Rosh Hashanah is coming in a can – the forward

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a delicious artisanal Rosh Hashanah drink?

Maybe something with apple and honey, but no bitter IPA aftertaste. And, although you can never tell with artisanal production, it would be nice if it weren’t for the added sugar.

What would be even better would be to have the choice between 5 or 6 so as not to be dependent on the whims of a single craftsman. What if such a concoction was not just the whim of the maker, but was in fact a millennial recipe?

It would be nice if it weren’t for the heaviness of beer or the hopelessly hip styles of niche craft marketing, right?

Welcome to cyser (pron. “Sizer”), the Rosh Hashanah drink that you didn’t know you needed, but ticks all the boxes. It’s not beer-based, it’s mead-based, and it’s a staple of the meads that flourish in America. There is now a mead in every state plus the two that should be states – the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

Honey wine has long been considered a molasses substance with Viking notes, but there are a whole slew of new producers excited to bring us crunchy, dry meads, many of which are blended with a variety of tangy fruit for an extra dimension.

Monty Python asked, “What have the Romans ever done for us? Well, on the one hand, they fermented honey and added apples to it as if they were waiting for the Jews in North America to crave a niche New Year’s drink. Cyser – which the Romans drank and called sicera – must now have over 50% of its fermented sugar coming from honey. Would you laugh if I told you that the name maybe even derived from Hebrew shekar (שֵׁכָר)?

Like whiskey, the ingredients required are extremely simple. Honey, apples, water and yeast. Different types of cyser mix apples and honey at different times in the process. Depending on the viscosity, flavor, and strength of the cyser they are targeting, growers ferment apples and honey separately or together (or in different amounts at different times) and use different varieties of apples, honey, and yeast.

This year Rosh Hashanah comes in a can

I tried six cysers from five different meaderies. Five were courtesy of Mutiny, a company dedicated exclusively to distributing mead, and the other was Kosher Honeymaker Apple Cyser from Maine Mead Works, one of the East Coast’s largest meads. The cysers came in custom-shaped boxes, bottles and containers. They ranged from just four ingredients in a neat, dry cyser to an “apple pie” mead – with freshly squeezed apples, locally ground cinnamon and hand-shaved Madagascar vanilla beans. And what I tasted barely scratched the selection – there are probably some delicious mead cysers near you, especially if you live in Michigan – which, it turns out, is the state of. Mead.

This Rosh Hashanah, grab yourself a cyser.