The Ice Cider

Brännland Apple Ice 2025 is a refined version of an expression that has come to take its place at the heart of Brännland Iscider’s identity. As always, this year’s Apple Ice is a three-part balance between sweet, acid and alcohol but the blend is rounder and warmer, sporting more yellow fruit. The reason is we’ve developed the Apple Ice blend. In previous iterations Apple Ice was 100% Mutsu but this year we’ve made small additions of Belle De Boskoop, Cox Orange and Red Gravensteiner. The goal is not to change the expression but to give the unique signature of Mutsu a stronger base to stand on.

Just as people grow through understanding individuals and cultures different from their own, Apple Ice 2025 is stronger because of the added varieties in the blend. An ice cider more itself than ever.

This is our most “winelike” bottling and it pays to see it as such.

Enjoy as a light sweet summer wine or aperitif but do also try it together with any food that plays well with apples.

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Our ice cider once made one of Europe´s finest winemakers cry. It reminded him of his childhood summers at his grandmothers’ orchards in Normandie. The ice cider became a madeleine-cookie moment, a suddenly surfacing memory of a simpler, happier time.

Then 2024 is all that, classically balanced, not too dry, not too sweet and with components beyond the obvious ones that will make it interesting to follow as it ages. From concentrated but accessible red and yellow fruit now to more muted, darker notes with time retaining an acidity that is an introduction to the flavors of autumn whenever you open a bottle. A sweet wine for the seasonally driven. Drink with classic desserts and cheeses but do also try this out with rich French and German classic courses, paté, pork charcuterie.

This year the barrel aged ice cider from Brännland Iscider switches name and becomes Essence. The change is part of our work to renew and clarify our labels.  

Andreas Sundgren, founder Brännland Iscider

• When we started barrel ageing in 2013 we just wanted to find out whether ice cider actually could be barrel aged for longer periods of time. Since then we’ve gone from two 225 liter barrique’s in the shower room, via used Burgundy and Sauternes barrels, to the current set-up using only 500 liter Stockinger barrels.  

• Essence is a clarification in several ways. The barrel aged ice cider has always been those ice ciders in a vintage with the greatest presence and weight, very often sensorically concentrated, but the barrel ageing also deepens and concentrates the expression of the ice cider.  

• The bigger barrels gives us softer barrel notes and often require longer ageing. We use mostly used barrels which imparts slow oxidation rather than woody notes and so Essence combines the magic of Stockinger barrels with something more elegant, binding Essence more clearly to our other non barrel aged bottlings while still retaining the barrel character.  

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In the wake of the success of our first release in september 2025 of an ice cider produced entirely using apples grown in our northern home county of Västerbotten we’re now releasing the next vintage of the same blend, Brännland Iscider LXIV Västerbotten 2023.

Once again a field blend of around 50 varieties from trial orchards established between 2014 and 2016.  

When we started producing ice cider in 2012 we knew we wanted to be a winemaker working with apples to be reckoned with over time. Do become that we taught ourselves to make ice cider and scaled up our business as negociants while at the same time establishing the world’s northernmost orchards.  

Since 2014 we’ve planted more than 10 hectares of orchard in northern Sweden. Some of those orchards we own, others are owned and maintained by farmers all over the region.  

The fruit they’re growing isn’t just an opening to plant more apple trees, it is meant to strike courage into the hearts of others who are contemplating the seemingly impossible and it opens the possibility to look at northern Sweden as something more than just a place used to extract timber, ore and hydro-power. It’s a battering ram, the beginning of something truly new, a sustainable small scale transition that can be scaled up without losing the advantages of that which is small scale.  In working up this orchard baseline we’ve looked closely at what works in regions in other parts of the world where apple growers and their fruit are valued higher than in Sweden.  

And the ice cider?

Andreas Sundgren, founder Brännland Iscider,  

We started producing ice cider from apples grown in the north in 2020 and around 2023 we started to have a basic understanding of the balance in the fruit, how it differed from the southern fruit we’d been working with up until then in terms of balance and sensorics.  

The northern fruit deviates in the balance between acidity and residual sweetness, the acidity is relatively speaking stronger. To save residual sugar we ferment the ice cider to a lower alcohol level but the finished wine still tends to have lower residual sugar than ice cider from southern apples. But because of the much more pronounced presence of tannins in the northern fruit the ice cider from it doesn’t necessarily present as dryer. Those tannins seem to amplify the sweetness.  

Brännland Iscider LXIV Västerbotten 2023 is fermented in stainless steel using natural yeasts and then bottled.  

 Brännland Iscider proudly presents Brännland Iscider LXIV Västerbotten 2023.  

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Five years ago, Brännland Iscider moved from inoculating yeast in fermentations to relying solely on the native yeasts on the apples and in the juice. That foundationally changed our ice ciders. One of the consequences was that the juices with a very high sugar content after concentration didn’t ferment as far as they had previously. Suddenly, we were left with a number of ice ciders that ended at 350 to 400 grams of residual sugar and between 3 and 5 percent alcohol after fermentations were done.  

To begin with we used these very sweet ice ciders to give our established blends more body if they needed it, but around the same time we also started working with Boge distillery. Boge is a fantastic small-scale producer of spirits based on fruits and grapes, a craft that differs quite a lot from distillation of whisky or gin. An old dream of combining a highly concentrated ice cider with a distillate made using ice cider resurfaced and in 2021 we fortified the first six hundred liters of very sweet Mutsu with distillate made for us by Boge.  

And so Brännland Iscider Spirit consists of concentrated ice cider fortified with spirits distilled from ice cider of the same vintage. It is the concentrated core of ice cider in a bottle, the soul of the ice cider if you will. Hence the name. We use about 25 kilos of apples to make a single bottle of Brännland Iscider Spirit.

Having presented Spirit under the radar in 2024 and 2025 we now feel it is time to release the first 900 bottles. Much like port and other fortified wines we’ve opted to release Spirit as a non-vintage where the oldest ice cider in the cuvée has been in barrel for almost four years. It is aged in small 112-liter barrels from Stockinger without topping up and the concentration in combination with the barrel ageing creates a unique fortified wine with a depth and girth unlike anything we’ve ever made. Residual sugar stops at 240 grams per liter but is well matched by the characteristic acidity so unique to Swedish apples giving Spirit an almost dry finish. The color is deep amber and the alcohol level stops at 17% after a touch of ice cider from our latest vintage. This wine can be kept and aged indefinitely.  

We proudly present Brännland Iscider Spirit.