Ice Cider

Ice wine is made from grapes that have been allowed to freeze, which concentrates their sugars, before picking. The result is usually a sweet dessert wine.

According to Ben Watson’s Cider: Hard & Sweet, a Frenchman living in Quebec by the name of Christian Barthomeuf began experimenting with trying to make ice cider in a similar fashion as ice wine. In 1996, the first commercial ice cider became available. In 2007, about fifty ice cider producers mostly in southern Quebec produced half a million bottles.

Watson says there are two methods to make ice cider, cryoconcentration and cryoextraction. The first method is very much like applejack in that fresh pressed apple cider is allowed to freeze and have the ice removed leaving a higher concentration of sugar, but unlike applejack, the sweet cider has not been allowed to ferment yet. The second method involves leaving the apples on the trees until they freeze at temperatures around 16⁰F to 5⁰F, usually in January. Then the apples are harvested and pressed while still partially frozen. Since very few apple varieties stay on the tree that long, sometime apples from cold storage are allowed to freeze outside.

Watson goes on to say that Quebec has some standards for how much sugar should be present before fermentation and after fermentation, leaving a sweet full flavored apple cider between 7 and 13 percent alcohol.

Watson states, "According to Charles Crawford, owner of Domaine Pinnacle, it takes 80 apples to make just one 375 ml. bottle of ice cider, which is only one reason it is so expensive. The harvest, pressing, and eight- or nine- month fermentation are all labor-intensive, and producers use special wine yeasts and must stop fermentation to leave just the right amount of residual sugar."

Waston discourages people from making ice cider, saying it should be left to the pros. He cites the difficulty to freeze apples in other regions and difficulty in stopping the fermentation, which he says a failure will end up in a strong cidre fort. He even points out that some ice cider makers have batches that they can’t sell as ice cider, and convert it to a dessert apple wine kind of like pommeau.

Edit: I found this excellent blog on ice cider by Real Cider out of the UK after I posted my own on ice cider. Please give it a read.

A Cidery's Desire to Distill for Pommeau

Wandering Aengus Ciderworks produces a dessert drink Pommeau. Ben Watson’s Cider Hard and Sweet describes Pommeau as a Calvados or clear apple brandy blended with fresh sweet cider to produce a lightly sweet, reddish amber liqueur around 16-18% alcohol by volume. Wandering Aengus Ciderworks describes their Pommeau as:

“Pommeau is a unique apple dessert wine. Select heirloom cider apple varieties were fermented and then distilled. The resulting apple brandy, after aged 5 years in oak, was expertly blended with fresh juice from cider apples that offer diverse character - those with a wealth of tannins and those with plentiful sugars. Pommeau is a delicately sweet, surprisingly smooth, aromatic wine with an incredible brandy essence. Serve chilled or warm and enjoy as an aperitif, a dessert or with a meal. Production of only 100 cases every other year.”

In a way, this is very much like a Port Wine or Sherry, which is wine fortified with, or has added, grape brandy, but in this case, they are using apple juice and apple brandy.

When I was at Wandering Aengus Ciderworks after Thanksgiving, they were almost sold out. I asked them about Clear Creek Distillery, to which they responded that, yes, they did get the brandy from Clear Creek Distillery. However, it was a small custom batch that they requested, so it was quite expensive, which could help explain the $45 a bottle price tag. Wandering Aengus Ciderworks instead expressed interest in obtaining their own distilling and license. They went on to explain that most large wineries blend all their wine from all the barrels together before bottling, but some barrels may have contained a slightly inferior wine. Rather than toss the wine, the makers blend it in with the other wine to keep the volume up believing that such a small amount would not affect the overall quality. What Wandering Aengus Ciderworks hopes to do is take their slightly inferior batches and distill them to make the Pommeau. This allows them to better control cider quality, find a use for slightly inferior cider, keep all of the production at their facility, and lower costs on the Pommeau. I say it sounds like a good idea.

One more thing I should note is that Watson does say it is easy to produce your own Pommeau by taking some fresh sweet cider, and add either cider brandy or clear apple eau-de-vie. He does caution about adding too much brandy, as the higher alcohol content will mask the fruit flavors, while not enough brandy might allow raw sweet cider to start fermenting unless it is treated.