It’s odd for a cider maker to hunt for ingredients in any season but autumn, when apples pull down branches as if begging to be picked. But, on a hot afternoon in late May, twenty-nine-year-old Tariq Ahmed is driving a white delivery van through Guelph, a leafy university city in southwestern Ontario, scanning the roadsides. “Here we go,” he says, pointing to a thicket separating the highway from a residential street. “Gold mine.”
Ahmed pulls over and begins snipping off his bounty: purple conical lilac blossoms. The lilacs are growing on city property, so he’s technically not trespassing. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s weirder than this that’s happening in Guelph,” he says, like people taking their pigs for a walk down the street. But weird is what Ahmed is going for. The lilacs that he picks during this short spring flush will be added to a batch of apple and golden plum cider for a line called Ostara, where each drink is flavoured with a different flower. It’s just one of the many revolving products he creates for Revel Cider, which he founded in 2014.
