What better way to celebrate the end of summer (we have three more weeks here in Seattle, right?) than a festival? The Third Annual Washington Cider Week kicks off tomorrow, September 5, and runs all the way through September 15. The highlight looks to be the Fourth Annual Cider Summit taking place this Friday & Saturday at the South Lake Union Discovery Center. They are expecting 112 ciders at the festival, which organizers believe may be the largest number of ciders ever offered at a festival in the U.S. & possibly anywhere.

If you missed it, I “hopped on the cider bandwagon” earlier this summer with a trip to Portland where I attended this same Cider Summit and learned a whole lot about the beverage. The festival was a blast. You can read more about it here, as well as about some of the ciders I tried that will likely also be available at the Seattle version of Cider Summit. I admittedly have not kept up my cider drinking as much as I’d like to, but Cider Week sounds like the perfect chance to change that.

There will be events all across the state, but many of them are here in the Seattle area. It’s the perfect chance to check out the still new Capitol Cider, where they always have a ridiculous amount of great ciders on tap. For Cider Week, it looks like they’ll have a full slate of tap takeovers with Blue Mountain (9/5), Virtue Cider (9/7), Seattle Cider (9/9), Finnriver Cider (9/11), Wandering Aengus Ciderworks (9/12), Schilling Cider (9/13) & Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider (9/14). Several other cider-friendly bars in Seattle will be featuring ciders as well, with Beer Junction dedicating 8+ taps to cider all week long, Brouwer’s Cafe doing 8 ciders, The Sixgill dedicating 6 taps to cider, The Noble Fir dedicating 3 rotating taps, and quite a few more.

There will be tastings at local retailers like Full Throttle Bottles (SBN Sponsor), Bottleworks, Whole Foods and Beer Junction. There will also be cider and food pairings at some great restaurants around town, including an event pairing Tieton Cider Works at Chef Tamara Murphy’s Tara Plata in Capitol Hill and a Cider & Bites event at the Coterie Room in Belltown.

There are many, many other events. Check out the events page for a full list and descriptions.