Decideret

"In Denmark, we are blessed with apples that offer a balance between a tart acidity and a fruity apple sweetness. Our cider culture, on the other hand, is impoverished. Our food culture has improved with the new Nordic cuisine - now it's time to take a look at what we're drinking."

With Decideret, the three founders, Cornelius Simonsen, Jakob Paludan and Martin Pedersen make wild fermented ciders and fruit pét'nat's. For this they use surplus garden apples and organic fruit from the best orchards in Denmark.

Decideret prove that ciders can be as complex and vinous as wine, as tangy as Pet'Nat', as tart as lambic and as fruity as freshly squeezed juice.

The organically grown apples are crushed and pressed, the juice is spontaneously fermented, and the cider is bottled without further intervention. Some ciders are drunk young, others gain complexity as they age in oak or through macerations with apple pomace or fruits such as cherries or grapes. The emphasis in production is on craftsmanship, experimentation and reducing food waste.

After all, every year 5 million kilos of apples fall from the trees and spoil in Denmark's gardens. On the island of Funen, there is a long-standing tradition of dropping off surplus fruit at the cider factory in Ørbæk, where apple donors sign a paper confirming that no pesticides have been used. The juice from these crisp garden apples fills some of Decideret's fermentation tanks and has also inspired them to start their own apple collections in Copenhagen and Aarhus. In addition, they work with some of the best organic orchards in the eastern part of Denmark to be able to use the most interesting local apple varieties for their outstanding ciders.

It all started in Copenhagen, on a late summer day with friends in Nørrebro Park. They wondered why there wasn't a culture of drinking good cider in Denmark, as there was in France, England and Spain; after all, there was no shortage of apples. With the exceptional quality and diversity of the local apples, Denmark likes to be called apple country, but where was the cider that could do justice to those apples?

So the first 100 bottles were created with great passion to pave the way for a Danish cider culture, in a garage northwest of Copenhagen. In August 2015, they borrowed a press, collected apples from the gardens and parks of Copenhagen and just got started, without having a clue about the art of wild fermenting at the time.

In 2016 they moved the "production" to a container in Nørrebro/Frederiksberg, where highly explosive cider and volatile acids drove the learning process. The next stop was Grønttorvet, Copenhagen's old vegetable market, with a first handsome result of about 3000 litres of highly drinkable cider. They delivered the bottles on their bicycles to bars and restaurants all over Copenhagen and when the summer of 2018 came to an end, they were sold out. Today the production is well established in Copenhagen's North Harbour, producing around 30 000 litres of the finest Danish cider for the 2020 vintage, always with the idea of pushing the boundaries of what cider can be.