(Bloomberg) - On a recent trip to Portland, Ore., I found myself standing around a crowded bar called Bushwacker, shoulder-to-shoulder with some burly, bearded beer guys intently sipping and dissecting small pours of straw-colored liquid. I was in town for the annual Craft Brewers Conference, but this wasn’t beer that I was tasting. It was dry, crisp hard cider at the country’s first cider-only bar, which opened in 2010.

Since then, bars such as Capital Cider in Seattle, Upcider in San Francisco, and Urban Orchard in Asheville, N.C., have restored the beverage to its original place on the American table, propelling it into a new phase of popularity. Cider was, after all, the drink this nation was originally built on, with Johnny Appleseed planting orchards for hard cider production all across the country. But post-Prohibition, many cider orchards and breweries were abandoned or destroyed. Now, with roughly 350 cider producers in the U.S.—most of whom make small-batch ciders—the drink has never been more popular.

According to an IRI market-research report, cider is currently the fastest-growing segment of beer and malt beverage marketing, with sales increasing 75 percent in 2014. Granted, most of those sales were from mass-produced ciders like Strongbow, Smith & Forge, and Hornsby’s, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.

“Nationwide, cider is often viewed as a sweet, gluten-free alternative to beer,” says Ben Sandler, co-owner of the month-old Wassail, Manhattan’s cider-centric bar and restaurant that opened in April on the Lower East Side. “People think of it as a sugary alcoholic beverage, on par with wine coolers.”

“But that’s not real cider,” Sandler says, “and those aren’t the types of cider that we’re interested in.”

The types of ciders you will find at Wassail—those “real” ciders, like the ones I was sampling with the beer nerds at Bushwacker that afternoon—are terroir-driven examples made on farmsteads among orchards, often tasting like unadorned expressions of the apples grown in their respective regions. Imagine the tang of a ripe, tart apple resting on old leather, or the smell of a dense apple orchard, a cool fall breeze blowing through the gnarled branches and fruits rotting softly underfoot. Ahhh ... breathe it in.

Like biodynamic wines, many good ciders are naturally fermented, produced with minimal interference and low technology. Most are clean and dry-tasting like a crisp white wine, but sometimes they’re unfiltered with a funky, farmhouse ale-like undercurrent from wild yeast strains. Some even take cues from craft beer, spending time in bourbon or wine barrels or getting steeped with whole-cone or pelletized hops (a technique known as dry-hopping). These modern ciders appeal more and more to serious beer and wine enthusiasts.