Colorado's most serious cider house, full stop
Aurora · Aurora · Cider Tasting Room · Visit Website ↗
Reviewed by the RagingWine Tasting Desk · August 16, 2026
RagingWine reviewed Haykin Family Cider Tasting Room’s wine list and gave it The Wild Card — RagingWine’s Vibe-Check rating. How RagingWine reviews wine lists →
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Wingman Metrics
Walking into Haykin, you realize immediately this isn't a cider bar with a few fun options — it's a producer tasting room with the focus and intentionality of a serious winery. The bottle menu reads like a varietal deep-dive, with single-variety ciders named after heritage apples most people have never encountered. This place knows exactly what it is, and it's not messing around.
Haykin's 20-plus labels are organized around single-variety heritage apples — Golden Russet, Roxbury Russet, Kingston Black, Yarlington Mill, Newtown Pippin — the kind of lineup you'd expect from a Finger Lakes cidery, not a Colorado tasting room. They also venture into more unusual territory with a Chestnut Crabapple, a Santiam Cherry, and a Redlove, which is made from a rare red-fleshed apple. The Methode Ancestrale bottling adds a pét-nat-style dimension for the fizz crowd, and the dessert tier — Pommeau at $38/375ml and Ice Cider at $32/375ml — signals genuine ambition in the craft. There are no filler SKUs here; every label exists to make a point about what a single apple can do.
By-the-glass specifics aren't listed on the bottle menu, but tasting room format typically means pours are available across the lineup. The tiered pricing structure — standard bottles from $22 (750ml), reserves at $29, and Methode Ancestrale at $44 — suggests that even bottle purchases are accessible enough to explore freely. We'd expect staff to walk you through options rather than hand you a laminated card.
Haykin Family Cider Jonagrimes 2024 — $22
At the base bottle price, the Jonagrimes — a hybrid of Jonathan and Grimes Golden apples — gives you a genuinely unique single-variety cider that most people couldn't find anywhere else in Colorado. Drinking rare for $22 is the whole point of coming here.
Haykin Family Cider Muscadet de Bernay 2024
Named after a French cider apple variety, this one flies under the radar next to the more approachable American heritage names. It's exactly the kind of bottle that separates the curious from the crowd-pleasers — and it's why this list exists.
Haykin Family Cider LUCY™ 2025
LUCY™ is a trademarked modern apple variety bred for fresh eating, not complexity. In a lineup this focused on heritage and heirloom fruit, it feels like the one concession to accessibility. Fine for what it is, but not why you drove to Aurora.
Haykin Family Cider Kingston Black 2024 + Sharp aged cheddar or charcuterie board
Kingston Black is a classic bittersweet cider apple with tannic structure and dark fruit depth — it needs something with fat and salt to push back. A sharp aged cheddar or cured meat board gives it something to work with and turns a tasting pour into a full moment.
The Bottom Line
Haykin is the rare place where cider gets the same treatment wine does — single varieties, vintage dates, dessert-tier offerings, and zero apologies for being serious about it. If you've ever wanted to understand what an apple actually tastes like, this is where you go.
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Small but Thoughtful
Steep
Basic Stemmed
Rotating Cast
Set & Forget
Acceptable
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Small but Thoughtful
Fair
Basic Stemmed
Willing but Green
Set & Forget
Acceptable
Stanley Marketplace · Aurora · Oyster Bar / New American
Traveling Mercies is a Wild Card in the best way: an oyster bar inside a marketplace that built a wine list with actual conviction. It's not deep, but it's smart, and smart beats deep when you're eating shellfish in Aurora.
Small but Thoughtful
Fair
Basic Stemmed
Willing but Green
Set & Forget
Acceptable
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Plays It Safe
Steep
Varietal Specific
Knowledgeable & Friendly
Set & Forget
Proper
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Crowd Pleasers
Fair
Basic Stemmed
Willing but Green
Occasional
Acceptable
Southlands · Aurora · American
BJ's Southlands is a perfectly fine place to drink a craft beer, and we mean that sincerely — lean into the thing they actually care about. The wine list is a national chain template on autopilot, marked up past its worth, with zero local character and no sign of anyone tending the program with any intention.
Crowd Pleasers
Steep
Basic Stemmed
Willing but Green
Set & Forget
Acceptable
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