Cider on NCL Jade?

We will be travelling on the Norwegian Jade in December. Does anyone know if they stock Cider in the bars/restaurants please? Thanks in advance:)

Welcome to Cruise Critic.

Best to ask this question on the Norwegian board at this link:

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/forumdisplay.php?f=107

We will be travelling on the Norwegian Jade in December. Does anyone know if they stock Cider in the bars/restaurants please? Thanks in advance:)

If you mean the alcoholic drink, we refer to it as hard cider. Most Americans think of cider as a non alcoholic drink.

Bottled Strongbow IIRC (I don't drink the stuff - it's like putting diesel into a finely tuned petrol (beer) engine):D

I think this poster is just trying advertise for Hard Cider and perhaps trying to get cruise lines to consider carrying some specific brand but what brand each cruise line carries is most likely going to be tied directly to the brands of beer they carry as these are the larger producers of Hard Cider and already have distribution channels in place and contractual agreements with the cruise lines.

I think this poster is just trying advertise for Hard Cider and perhaps trying to get cruise lines to consider carrying some specific brand but what brand each cruise line carries is most likely going to be tied directly to the brands of beer they carry as these are the larger producers of Hard Cider and already have distribution channels in place and contractual agreements with the cruise lines.

(Hard) cider is a popular drink in UK (and becoming more so). Unfortunately, the choice of ciders on board (i.e. one) is worse than the choice of drinkable beers (i.e. not many more than one).

If OP is attempting to improve customer choice re cider on board ship then they should be applauded and supported - some cruise lines are beginning to dip their toes in the water re offering more craft beers - a trend to be applauded as well.

(Hard) cider is a popular drink in UK (and becoming more so). Unfortunately, the choice of ciders on board (i.e. one) is worse than the choice of drinkable beers (i.e. not many more than one).

 

If OP is attempting to improve customer choice re cider on board ship then they should be applauded and supported - some cruise lines are beginning to dip their toes in the water re offering more craft beers - a trend to be applauded as well.

I don't think that you or the OP understand the problems affecting the sale of hard cider here in the US or the current market or you would realize that trying to get cruise lines to improve customer choice for hard cider on cruises provisioned out of the US doesn't make sense. There are very limited options that the cruise lines have in regards to buying hard cider for cruises originating from US ports. The problem is not with the cruise lines at all and the cruise lines can't do anything to fix the problem. The problem is actually fairly complex.

First off US Tax laws that were passed after Prohibition don't cover hard cider because it was not available in the US then. Therefore hard cider, under our current tax laws is taxed as either beer, wine (depending on alcohol content) or champagne(depending on the amount of carbonation) which is an overly complex tax structure for hard cider and can be incredibly costly to the hard cider maker if they cannot control the amount of carbonation or alcohol in their hard cider. This has led to the proposed CIDER Act which has not yet been passed by Congress.

http://www.ciderassociation.org/cideract

Secondly, hard cider is currently a little over half of 1% of the total US sales for alcoholic beverages, so there are not that many brands of hard cider in national distribution in the US yet. In the UK, hard cider is 15% of total UK sales for alcoholic beverages. This is a huge difference between our countries. I'm sure you are also unaware that hard cider was not sold in the US between the late 1800's and 1991 and that when it was re-launched the first time in 1991, it flopped commercially. Around 2007 some chefs began serving hard cider in restaurants that created food based on farm to market products and that's what began to create a market for this product in the US. You might be surprised to learn that the hard cider business only really began to take off in sales the US and gain market share in 2011 and has been steadily growing since but it is still in it's infancy here. The best selling hard cider in the US is Angry Orchard which was only introduced in 2011.

So there are limited major brands and the artisanal producers either don't produce enough product for a large corporation to buy it or they are struggling under the complex tax laws that drastically affect the pricing of their product, or they don't have wide enough distribution. ALL of this limits what the cruise lines can buy.

The craft beers don't have this complexity to deal with.

So, there is absolutely no point in complaining to the cruise lines about not having products that are simply not available to them and that also are not yet selling enough here in the US to be worthwhile for them to stock alternative brands. Remember each bit of storage space on a ship is worth money to the cruise line. Ask yourself as a business person, is it better to stock an item that only 1% of the cruise passengers want or an item of equal size that 30% of the cruise passengers want. Which do you think would be a better business decision?

You might wonder about importing hard ciders from your country to ours to sell to the cruise ships being provisioned here - well, the product would be affected by our tax laws for imports, then the tax laws that cider producers are trying to get changed with the CIDER Act and then there is the complexity of shipping it - I suppose in an air conditioned cargo plane in order to keep it fresh, all of which would add a lot to the price of the product.

SuiteTraveler

Thank you for a very informative post. No, us UK based folks (at least me anyway!) had no idea about this. We have had proper cider here for hundreds of years (in some parts of the country it is almost people's bloodstream). I think there may even be some tax breaks for small artisanal cider producers here.

It seems to boil down to cock-eyed government laws and corporate profits above peoples' quality of life and experience. Now I wonder where have we seen this before?:rolleyes:

We will be travelling on the Norwegian Jade in December. Does anyone know if they stock Cider in the bars/restaurants please? Thanks in advance:)

you need to ask about HARD cider.. otherwise you will get answers regarding regular apple cider which is NOT alcoholic but widely available during the last part of the year.

SuiteTraveler

 

Thank you for a very informative post. No, us UK based folks (at least me anyway!) had no idea about this. We have had proper cider here for hundreds of years (in some parts of the country it is almost people's bloodstream). I think there may even be some tax breaks for small artisanal cider producers here.

 

It seems to boil down to cock-eyed government laws and corporate profits above peoples' quality of life and experience. Now I wonder where have we seen this before?:rolleyes:

An additional fact about this situation is that America's colonists DID make and drink hard cider. It was so popular that every man, woman and child (yes, children drank it too!) drank about 40 gallons per year. Hard cider was THE favored drink in the United States until about 150 years ago when beer began to be popular here and the Temperance Movement started. Somehow in the 100 years before Prohibition, cider completely disappeared in the United States and most modern day Americans have never heard of it or tasted it! If you ask an American for cider, most of them will think that you want unfiltered apple juice.

I have an alternate point of view ... I have been an occasional consumer of hard cider in the US for more than twenty years, and I have never had any trouble finding a decent variety of choices, in a variety of stores. It's certainly not as popular as beer, wine, or spirits in the USA, but it's not obscure or hard to find. The cider makers may not like the current legal situation, but their complaints are somewhat exaggerated. They want laws more favorable to their business (doesn't everyone!), but the current laws are not preventing me from buying cider: locally, regionally, and nationally distributed brands, as well as imports from England, Canada, and Ireland. I can even buy varietal ciders (Macoun, Granny Smith, etc). And I can even find cider on tap at some pubs, although it's not common.

Cruise lines could easily supply their ships with a reasonable selection of hard cider if they thought it would be profitable. Passenger requests might be able to convince them, if enough passengers were to speak up. But the notion that it would be difficult to find or source cider is a bit exaggerated; the complaints of a cider industry organization don't prevent my local retailers from offering a variety of selections.

I have an alternate point of view ... I have been an occasional consumer of hard cider in the US for more than twenty years, and I have never had any trouble finding a decent variety of choices, in a variety of stores. It's certainly not as popular as beer, wine, or spirits in the USA, but it's not obscure or hard to find. The cider makers may not like the current legal situation, but their complaints are somewhat exaggerated. They want laws more favorable to their business (doesn't everyone!), but the current laws are not preventing me from buying cider: locally, regionally, and nationally distributed brands, as well as imports from England, Canada, and Ireland. I can even buy varietal ciders (Macoun, Granny Smith, etc). And I can even find cider on tap at some pubs, although it's not common.

 

Cruise lines could easily supply their ships with a reasonable selection of hard cider if they thought it would be profitable. Passenger requests might be able to convince them, if enough passengers were to speak up. But the notion that it would be difficult to find or source cider is a bit exaggerated; the complaints of a cider industry organization don't prevent my local retailers from offering a variety of selections.

I think that you are forgetting that some products in the US are regional and for the past 20+ years, hard cider has certainly been one of those. Woodchuck is the company that started the hard cider movement back in 1991. They are located in Vermont - part of New England where you apparently live. The people living in the Northeastern US had been the primary market for hard cider in the US since 1991 after the product failed to catch on nationally, but that market stayed very flat until 2011, when things changed and sales literally exploded. The reason for this is because of the primary market for this product in the US shifted to 3 main groups which are: 21 to 29 year olds in the craft beer crowd, people avoiding gluten (11% of US households) and women.

Up until about 2011, hard cider has not been very available in most of the rest of the country. If you look at most of the national brands, most of them didn't even exist prior to 2011. But the drastic change in sales that occurred that year convinced large companies to enter this market with new hard cider products.

I still think the biggest drawback to NCL carrying more brands of hard cider right now is that this product only makes up a little more than half of 1% of the entire alcoholic beverage market in the US at this time.

There are about a dozen hard ciders imported into the US from the UK with Strongbow being the best seller. The list of imports is here:

https://cydermarket.com/England_Import.html

According to this article: http://www.thestreet.com/story/12302904/1/5-hard-cider-brands-pressuring-beer.html

Of the US brands, Angry Orchard is the US Cider brand leader in terms of sales. The other top brands in the US are Crispin, Stella Artois Cidre, Square Mile Cider, Woodchuck Hard Cider, Johnny Appleseed, and Smith & Forge. Of these, Square Mile is not nationally distributed.

Perhaps, the right request to NCL would be to replace whatever hard cider product they are currently selling onboard with one of these other national products or one of the imported hard ciders from the UK.

Just a slight detour here.

Should you ever see Somerset Cider Brandy on your travels - try it. It is superb.

The 10 year old is a lovely after dinner drink (off to sup one now out of a Murano glass brandy balloon - a souvenir of a lovely Jade cruise!:D).

http://www.ciderbrandy.co.uk/shop.html

Just a slight detour here.

 

Should you ever see Somerset Cider Brandy on your travels - try it. It is superb.

 

The 10 year old is a lovely after dinner drink (off to sup one now out of a Murano glass brandy balloon - a souvenir of a lovely Jade cruise!:D).

 

http://www.ciderbrandy.co.uk/shop.html

Thanks for the recommendation. I found a site where I could order it!

Can a fellow get a shandy up in here?

Can a fellow get a shandy up in here?

shouldn't be too hard I wouldn't think. however you may not have a choice as to the beer ( probably whatever is on tap only)