Cider Class: Learning About Apples

The first day at my cider class up in Mt. Vernon focused a little bit on marketing and a lot on trees.

Gary Moulton of WSU Mt Vernon gave us a presentation on the care of apple trees, including nutrition, disease, grafting, and pruning of cider apple trees. It isn’t that it is really all that different between growing apples to eat and apples for cider production, but eating apples need to be symmetrical in shape and blemish free, while cider apples just need to taste good since they will be ground up. Therefore, maintenance is aimed more at tree health for taste, not looks.

Indeed, even picking cider apples is done differently than picking apples for eating. Normally, apples are picked a little green to withstand shipping and storage. However, when they are picked green, they contain more starch, which is not fermentable. If the apples are allowed to stay on the tree longer, the starch is converted to sugars, which are fermentable, and in addition the apple is much more flavorful to give a much better taste to the cider.

So what is a cider apple? I had mentioned before that they are apples in which they have been breed for the production of cider and generally don’t taste all that great when eaten. Apples varieties have been tested for their acidic and tannin components. Therefore, cider apples are classified by how much acid and tannin one has:

• High tannin, low acid – bittersweet
• Low tannin, low acid – sweet
• High tannin, high acid – bittersharp
• Low tannin, high acid – sharp

However, these descriptors do not indicate how much sugar is in the apple. In fact, most grocery store apples are low in tannin and high in acid, making them sharp, not sweet, apples. Most grocery store apples are usually refered to as “dessert” apples, and can be used to make ciders, though they are not as good and do better when blended with a higher tannin apple. Since the acid is high in dessert apples, they are usually blended with bittersweet apples, allowing the two to have a balance between acid and tannin.

In this part of the country, dessert apples are readily available and easy to buy, so all three of the cideries we visited had an acre of bittersweet apples growing, like Dabinetts and Kingston Black. They would grow the bittersweet apples and then buy the sharp dessert apples to make their product. Interestingly, both Red Barn Cider and Sea Cider went with dwarf rootstock to have about 1,000 trellised trees per acre, while Merridale Estate Cider had semi-dwarf trees. Red Barn Cider said that they used M9 and Bud 9 rootstock and planted them 6' x 12' apart, thought would probably increase to 14' in the future.These small trees allowed them to not use ladders on the trees and do all work on them from the ground.

One of the highlights of learning about apples was a taste test that Moulton brought us of cider made from a single variety of apples fermented dry as part of the WSU research. The first cider was Jonagold, which is a dessert apple, and therefore sharp tasting and thin due to low tannins. The second cider was a Brown Snout, which is a mild bittersweet apple. It had a better aroma, was darker in color, and more mouthfeel as it was thicker and creamier and very pleasant. The last cider we had was a Medaille D’Or, which was a very bitter bittersweet apple. It was very bitter, and Moulton compared it to drinking an IPA. It definitely had more tannins, as I had the dry mouth cotton feel from it. While horrible to drink alone, I could very easily imagine it blended with other apples to tone it down while it gave interest to other more bland apples. And in the cider world, blending is at the heart of cider production, just like a cook gathers together different ingredients for a sauce.