Archive for the ‘Apples’ Category

Once upon a time, I built a wine cellar. In order to make decent wine from the grape vines in my back yard, I was advised to practice on other fruit. I practiced on apples. Now my wine cellar’s really a cider cellar. Perhaps cider/charcuterie cellar would be most appropriate. If I call it a wine cellar, it’s only because I’m lying or getting old and am forgetting what is in fact stashed down there. It’s cider. Apple ciders of various blends/batches. Pear ciders of various blends/batches. A couple types of Pommeau [an apple and apple brandy desert wine]. And if you look hard through the bins, you will find some actual grape-based wine. If you were to turn around from this view of the west wall of bins, you’d see kegs. Full of bubbly cider. Awaiting an epic party. Above them hangs odds and sods of dry cured meats. Refreshing that meat stash is on my to-do list.

Edmonton is an apple [and pear] city, and we just haven’t figured it out yet. Maybe I’m reading too much into things or it’s just the circles I spin in, but cider seems to be slowly creeping into our psyche. Maybe it’s just me. I’m starting to think ‘coq au cidre’ instead of ‘coq au vin’. Starting to pair every pork dish with some kind of apple booze. Give me cheese, I now think ‘pear cider’ instead of ‘pinot gris’ [which I still love, btw]. Is part of it frugality? Partly, especially indirectly in that it’s so abundant that dumping a litre into a braise doesn’t phase me, whereas dumping a $20 bottle into the dish does. As a result it creeps into your daily life. But there is also a dominant thread of simple beauty around the harnessing of what ‘where we live’ offers. I don’t think that bit will ever get old.

So I built a big cider press. Or rather, I had one built. A metal fabricator built the steel frame, and @landonschedler crafted the oak tray. It didn’t take long in test-phase to be in awe at the faucet flow of fresh juice pouring out of it. It works well.

Cider season, having happened the first part of September, feels like a blur. Chad Moss and I spent nearly every day for two to three weeks [don't remember, the blur thing] either in a fruit tree, under a fruit tree, in a vehicle finding a fruit tree, or in my garage crushing and pressing the yield of the fruit tree. We did take breaks to light a fire and prep a meal here and there. And slept. But that was pretty much cider season. If it takes 100lbs of fruit to fill a carboy, I estimate we saw 5-6000lbs of fruit, marked by roughly 400-600lbs of 3-4 different varieties of pears in the mix. Everything from little red crabapples tasting like watermelon jolly rancher to huge baking apples, to apples with bright pink flesh – we saw a lot of apple. Need to keep better records next year, but I’m confident we cracked the kilo-L this year, and likely made it into the 1200-1300L range. Not all for me, of course. And that’s what makes this cider season an epic one. Spent a lot of time with good friends having a lot of good times, revelling in the wealth of fruit, dipping glasses under the tap of fresh juice, sharing meals and drinks and the satisfying fatigue of hard work. A memorable stretch of life, this cider season was. And the cider will now penetrate into our homes, affecting how we’re cooking and drinking, etching itself more deeply into our food culture. Love it.

I dearly wish I could show you via video rather than photos and writing, as I had lined up a video episode for this wonderful place, and realized I forgot my DSLR setup on the lower mainland as we left the dock on the ferry towards Victoria. I don’t think I’ve ever claimed to be smart.

I’ve known about Merridale for a while, and had tasted some of their ciders prior to me falling in love with the stuff, but it was an eye opener seeing first hand the cider gold-mine of awesome they’re sitting on, and taste the gamut of their production. The only cider operations I’ve been to have been in Normandy, so it was nostalgic to be there. Nostalgic, and a little piece of me hopes: prophetic. I think there’s opportunity in this industry in Canada. Big time. All those varietals that grow here in abundance but folks don’t get excited about because they’re not good out of hand translates into cider potential. My nostalgia though was a little mis-sited, as the varietals they use are base more in the British cider culture. It’s all good in my world.

As with most new world producers, the methodology here is based on past winning formulae, with many a contemporary innovation. They make pommeau, for example, but not the way the French do – the french just mix 1/3 apple brandy to 2/3 juice and age it in oak 18 months. Merridale’s is actually based on cider to bring some of that flavour to the party, and they age it in oak a lot longer. Their cider product line is deep with variations on the cider theme – all of them interesting, my favorites being their dessert ciders and Normandie cider.

As with all new ag ground that need be broken, their operation is plagued by government foot-dragging. The distillation portion of the business, an important piece of the puzzle in my opinion, gets hammered with ~170% tax by the province, rendering profitability impossible if trying to hit a price point on a bottle that the market will bear. They’re working hard to change that. Until then, barrels of apple brandies sit in french oak until it’s profitable to bottle and sell them. C’mon BC gov’t.

This place is worth a visit, and worth supporting in general. Sadly, because their product is only shelf stable under refrigeration, transportation far and wide has not been feasible. So despite this being the closest cool cidery to me [closer than France, that's for sure], I still can’t buy the stuff here. One day. Until then, I still heart Merridale. Bravo.

Applejack is a hard liquor of 20-30% abv that can only be made when it’s extremely cold out. For that, it is special to me. Its flavours and smells cannot be created in warmer climates – perhaps why the Normands don’t do applejack despite their apple-booze culture…they simply can’t. It’s extra special due to the fact that distilling booze to make spirits is illegal here – big time. But this isn’t. I spoke to 4 people at the AGLC [all strangely helpful and nice] before finding out if posting this would incriminate me. The guy at the top didn’t even know what applejack was, and had to look it up and get back to me. Apparently I am into the obscure. Clearly couldn’t be something they were enforcing if they didn’t even know what it was, no? Had to be sure though, and in the end, the authorities gave me the okay – but do check with the authorities in your jurisdiction prior to trying it, finding yourself in the slammer, and blaming it on me. Don’t do that.

You could try this with a full bodied white on the sweeter side if you want to give it a go and are short on cider [not a problem I have]. My one suggestion having done it is that you’d want to use as high quality an input as you can – use your good stuff, not your ‘this-sucks-but-maybe-if-I-Applejack-it-stuff’ – as it will concentrate the good, but also the bad. More, in the video.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a friend about apple-booze-making, something near and dear to my heart, and I learned that he had out-produced me in volume this past year. And I made a lot. It was immediately clear to me that we would have to get together to do a tasting of our products to check them all out, compare notes, etc. So we did. That was last week. And I made a discovery.

Last year, on apple crush day one of many, I opened a bottle of the 2009 vintage, then a year old. I had kept a half case back, tucked it in a top corner of my wine cellar, and was resolved to test one a year to track its evolution. So pulled the cork, and besides some light bubbliness, it was very austere and boring. The newer vintage was better by far. I was really disappointed, and had built a lot of capacity to properly age wine. Looked like this stuff was going to be like most white wines – lose its bright fruit after a year or so and tank steadily after that. It was so disappointing that I wondered what to do with the remaining bottles.

So at last week’s mega-tasting among other things we tried a 3-4 bubbly ciders, and 3-4 apple wines, including a vertical of the 2009 and 2010 vintages from my tree. And lo and behold, the 2009 knocked the socks off the 2010. It was unquestionably more concentrated on the nose and palate, and had a far better flavor profile. Lovely stuff. I enjoyed every last bit of that bottle. So what happened?!?! It shut down after a year [it was good young], and then perked up after 2? Not sure, but I can tell you that I’m extremely glad I have a few more bottles tucked away in the cellar for future years, and am relieved that I have space to age more of the 2010 and 2011 vintages. Clearly more research required.

Success, right out of the gates. I’m pleased. It’s probably worth mentioning that I wouldn’t call myself a big cider lover. I haven’t minded the stuff, but it’s taken a while to take a shine to it. So why bother then? I’ve been making apple wines, and although I enjoy them, some variety in the form of carbonation would be appreciated, especially on hot summer days. I also wanted to make a product with fewer inputs. Apple wines requires chaptilization, which means adding sugar to get the 12% or so alcohol content vs the 5-8% that the juice would naturally ferment to. I was using sulphites, pectic enzyme, acid products in some cases, oak. Then my recent visit to France inspired me to shed it all. To simply take juice, let the yeasts present in the juice and air ferment it, and leave it at that.

I wrote about the making of it here and here. You can watch the stuff ferment here. You can even back way up and check out the flower blossom stage here.

At bottling, it wasn’t terribly exciting. No carbonation at that point, just a semi-dry flat cider. But then, as it was supposed to, it gradually picked up carbonation from the remaining sugar in the fermenting must. Although not evident in the photos, it now gets a 2-3″ head of foam on it when decanted – which is sensible to keep the lees out of the glass. As the bottle fermentation continues, it keeps getting foamier, which is pretty darn cool if you ask me. No CO2 products. No priming bottles with sugar. Just plain old juice fermenting in bottle. Neat.

It now tastes lovely – far better than I’d expected, as cider can be pretty funky from fermentation smells that aren’t always pleasant. Since discovering that the austere acidity of apple wines benefited from back-sweetening with elderflower syrup – which softens the texture and gives it gewurztraminer/ehrenfelser type notes on the nose – we’ve been doing the same to the cider at times, and it’s damn good. Highly recommended. Ends up coming across like a nice white wine aromatically, with the refreshing carbonation of a light beer or bubbly wine. I find I prefer it as-is, dry, with food – and picked up with the elderflower as aperitif. At this stage, it’s not just me that likes it – others who don’t normally dig cider are also loving it. Success. Here’s hoping that bursting bottles don’t burst my bubble.

One of the things that keeps me blogging is the lack of information about certain topics available online – and this is one of those. There is oodles of information, youtube videos, and so on for still cider and even moreso bubbly cider achieved by fermenting dry then priming with sugar for carbonation, none of which I wanted to make. I wanted to make old-school bubbly cider. Like it would have been done eons ago, using the sugar present in the must to make the bubbles. Fortunately it’s extremely easy, barring one small detail surrounding not having bottles blowing up, literally, all over.

So here’s what I did. Picked apples. Crushed and pressed apples. Did not rack off the clear juice – left the sediment in for yeast nutrient and flavor [for better or worse]. Let the pressed juice ferment naturally – no added yeast, no campden tablets, no pectic enzyme, zero. Let it bubble happily away until S.G. of about 1.003 – which was a bit of an overshoot, as I was shooting for 1.005, which is what I’ve read my flip-top bottles can hold for pressure were the yeast to fully ferment the remaining sugar. [side note: champagne bottles can take 1.010, kegs far more, wine bottles are a major no-no] It hit 1.005 yesterday but I simply didn’t have the time to bottle yesterday. C’est la vie. Fortunately I have a batch that was still not fermented down that far, so added some of it’s sweeter still-fermenting-and-very-clear must to get to 1.005. Once there, and I was careful with the S.G. tests as I didn’t want bottle bomb issues, I racked into the bottles, flipped the tops shut, and will now let them sit for a while to continue fermenting in bottle. With ever-so-versatile rubbermaid containers inverted over the case to contain any potential disaster.

Yes, I know there are risks involved with wild yeasts not wanting to finish the job or bringing off flavours to the party. I get it. The advantage I have on this front is that I have 9 carboys with different fruit from different locations in each, so I’m expecting some variability. Worth noting that every last one of them is fermenting happily and healthily. I’m not sure why this is a surprise, but it is. Also appeasing any fear of wild-yeast-malfunction is if some goes stinky-sideways, I still have uses for it. Vinegar, or some other cider byproduct. If they all go sideways I’ll reconsider my yeast strategy.

How does it taste? Ok. Which is what I was expecting. Freshly made cider isn’t optimally tasty, especially flat. Like beer, it’s way better ice cold and bubbly. We’ll see if this batch gets there. Oh – one last thing, volume. I did just under an 11L carboy of this batch in 1L and 500ml flip-tops. I plan on doing another batch once one of the particularly clear carboys hits the correct S.G.. Might also do some back-sweetened-type/primed version. We’ll see. I have some time to figure it out, and about 200L of fermenting goodness left to get me there.

There has been an inverse relationship between my activity with food and my number of posts lately – ie, I’ve been so busy harvesting and processing fruit and veg that there’s really not much time left to write. But I believe I’ve turned a corner. Apple crush is over.

Last year I crushed and pressed about 1000 lbs of urban apples, and this year I did roughly the same. I have 9 full carboys fermenting away, 16L of juice put up with many litres already consumed fresh, have about 30 lbs fresh in the fridge, made a case-and-a-half of ‘pommeau’, gave a few boxes to charity and Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton, and am now happily turning down offers of more apples. I’m done. Way done. Done to the point of now trying to figure out how to streamline my process so that it’s not such a grind in future years. I recently built a space adjacent to my cellars to accommodate wine/cider making, so my process is under full review and likely to get a profound overhaul.

Needless to say, if my evenings haven’t been consumed by harvesting apples, they’ve been consumed by crushing, pressing, clean down, tending fermenting carboys, clean down, repeat, clean down – and am now seeing the other side where some of the carboys have fermented enough that my first bottling of semi-sweet cider is imminent. Which will mean bottling in flip-tops and then, more clean down. Conclusion: my new wine/cider making space will be well equipped for ease of clean down. Next task, plumbing.

[Part 1 is here]. Over lunch yesterday it came up that some of the calvados I was tasting in Normandy was 40 years or older, the oldest specific vintage being a 1969 Dupont. That would be very unusual in the wine world, and highlighted  one of the fantastic things about spirits vs. wine: shelf stability. Opening a bottle of 1969 red wine would be a commitment, as that bottle would need to die within a short period of time to not waste its awesomeness. A bottle of 1969 calvados [or any similar spirit] is fine on the shelf well past your being dead. Which makes it clear to me why folks starting distilling in the first place. Pre-electricity, creating a shelf stable product out of perishable food was an accomplishment, often a necessary one. A food product that actually improved with decades of storage, even. Not many other food-stuffs can claim that feat, if any.

Secondly, it allows you to use a copious amount of produce. Let’s say for a moment that an apple tree produces about 220lbs of fruit. 10 trees would yield a tonne of fruit [2200 lbs]. 100 trees, 10 tonnes. I know folks with over 1000 trees – 100 tonnes. What do you do with 100 tonnes of fruit?? A bit absurd to consider, perhaps, but in fact it’s part of the problem I see with the urban fruit in our city that needs rescuing. If we could glean 100 tonnes of apples, what to do with all of that?? The man-power required to peel, core, cook, and put that fruit into some kind of consumable food-form is considerable. A portion of it could go that direction, but not all of it. Ask anybody staring at 100 lbs of apples, and they’d probably be eager to hear of other ideas of what to do with it all, nevermind a few tonnes. The answer: juice and its by-products.

So juice. You can see my crusher and press in action here, that can largely be slapped together for $100 or less if you’re thrifty. It makes juice. Tasty juice, actually, some apple varieties far more than others, which makes sense. In Normandy that’s product #1: apple juice. They pasteurize it via heating, as one would expect for shelf stability. Product #2 comes shortly thereafter: unpasteurized must is mixed with a previous vintage of calvados to make pommeau, my new favorite aperitif. The high alcohol content [17%] prevents any yeast parties, and stabilizes the product. And it’s tasty. Very cool. And it’s just a measure, mix, and bottle exercise that’s super easy. Once the must starts to ferment naturally – all the producers I visited rely on native yeast strains, none added  - they start watching specific gravity measurements to pull cider at different sweetness levels. The sooner the stuff’s bottled, the less time the yeast has had a chance to convert sugar to alcohol, so the sweeter the cider. Product #3: sweet cider. They’ll often pull an intermediate level of sweetness shortly thereafter – product #4: semi-sweet cider. They’ll then do the rest of the cider once much [but not all] of the sugars are fermented for product #5: dry cider. The rest of the juice is left to ferment to complete dryness, which would taste nasty as a cider essentially – for distillation. In the winter, they’ll start distilling it into product #6: calvados [apple brandy]. Many products come from that as different ages are bottled for different uses and palates. Many more products come in the way of cider jellies, vinegars, etc. All because of some apple juice. All  gleaned from different stages of the one process.

Part of my exploration was how apples impacted food culture in Normandy, and how that might translate here. I’d say booze is the biggy. Not only does it impact what you drink, but it also makes its way into your food. Dishes finished with calvados rather than grape-wine-made brandy. Meats cooked in cider rather than beer or wine. And as soon as you bring those apple flavors to the dish, it opens up the opportunity to bring the apples in themselves. While there I was putting pears and apples into nearly every dish, every meal. Apples are extremely versatile and can work in savory dishes as well as the sweet, can vary in texture from crunchy raw to mushy when sauced, and tend not to dominate a dish. Slow cooked apples and leeks in AOC Isigny butter with some local fleur de sel atop a local Bayeux breed of pork bone-in chop cooked over an open fire was a highlight. Simple, but lovely. Desserts were chausson aux pomme, or poire. My daily snack-on-the-go was a fresh apple picked that morning on my way out the driveway. I drank apple juice for breakfast every day, and cider, pommeau, and calvados in the afternoon and evening. Apples invaded my daily food instantly, from top to bottom, not missing a spot. So mission accomplished on that front: the chaussons aux pommes that I baked off last night are a testament to some of that Normand influence already making its way into my own food culture. I’m sipping some freshly blended pommeau as I write.

The humble apple is capable of much, and little used to its full potential here. I hope to change that in my home.

[Regarding apple seed toxicity. I've had many questions over the last few years about coring to rid the apples of seeds which contain trace amounts of toxins - there have been some debates in the comments. I can assure you, apple juice and cider producers do no such thing. They do not employ immigrants to core each of the millions of apples, or have a machine designed to do it. The apples go whole into a big machine of destruction and get turned into pulp, seeds and all. I'm not the only one going whole-apple. You don't consume the solids. In Normandy that goes to their cows. Presumably the seed solids even in that concentration won't kill a cow, or they would likely stop that practice rather abruptly.]