Peter Martin: Exploring the limits of hard cider

When it comes to hard cider, brewer Peter Martin of Boss Cider in Leslie said there’s a world of possibilities waiting to be explored.

“I enjoy the freedom of being able to try new things. Personally, I feel like cider is a very untapped market,” he said. “You can do all sorts of stuff with beer, but cider is very similar. We’ve everything from spicy ciders to herbal ciders to, of course, fruits. But we’ve also done hop ciders. We’ve done ciders that aren’t just made with apples — we have a Concord grape cider, we have a Niagara grape cider, we have a cranberry cider. We’ve done all sorts of stuff that I think is very off the beaten path of what a usual cider is.”

Working on and off at Boss since it opened in 2019, Martin, the winner of Best Brewer in City Pulse’s inaugural Top of the Town People contest, is fully self-taught in his craft. He works hard to ensure the flavor of Boss’ cider is fresh and clear.

“I think a lot of the time when you try a cider, they call it raspberry, and it’s like, is it raspberry? You have to kind of search for it. Whereas our ciders are like, ‘Yeah, that’s the blueberry. That’s the raspberry. That’s exactly what they say it is,’” he said. “It’s just a much bolder way of doing cider compared to things that I’ve found in the store or tried in the past.”

However, he noted that what he enjoys in a cider might not satisfy everyone.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? We have 20 ciders on tap; five of them somebody will just hate, and the other 15 they’ll love, or vice versa. So, I can’t say specifically what makes a good cider because there’s some people that like really dry stuff, and a lot of our stuff is semi-sweet or sweet. We do have the occasional dry one, but it’s not as often as the others. It’s all personal preference.”

He said the draw of Boss, above all else, is its small-town feel.

“We want people to love being here. I guess we’re doing something well, because people tend to keep coming back, and we always appreciate that,” he said.