Notes from the Cider FOlk
Club Page archives - 2021
WINTER 2021 / IN THIS SECTION:
photos of the “single tree”
Video: Apple Carbonic Maceration
Traditional Method Riddling
photos of the “single tree”
As explained in the club booklet, this tall, old tree produced a thousand pounds of Baldwin and Northern Greening apples in 2020, so we seized the chance to make a small batch pressed entirely from its fruit, aka the bottle of “Single Tree” in your winter club box.
This tree was planted at Old Orchard Farm on North Pender Island in 1895 (making it 127 years old) by a settler family of European ancestry, the Grimmer family. Not long after, the orchard was sold to the Percival family, who expanded the orchard into a commercial operation and shipped apples by steam ship to the mainland. You can see Northern Greening grafted on the left, Baldwin on the right.
Note the big hole in the central trunk. The main trunk is—incredibly—completely hollowed out. Truly amazing that it has been able to, for decades, support such a huge canopy and huge crops despite having no heartwood. At pruning time, we’ve been slowly working on lightening the branch load in order to prolong its life (maybe this helps explain why it had such a great crop!).
carbonic maceration of apples
Inspired by the Beaujolais wine method of fermenting grapes whole in a CO2-filled tank (aka carbonic maceration), we wanted to find out what happens to a cider's profile when fermented this way.
We used a balanced blend of bittersweet and mixed-used heirlooms for the experiment and pumped actively fermenting cider into the bottom of the tank to produce natural CO2, keeping them protected from spoilage. The apples were in the tank for about 4 weeks, and were fizzy and fermenting inside the skins once we finally pulled them out, milled them and ran them through a little hydro press (which handled the mushy, fermenting pulp far better than our rack and cloth or basket press). This method is used to produce overtly fruity, chuggable grape wines, so we’ll see how it translates via apple chemistry.
It’s quite a small batch—we’ll likely offer it as a limited add-on for you club members to snap up—if you’re keen, keep an eye out!
Traditional Method Riddling
We recently had a custom riddling rack made for our cellar by good friend and fabricator, George. We were able to source beautiful, dense alder wood grown and milled on our island to make it, and through online research and consulting with faraway cidermakers who have made DIY racks, George hit upon a perfect design for our narrow cellar space.
This video explains how we prep each bottle for riddling. Since the rack only holds about 200 bottles at a time, we’ll be riddling/disgorging/releasing our traditional method in batches. Scroll below to see some of the rack construction process.
FALL 2021 / IN THIS SECTION:
Video: Perry pear HarvestinG
The vines behind “Vitis L.”
More about “flor”
Shaking out perry pears, 2021
How it's done! Matthew, Ana, Ari and some volunteer helpers shaking down tannic seedling pears at Old Orchard. These pears go into our Forage Fine Perry every year and are one of many wild seedling varieties that give it the tannic dimension. Filmed September 2021.
Often people are surprised at (or have just never seen) how we harvest by shaking, but it’s a traditional harvesting method that is as old as apples. In every region that has a long cidermaking tradition, such as England, Spain and France (to name a few) shaking is the preferred harvesting method: even large scale cider-specific commercial orchards still shake but now use tractor PTO attachments that grip the tree and shake it.
Shaking has also been a traditional method for small crabapple harvesting in this region for ages—some Coast Salish elders relate laying blankets around ḴÁ¸EW̱ (click for audio) Pacific crabapple trees when very ripe and using a stick to shake out the tiny crabapples for later drying and food preservation.
The old vines behind “Vitis Labrusca”
For those of you who snatched up a bottle of Vitis L. from our fall add-on selection, here’s a bit more about the old Concord vines we used for this batch which give it the fun raspberry sour-candy-esque profile. There are multiple vines growing around the original farm home at Old Orchard on North Pender Island, and the current owners believe the vines are at least eighty years old (probably older).
Concord has a controversial history in winemaking. Bred from a native North American grape species, Vitis labrusca, it has remarkable hardiness for this climate and is incredibly resistant to the fungal diseases that plague European grape varieties—so it’s had fairly widespread cultivation and use in “low quality” table wine by settlers since the 1800’s. But with commercial fungicides/herbicides making “old world” varietals (Vitis vinifera) more possible to grow these days, they have long fallen from popularity.
And it’s true, there are many more complex varieties out there for making a serious full-bodied red wine…but as a naturally sparkling fruit wine blending aromatic, low acid apples with (semi-carbonic) grapes? We think they’re stellar.
Plus, what the variety itself may lack in character the surprising age of these vines definitely lends a helping hand to the grape quality. You would be hard pressed (no pun intended) to find vines this old in any commercial BC vineyard, so they are really something to celebrate. These vines receive absolutely no sprays or fertilizers, which is an incredible boast for coastal vines—organic certified grapes can’t even claim that!
More about Flor
For any members who picked up a bottle of our unique experiment FLOR, you can find an explainer about the history and science behind aging under yeast films in these articles: Raising the flor and The science of flor: what’s growing on my wine?
The flor batch was the result of a partially-filled barrel we….forgot about. When we peeked in after the busy hubbub of harvest, we found a fully formed yeast film protecting it from oxygen. At this point, most wine/cidermakers would have hurried to rack the cider out from under the yeast film and dosed it with sulphites to kill the microbiological activity. But having read about certain Spanish and French wine and sherry makers who embrace yeast film aging, we decided to roll with it instead (at the risk of total spoilage), letting it age for a couple months before racking and bottle conditioning. FLOR is the wonderful result—we expected some interesting funk but we actually got a fresh, beautifully nuanced, peachy-almondy treat of a cider.
Image: wineanorak.com Global Wine Journal
“[...} an average annual temperature of about 18°C, high relative humidity and proximity to the sea, are really good for the development of the flor. ”
SUMMER 2021 / In this section:
Excerpt from beside magazine “vital matters”
Behind the scenes: Transporting a clay pot
excerpt from beside magazine “vital matters”
“The winemaker, confronted with the blooming, buzzing profusion of life, rather than recoiling or attempting to impose order into it, says, ‘Yes, let’s see where this takes us.’ And, in doing so, brings us drinkers along with them.”
Perusing an issue of the indie print magazine BESIDE we came across an inspiring article on natural wine and microbial communities that expressed our own philosophy so well that we asked them for permission to share an excerpt here.
The following is from an article by Jonah Campbell in BESIDE issue 8. Read it with a glass of pét-nat!
"It is fitting that the world of natural wine should become one of the key sites for this rearticulation of human-microbe relationships in the 21st-century. For it was in his early research on wine and the causes of spoilage that Louis Pasteur elaborated the idea that fermentation was a biological process, carried out by microscopic living agents--yeasts and bacteria. Though others had proposed yeasts as living organisms before, it was Pasteur and his subsequent work on the germ theory of disease that firmly established microbes in the land of the living.
We might say that before 1866, humanity lived in a world of mysterious forces, miasmas, and spontaneous generation. After 1866, we stepped into a world where every surface, and indeed the very air itself, is alive with vital activity, just beyond the field of vision. A world in which we are never truly alone.
But of course this activity does not take place in a vacuum (pun intended). The bounds of this relationship are not limited to the winemakers and the microbes, but extend to include the consumers as well: the sommeliers, who serve and sell the wine, educate themselves about and enthuse over it; and those who simply drink it (not mutually exclusive groups, naturally). While the fevered anti-capitalist in me balks at most talk of consumer choice as the basis of any kind of community, I am in this instance tempted to suspend at least part of my usual skepticism.
Yet it is this very wildness, this vitality, that is so exciting to many drinkers, novices and connoisseurs alike. Indeed, this was my own point of entry into loving wine, and remains an almost undrainable source of drinking pleasure and intellectual attraction. The winemaker, confronted with the blooming, buzzing profusion of life, rather than recoiling or attempting to impose order into it, says, 'Yes, let's see where this takes us.' And, in doing so, brings us drinkers along with them.
Whether most people think about it explicitly or not (they don't), this openness and willingness of drinkers to be surprised, and surprised by what they like, to deal with that unpredictability, can be seen as an extension of this quasi-ethical, quasi-aesthetic micro-community, grounded in a respect for the agency of the yeasts and a willingness to meet them halfway."
-Jonah Campbell, "Vital Matters: natural wine and learning how to live with microbes" BESIDE Issue 08
Behind the scenes: transporting a clay pot
Many folks ask about the status of our dug-clay vessel project, so here’s a little behind-the-scenes of the last trip we took to the Shadbolt Centre to pick up one of the newly kiln-fired pots. We’re currently working on a way to fire the new ones I have built in our backyard, so with luck we won’t need to strap pots in for a ferry ride ever again! The cider aging in the first few clay vessels is tasting amazing and we can’t wait to share it with you.
Spring 2021 / In this section:
Video: Apple Bin tour Harvest 2020
Video: Storing & Chilling natural bubbles 101
Sneak Peek at Pipette Magazine Feature
Video: basket Press vs. Rack & Cloth Press
A peek inside the apple bins
A look at the rare varieties we’re typically picking and pressing near the end of the harvest season…with some tidbits about some of the club-only batches we were working on at the time. Filmed during the 2020 harvest season.
A guide to chilling and storing natural bubbles
The majority of ciders (craft or mass) on the market are artificially force-carbonated and pasteurized or filtered. But our jam is natural bubbles (CO2 is created through fermentation in the bottle rather than prior injection) and ciders that taste ALIVE. Naturally, they need to be handled a bit differently. Watch this quick 101 for the basics!
Sneak peek at Pipette magazine feature
We’re pretty thrilled to be documenting Katie’s clay fermentation vessel project for the indie natural wine magazine Pipette’s June issue. Here’s a look at some of the photos showing the process of digging, screening, and drying the native clay, to building the 150 litre pot layer by layer. We’ll be aging a batch of cider in a few of the larger vessels pictured, to be released as a regular club offering later this year.
“The trees, clay and stone here have been gently used for tools, art and food storage from time immemorial by the Coast Salish nations indigenous to this region, but the defining relationship between settlers and the land has been exploitively industrial in scale. For me, as a settler, this simple, slow process which begins with a bucket and shovel is a revelation of how normalized industrially-mined and manufactured equipment is in North-American cider/winemaking. Becoming intimate with and curious about the land I live on has provided me with an alternative.”
How we get juice: basket press vs. rack & cloth
Matthew talks about the history and uses of the two different presses we use during the harvest season. Filmed during the fall/winter 2020.
Anna and Simeon working our rack and cloth press, the press we use for the majority of our apples. The rack and cloth was designed specifically for apples, and historically in England the "cloths" were actually woven from horse hair. We use heavy-weight denim-style cotton--washing and line-drying dozens of these after a press day is quite a chore!
Our "old" wooden basket press, originally a wine press. Matthew and our helper Ari (who filmed most of this) are pressing the fermenting pomace that went on to become the batch On the Pomace. We use this press for most of our small club-only batches.