Inventory

Since I knew I was getting some free brewing equipment from dad’s cousin, I decided to take them a bottle of my first wine as a thank you. We opened it and drank it. It is a low alcohol apple wine that is only three months old. Last month, it tasted very much like a butter chardonnay, but this month has mellowed it out a bit more. My mother, who develops a rash if she drinks too much, really liked it.

When I got home, I looked over my brewing closet to see how my batches are coming along. After I made the beginner’s apple wine, I made a cloudy apple cider, another apple wine, and an apple cranberry cinnamon style cider, all of which I bottled and have yet to taste. Since then, I have been on Home Brew Talk where a woman with the handle YooperBrew encouraged me to allow things to bulk age more rather than to bottle age, so my batches have been staying in the closet longer before I bottle. Currently, I have a bell pepper and peach wine, strawberry wine, blackberry melomel, and another apple cider. Only the apple cider needed attention, and that was to be racked into a new jug.

I had some cherry juice out in the garage for awhile, and decided it was time to do something with it. I had asked the people on home brew talk what they would do, and there was a strong consensus to add honey to it. When I pulled out the juice, I realized that I only had 3 quarts, and not a full gallon. I didn’t want to add more water and dilute the juice, which I realized was mostly apple juice, so I went to the grocery store and picked up two cans of cherries. One was Oregon Bing Cherries, which contained cherries, water, and sugar, and the other was the store brand red tart cherries, containing only cherries and water. Then I realized from Terry Geary's The Joy of Home Winemaking that I had enough canned fruit to make 1 gallon, and enough juice to make ¾ of a gallon, for 1.75 gallons total. I mixed both together along with about a pound of honey and tasted it before I had all the water in, and decided to leave it at 1.5 gallons instead. I then added about another ¾ of a pound of sugar to bring the potential alcohol to around 11%. I decided to try a new yeast this time, so we will see how it turns out.

Where to go from here? I am registered to attend the Washington State University week long cider class this summer, and I’m trying to become more active in the wine clubs in the area when I can without investing too much money, such as the NW Cider Society, Home Brew Talk, and I have been eying the Columbia Willamette Enological Society and Wine Maker Magazine.

Astoria, OR

This last weekend, I was in Astoria, OR, were life was very kind to my husband and I in the fermenting world.

After going to the Blue Scorcher Bakery and Café for a bowl of homemade soup and a pear and clove bread pudding, we headed over to Shallon Winery for a tasting. He had his dry black berry, cranberry whey, peach, spiced apple, and chocolate orange wines. Upon me producing a business card, he realized that he had read my previous comments about the winery, and informed me that I did have one fact incorrect. He does add sugar to the fruit wines, or else the alcohol level would be too low. Thank you, Mr. VanDerVeldt, for clearing that up for me and for producing great wines!

After purchasing a peach wine and an apple spice wine, we walked back to Fort George Brewery, where my husband had a bourbon barrel stout and I had the wasabi ginger ale. Mine was a bit bland, and I was since told that sometimes the batches are inconsistent. My husband enjoyed his beer, as he was getting ready to add the oak chips that have been soaking in bourbon to his porter back home to make a bourbon barrel porter.

We then joined my father’s cousin for dinner. My parents had told them before Christmas what we were doing, and they said they had some brewing equipment that they hadn’t used in over ten years that we could have. We ended up with three 5 gallon carboys, two bottling buckets, a 90 bottle tree and cleaner, another hydrometer, a bigger wine thief, a few books, and about 100 bottles. The bottles were unique. I think he said they used to have Bud Light in them, but they were like brown 16 oz Burgundy bottles rather than beer bottles with shoulders. This means that if a batch is bottle conditioned for carbonation, it is harder not to pour what little lees are produced as the neck is not conducive for catching them. There were also some champagne bottles that had the ability to be capped. My husband is thinking about using one of those per his beer batches for occasions like parties.

When we got home, we started scrubbing dust and algae off of things, and sanitizing the equipment. My husband is excited to now brew twice as many beers because he has twice the carboys to do it with!

Wine for the Confused

In 2004, the Food Network aired John Cleese’s (of Monty Python fame) Wine for the Confused. It was a low budget film in which he went to wineries near his house to learn about the big six grapes and their wine.

He also had some novice wine drinkers do some blind taste tests. The first one was to identify out of six wines which one was a $200 bottle and which one was the $5 bottle. The results were all over the board. His point to this was that one should not let another person dictate what kind of wine they like or how much to spend because one person’s $200 bottle is another person’s $5 bottle. Go with what you feel comfortable with and with what you like.

However, he did recommend working with a sommelier. By this, he means finding a sommelier that you like and become their regular. You tell them what you like, and they can recommend other things that you might like. However, you have to be willing to try things. There was a spoof, which I can’t find now, about how a person asked about a wine, the sommelier told them about it, but then they asked if it was like a particular style of wine that they liked. Well, it was a different style, so of course it tastes different.

You can watch it for free on hulu.

I won't take a Wine Class from my Local Homebrew Store

Let me give you a little background to my local homebrew store. The owner quit his job as a electronics salesman and started up the store in 1992, catering to beer makers. Then he realized that wine was a growing industry, so he moved the store and opened up a winery next door. He has great staff if you are making beer, but if you are making wine, cider, mead, etc, they all have to get out manuals, cheat sheets, and whatever else. These people don’t know what they are talking about, and I’ve gotten in a few arguments with them and left without purchasing anything. Unfortunately, my husband, who makes beer, is also frustrated with them. Quite often they are out of products, so he finds himself quite often substituting ingredients in his recipes, and it makes him nervous.

Now the winery next door allows you to make your own wine using their facilities. I have to tell you, I’ve been tempted. It would be nice to have some hands on experience using industry equipment, but I won’t because the process is that you pick out the wine you want to make from a kit, and then come back in eight weeks to label the bottles. Whoa! What happened to checking the airlock, racking, bottling, and all that other stuff that happens in that time? Those are great learning experiences!

However, if all you want is a customized wine, don’t want to invest in equipment, and/or don’t want to monitor the production, this is a good route to take, and I know of at least one other place that does this, and one beer brewery that does, too. But this isn’t for me.

Education

I’ve been looking around at various classes on cider and wine making, and I am sure excited.

I have signed up for Washington State University’s week long Cider Making Workshop taught by Peter Mitchell in the summer of 2010.

However, since cider making is a tiny but growing industry in the United States, and Wandering Aengus Ciderworks confesses that they operate like a winery and are licensed as one, I’m looking into wine making classes to figure out the business and equipment needed to start a cidery. For that, I have found a few sources.

• UC Davis Extension offers many different classes on winemaking and grape growing, including some business classes. They also offer an Online Certificate Program in Winemaking, which can be also taken for non-degree credit to by pass the waiting list.
• Washington State University offers a certificate in Viticulture and Enology as a major or as an online certificate program, which takes two years and three hands on events. There again, if you want to bypass the waiting list to participate in the program, not attend the hands on events, and/or save money, the classes are offered as a self-directed course.
  
• Oregon State University Food Science and Technology Department offers a major in Fermentation and Enology and Vinticulture, and also have a graduate program. However, all of these classes require one to live in Corvallis, OR to attend the program, unlike WSU and UC Davis offering online programs.
• My local community college, Clark College, also offers classes about wine, including learning to taste wine, becoming a sommelier, or an introduction to winemaking.
• South Seattle Community College has a Northwest Wine Academy. They offer an AA or certificate in wine making, wine marketing and sales, or food and wine pairings.
• I’m also excited that this year’s Wine Maker’s Conference is being held in my neck of the woods, and I’m thinking about attending.

I’ve also found a few books on the topic of starting a winery or brewery business.

• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting and Running a Winery (2008), which I have found to be useful.
• I like Sam Calagione’s Brewing Up A Business (2005) much better. Calagione writes about his personal experience starting a brewery, so it is more of a story with highlighted points than a lecture. It also seems to be more encouraging, especially for creative people.

I have checked out from the library, but have not cracked the cover yet:

• How to Launch Your Wine Career by Liz Thach and Brian D’Emilio (2009)
• At Home in the Vineyard: Cultivating a Winery, an Industry, and a Life by Susan Sokol Blosser (2008)
• The Brewers Association’s Guide to Starting Your Own Brewery edited by Ran Daniels (2006)
• My First Crush: Misadventures in Wine Country by Linda Kaplan (2005)
• Wine Country: Architecture and Interiors by Mary Whitesides (2004)

Please note that I am not recommending the books be purchased from the links provided, but that they are just links to provide some information.

There are many more books and classes discussing running a winery as a business that I have not yet found, but I feel that this is a good start.

Thing is, the wine industry is experiencing huge growth because the 20 and 30 somethings are getting interested in wine, and this is a boom I hope to capitalize on. I think it could happen, as cider is able to market itself as beer or wine, and just judging by the recent press, cider making is also a growing industry.

Bottle Conditioning

Cider, beer, and wine are all naturally still unless carbon dioxide is somehow added to make it sparkling. With a keg system, this is easy, as the drink is held under pressure, forcing it to absorb CO2. However, to make a drink in a bottle be sparkling, large bottling plants force carbonate their drinks, a method not available to the home brewer. Instead, the home brewer needs to employ a technique known as “bottle conditioning.”

Bottle conditioning can be done with near dry (1.005 or less) wines, ciders, or beer or a dry wine, cider or beer with a small amount of sugar, usually referred to as “priming sugar,” added to the batch. The batch is promptly bottled without preservatives. The yeast will begin eating the sugar and releasing CO2, but there is no place for the CO2 to go, so the liquid absorbs the CO2. For beer and cider, they are drinkable in about two weeks, and not waiting to consume the beverage helps reduce exploding bottles from building pressure from the CO2.

One can tell if the drink was force carbonated or bottle conditioned by looking at the bubbles. Bottle conditioned bubbles are smaller, more consistent in size, and last longer.

One draw back to bottle conditioning is that there will be a little bit of lees that form in the bottle. The trick is to not pour the lees when pouring the cider, as the lees will create cloudiness in the drink, and can affect the flavor when drinking the cider. Otherwise, the lees can be removed with a champagne technique called degorging. After being bottled in champagne bottles, which can handle higher pressures, and then allowed to age for a year, the bottles are slowly turned upside down, allowing the lees to collect in the neck of the bottle. The necks are submerged into a very cold solution that causes the necks and their contents to freeze, allowing the bottle to be opened, the lees to be removed in the frozen ice, and the bottles to be recorked before the majority of the gas to escape.

Due to the addition of yeast in the presence of residual sugar in a sweet cider, bottle conditioning is tricky and recommended being avoided on the small scale. It is possible after adding the solution and waiting a few days to pasteurize the bottles, but as Andrew Lea cautions, “I suggest goggles and strong gloves for this an a rehearse procedure for dealing the broken glass since burst bottles are a very real possibility.” Instead, consider using a keg system or forced carbonation for a sweet carbonated cider.

For more information, read:

• Andrew Lea – Dry Sparkling Cider
  
• Cider Workshop – Champagne questions
  
• Wikipedia has pictures of riddling and degorging.
  
• http://www.winemakermag.com/stories/issue/article/issues/114-dec-09jan-10/893-sparkling-wine-from-kits-wine-kits
• More on priming and bottle conditioning.
• Bottle Fermentation of Cider and Perry
• Bottle-Conditioned Perry and Cider

Cold Crashing Explained

I wrote a blog about how beer makers don’t know how to make cider. In it, I said that they add sugar when they shouldn’t unless they are trying to make wine, rush the cider instead of letting it age, and they believe they can cold crash cider to stop fermentation to have a naturally sweet cider without chemicals.

Because I knew that UK craft cider makers allow their cider to ferment outdoors, which allows their cider to freeze, yet it will start fermenting again when it thaws, I said that cold crashing cider is impossible, but I didn’t know why. I asked the Cider Workshop, and Jim K responded to me. He explained that cold crashing doesn’t kill yeast cells, contrary to home beer making beliefs, but just makes them go dormant, just like in cider making. However, the sugars in beer are not completely ferementable as they are in cider, so the yeast has a much harder time recovering from being dormant. He believes that the yeast could become active in beer eventually after a few months, but because beer makers rush things so much, chances are the beer is consumed before the yeast can be active again.

Jim also added that most good brewers use cold crashing as a way to clear the beer, much like how I use pectic enzymes, but that otherwise mash temperatures are used to control sweetness.

However, I have since been schooled by a beer maker, CvilleKevin. It turns out that I did not know the proper technique of cold crashing. He said, “Cold crashing is not the same as cooling. Chilling will make the yeast go dormant. Most types of yeast will drop to the bottom at that point. To cold crash you rack, cool, and rack again. Keep an eye on for a week or two to make sure you got it, or else you can go straight to a keg at that point.”

He continued, “By cold crashing, you are getting the yeast and nutrients to drop out of suspension and racking them out. You can do it with just about any yeast, but some are easier than others. Nottingham is very easy. One of its properties is that it flocculates at low temps and makes a nice compact sediment. Most ale and wheat yeasts are easy to crash. Wild yeast, lager yeast, champagne yeast and some wine yeasts are tougher.”

“I've been cold crashing cider for years without problems. I've got about 20 liters right now from last season that have been stored at room temp for over a year with no problems.”

When presented back to the Cider Workshop, Andrew Lea of Craft Cider Making further explained that in this context, it is not the cold temperatures that cause it to work, but instead the allowed “repeated rackings, thereby reducing yeast and nutrient to levels at which refermentation is less likely. So it fits into that hierarchy, and there are no guarantees!”

Since asking these questions, I found Ben Watson had addressed “cold shocking” in his Cider: Hard and Sweet book on page 166. The process is as CvilleKevin described it, adding after racking that “The cider should remain at a cold temperature, and then, before bottling, you’ll need to add potassium sorbate… to guard against refermentation… All this effort strikes me as way too much of a hassle for the amateur cidermaker… A much more practical solution, and one that doesn’t involve preservatives, is to stabilize the cider after bottling by pasteurizing it, bottle and all.”

Therefore, after much research and asking of question, I now believe that “cold crashing” can be done on cider as long as racking is done with the reduced temperatures with the use of potassium metasulfite and potassium sorbate to ensure that the cider would not start fermenting again.