Also important is that all of our cultivars are doing well. Having fruit from all 12 of our apple varieties will provide a nice palette of tannins, acids and sugars for what will become the 2015 (two year aged) brandy and perhaps a later four-year aged brandy release.
Another great pleasure of this year’s crop is that The Cider Farm will produce its first crop of true Perry pears. These pear varieties, like the apple varieties we specialize in, have been cultivated over hundreds of years to produce complex Perry—the pear equivalent to true cider.
Although in the future we will consider pursuing the development of a true Perry product, this year’s Perry pears will go into our brandy. We follow the blending guidelines of the French Calvados producers, which call for a small amount of high-quality pear in the blend. Our organic perry pears should do the trick nicely and keep our brandy production to 100% estate-grown fruit. For our 2013 and 2014 cider brandy releases we added organic pears from off The Cider Farm to supply the pear quotient in the mix.
Every year is different in the orchard. The 2011 growing year, which provided the ingredients for this year’s cider brandy release, was fairly consistent, producing our first crop of good quality. This crop has aged nicely in American oak casks and our wild apple wood. We look forward to our Brandy Release on October 3 from 5 to 10 PM at Yahara Bay Distillers in Madison, and to the reactions from those who try it. We hope you can join us!
###
Managing for Flavor At The Cider Farm we do everything we can to put as much flavor intensity into our cider brandies and (eventually) our ciders as possible. We begin by selecting a range of true cider apple cultivars to provide the tannins and acids necessary for complex fermented and distilled products. Our decision to grow only cider apples is at the heart of what we do and how we approach crafting our products. The lack of commercial availability of these apple varieties is why this project has taken ten years to produce its first product. Having apple varieties that possess the flavor profiles we need is a major step in our process at The Cider Farm, but we don’t stop there. Typically, in growing table fruit, orchardists will thin their crop in the spring as the young apples are beginning to form. In organic production, salt water is sprayed on the crop to cause some of the blossoms to drop off at this point. This results in fewer, but larger, apples, a generally desirable state for table and fresh fruit growers. Since we use 100% of our crop in the production of alcoholic beverages, we manage for high tannin and flavor, not larger fruit size. By not thinning our crop, on many of our cider varieties we get clusters of smaller apples rather than a few larger ones. This fundamentally and significantly changes the fruit to skin ratio of the apples, resulting in a higher percentage of skin in the apples as they go into the mill. It is the skin where the apple’s tannins and aromatic notes are to be found. Not all apple varieties cluster, but in the ones that do, by not thinning we take another step to provide complexity in the juice that is then fermented and distilled.###
Where It All Begins At The Cider Farm we have had to develop production steps and processes that the typical commercial orchard doesn’t. When we began the project that has become The Cider Farm, the American, English and French cider apples that we wanted to grow were not commercially available. We had to get the varietal wood to be grafted onto our selected rootstocks from one exceptional small grower in Wisconsin and from the United State’s apple germplasm repository in Ithaca, New York. From our earliest days, we have had to hand graft our trees and begin their life in a nursery prior to placement in the orchard. In the past, our tree nurseries have been located at various spots on The Cider Farm and have encompassed as many as 1,500 trees at a time but this year we decided to change and expand on our tree nursery approach. This spring we erected a 30’ x 100’ hoop house to help accelerate the process of growing our own tree stock. The plan for the hoop house is to fill it with nearly a foot of compost to act as the growing medium for the graftings. Graftings will be started in the early spring in the hoop house and taken out and put in the orchard in the fall. It is hoped that the hoop house will accelerate their development during their first growing season. By planting these graftings into the orchard in the fall, they will be ready for quick growth in the spring (as opposed to just being planted then). A more rapid expansion of the total trees in our orchard will help us launch a range of true ciders in addition to our cider brandy and be able to sustain production volumes of the high-quality, specialty juice needed to produce the craft product we have in mind. If we were OK with using table apples or juice concentrate we could produce product any time but this way you will have to stay tuned for our first cider release in the spring of 2015.###