Cider Class: Touring Cideries

As part of my cider class in Mt. Vernon, I was able to tour three different cideries.

We toured the first one on Monday in Mt. Vernon. Red Barn Cider had partnered up with Tulip Valley Vineyard, and was next door to the WSU research orchards. Years ago, Gary Moulton of WSU had some cider apples and offered them up to someone to make cider. Drew Zimmerman took him up on the offer, and traveled to England to attend Peter Mitchell’s cider making class. Two things came out of that. Peter Mitchell began traveling to Mt Vernon to teach cider making, and Zimmerman started producing cider commercially. I liked the simplicity of his operation. Zimmerman took us through his dwarf bittersweet apple orchard, and then let us taste his cider products, in which he did use Jonagold and Gravenstein dessert apples. From there, we exited out the back side of the tasting room though the laboratory, and went into a three walled open air building to look at his apple crushers and presses. Next door, he had a climate controlled container from the back of a semi truck that he used for bulk storing of cider. On the other side of the crusher/press building was a semi-cylindrical room in which he fermented and bottled his ciders.

On Wednesday, we loaded up in a bus and took a ferry from Anacortes, WA to Sidney on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada.

From there, we first went to Merridale Estate Cider. Merridale was a bit different in that it had a much larger production, and it also attempted to diversify into a spa and restaurant. One owner, Rick Pipes, took us around. We started with his semi-drawf orchard, in which he said they also contracted with 3-4 other orchards for their apple needs. Their apple crushing and pressing area was under cover against the main building, in which the fermentation tanks were inside. We also toured their bottling area. Pipes also had another project going on, and briefly showed us his alcohol distiller, in which they distilled cider and other products into eau de vie. We then sat down to try some of the products with lunch, including the eau de vies, cider, ciders fortified with eau de vie, and ciders in which sugar was added at fermentation time to increase the level of alcohol. Interestingly, Merridale bottles the ciders in plastic bottles, as it is easier to recycle than glass, uses less energy, and lowers their carbon footprint. However, plastic has a shorter shelf life than glass, so they have an employee out rotating their product on store shelves, which sort of limits their ability expand their market.

Next, we went to Sea Cider, which is a smaller and newer cidery that sits on a hill looking down at the water and over their dwarf apple orchard. Christine Smart, who was a former student of Peter Mitchell’s, took us into their fermentation room, which also doubled as their bulk aging room. From there, we went out and around the building to the back side, which was an area covered with gravel that they used for crushing and pressing apples. When we were there, that same space was being used for pasteurizing cider bottles that had come out of the bottling room. Smart commented that a lot of money had gone into the planning of the building, but I felt it had a lot of wasted ceiling space and half thought out ideas such as a partial catwalk. It was also very cramped! There is a saying that vertical space is cheap and horizontal space is expensive when it comes to cider production buildings, but I have to wonder if they could have saved some costs from building up and spent it to build out. Also, Smart admitted that not a lot of thought had gone into a storage area, so they sometimes had to ship their products somewhere else for storing. At this point in the tour, we were a little pressed for time to catch our ferry, so we rushed the cider tasting more than I would have liked.

All in all, it was very good to tour all three facilities, see their operations, and get ideas for how I might build my cidery.

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.