Brännland Cider

Andreas Sundgren set up Brännland in 2010 in Vännäsby, near Umeå, and began production the following year in a basement in Brännland. Ice cider is not Swedish in origin: it comes from Quebec, where it is called cidre de glace, and consists of fermenting apple must concentrated to at least 30 degrees Brix, around three hundred grams of sugar per litre.

What concentrates the must here is not a machine but the winter. The apples are hand-picked in Västerbotten, on the Baltic coast, and the juice is frozen before fermenting: the water separates out as ice and the concentrated liquid is racked off that frozen mass. Two raw materials, as they put it: Swedish apples and subarctic cold.

In a little over ten years they went from a trial run of five hundred bottles to some sixty-five thousand a year. And in 2021 they met the goal Sundgren had set himself at the start: their cider accompanied dessert for the thirteen hundred guests of the Nobel banquet, the first Swedish wine in the dinner's hundred and twenty-one year history, always dominated by France and Italy.