BY MEG VAN HUYGEN for WEEKLY VOLCANO 5/22/26 |
It was a sunny springtime Saturday. After leaving the Tacoma Literature Fest at Tacoma Armory, to see Weekly Volcano’s editor-in-chief, Angela Jossy, speak on the importance of indie media, in fact, I realized I was gonna miss my bus home.
Wait, I realized, that’s actually okay. What am I gonna do at home? Chores? Inside? I’d found myself in the enviable position of walking through downtown Tacoma on a beautiful day with a fresh paycheck and no place to be.
You know, I thought, I could take myself out for a beverage. What’s my favorite bar around here? I didn’t have to think very long.
Cider & Cedar feels like an AI chatbot’s digital daydream of what a cidery should look like. Except it’s real, and it was designed by human brains and built by human hands, out of solid wood and not, like, medium-density fiberboard. Walk in the door and you’re pretty much in the forest, if the forest had a bar in it. There’s cedar everywhere, naturally. The lighting is warm, and dozens of lush tropical houseplants have taken over the bar area, like the place is auditioning to be a set for Fitzcarraldo. The soundtrack hovers somewhere among spidery indie guitar, dad jazz, and psychedelic funk from your tattoo artist’s playlist.
The centerpiece of the room, if it’s not the cider itself, is the tree. Behind the live-edge bar, the taps are framed in a colossal, show-stopping art installation made from the trunk of a thousand-year-old Western red cedar. Sterling Paradiso, along with his wife and co-owner, Mia, owns forested land out on the Olympic Peninsula, and he says he foraged the trunk himself from an old-growth tree. The one-of-a-kind wooden chandelier, as well as the custom timber tabletops, was sourced the same way.
Along with the cedar, yes, there is cider. A whole lot of it. Not the cinnamon-doused juice you sampled on a Halloween hayride, and also not the syrupy cans from the supermarket. This is sophisticated cider for grown-ups, sourced from the finest orchards: tart, funky, dry, herbaceous, scrumpy. There are bone-dry méthode traditionnelle ciders, which undergo a second round of fermentation inside their slump-necked Champagne bottles, in the way Champagne also does. Rotating taps feature regional cidermakers, and if you can’t choose one, you can just get a cider flight. They’re like chemistry experiments; one cider tastes faintly of pear and campfire smoke, then another finishes with enough acidity to make your jaw flex, just barely perceptibly.
Although I’m still a bit of a cider noob, I went to the Northwest Cider Symposium at Tacoma Convention Center the past couple of years, and I recognized a few names from that party. I went for a pint of Bauman’s Endless Harvest, which won the symposium’s Cider Cup in 2024, and with a perfect score, no less. Based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Bauman’s uses McIntosh apples, Golden Russets, and a mix of French bittersweet cider apples. The result is a crisp, sparkling, high-tannin bev with floral jasmine and melon flaves that will refresh the living shit out of you. Très Champenoise. I couldn’t have designed a more perfect day to have a surprise glass of Endless Harvest, to be honest.
Spectacular. Let’s have another. Next, I spotted a tap from Cockrell Cider, whose dream-sequence-like, espalier-style orchard and taphouse is easily one of the most gorgeous PNW vistas I’ve personally laid eyes on. Cockrell’s Valley Red is semi-sweet and imbued with red raspberries. The glass is brilliant to behold, the color of carnelian, and despite the tart tang from the berries, this stuff is as smooth as clockwork.
(Pro tip: Do not let the summer escape you without visiting Cockrell’s orchard and taphouse, perched on the edge of the Puyallup River, and meeting Ellwood the black Lab and all their friendly free-roaming chickens. This vision will be behind my eyes when I’m 110 years old. Just stunning.)
Seated at the bar, I pelted the bartender with questions. Helpfully, he spoke fluent fermentation and answered me with cheerful aplomb, and without making me feel stupid. Increasingly rare in bev culture.
Sharp Tacomans may recall that Cider & Cedar briefly opened in 2020 at Sixth Avenue and Tacoma Avenue South before reopening on Market Street in 2023, just north of the Rialto in the Arts District. The newish spot gave them new options, like real kitchen space and room for live bands. Groove jazzers The Queen Street Gang, Southern-fried singer-songwriter Walter Sherman, and wacky folk accordionist Cameron Villanueva are among the recent performers, while the menu skews toward light pub grub: roasted Brussels on feta, fries with queso, soft pretzels, air-fried wings in three flavors. The food’s a little less elevated lately, toned down from a prior bespoke menu of charcuterie and pork belly baos.
This bar feels important to me, possibly owing to its mix of beauty, sophistication, and accessibility. The Pacific Northwest has always had beer cred, and wine and coffee are obviously major industries up here in the top left, too, but cider still occupies a strange social space. Too rustic for cocktail snobs, too nuanced for tech bros, too fraught with peril for insecure types who interpret any fruitiness in a beverage as weakness.
But c’mon, we’re the goddamned Apple State, yeah? The PNW is home to tens of dozens of small cider producers, many of which are using their own heirloom fruit to make completely unique ciders, and they have few stages to shine as brightly as they can at Cider & Cedar. Cidermakers will often have taprooms that feature their own ciders, sure, but they’re usually located on-site at the rural orchards, not in the urban Arts District, so city slickers like us don’t get to try them. As well, many cideries don’t work with distributors, so you’re not gonna find them in a four-pack at Fred Meyer. They need representation in bars, like this one.
Quite frankly, I don’t understand why cider isn’t being pushed in Washington state with every modicum of energy that the other three unofficial state beverages are. We grow 60 percent of the world’s apples here, and 90 percent of the nation’s. We should be naturally ID-ing as cider people. It writes itself.
Since we agree, I hereby recommend that Tacomans get the process kick-started at Cider & Cedar. This exquisite bar does a heroic service to the local cider industry, but even so, it’s not quite out of the woods. And evidently so. Just take a seat at the bar and look around you.
Cider & Cedar
744 Market St., #102B
Tacoma, WA 98402
@cider_cedar
