Falling Headfirst into the Void…

In my first (ever) blog, entitled “Baby Steps”, I talked about my early experiments making hard cider at home and how this “winemaker” began his metamorphosis into a “cidermaker”. When we last left off, our winemaking hero (me) had managed to create something that walked like hard cider, talked like hard cider, and, well...tasted like hard cider. People even liked it. Fast forward to 2017. With my early success, and with my incredibly optimistic and unnaturally enthusiastic partner Christine, we decided to scale this operation up. Could we flush handfuls of cash down the toilet and have it refill with MORE cash than we had flushed? That’s right...it was time to start a business! I’ll spare you the details of how that works. Why? Cuz it’s the time and interest-equivalent of eating at Applebees while watching a C-SPAN marathon.

Here was my extensive and detailed plan for getting this hard cider biz off the ground in four easy steps:

1. Find some great apples, figure out how to extract their sweet nectar.
2. Put that golden goodness into some kind of large container and ferment it.
3. Put that incredible, glistening, finished hard cider into some kind of smaller, saleable bottle/can/milk jug.
4. Profit massively while enjoying praise and adoration from throngs of admiring super-fans.

Today we’ll focus on STEP 1 as I’m lazy and don’t feel like writing a masterwork...and I tend to get sidetracked easily (see below). As you’ll surely note from my list, in order to start a hard cider business, we needed one very particular thing: a CRAP-load of fresh-pressed apple cider. Yikes. My head hurts, even now, as I recount the machinations that my puny brain went through trying to figure this all out. One of the biggest sources of concern and bewilderment that I harbored when we embarked on this alcoholic maiden voyage was, “Where would we find apples?” I would literally be driving up the Taconic Parkway, past miles and miles of apple orchards, while subtly panicking inside over the fear that we wouldn’t be able to find enough apples. Mind you, I live in New York….the apple epicenter of the east coast of ‘Merica.

Apples Everywhere!

The Introverted Boozehound

(Prepare to sidetrack...) It would probably behoove me to admit here that I’m a dedicated and proficient “loner”. I prefer to do EVERYTHING alone, except for perhaps sex and fishing. The thought of having to TALK to people...and TRUST people…and RELY on other people to get apples made me nauseous. Deeply nauseous. I don’t even trust my doctor cuz I’m pretty sure that I know more about the medical profession than he does. For instance, he told me that my diet has no effect on my cholesterol levels. For REAL! Although, to be fair, he probably gets kickbacks from pharmaceutical sales reps, so he is just looking out for himself by feeding me nonsense information that will inexorably lead to a Statin “sale”. That I can understand. And hey, I need him to probe my prostate once a year and make sure it’s not the size of a grapefruit. So I pretend to value his expertise. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. I’d like to apologize to our younger readers who will inevitably have to listen to me complain about “getting older” occasionally. I just turned 45, so deal with it. The body falls apart. Drink more hard cider and it won’t. Trust me! (btw, that is NOT medical advice...just GOOD advice).

Finding the Best Hard Cider Apples

Back to the story now - Fortunately, one of our “partners” (quotes here indicate that she is no longer a partner….long story) at the time had previously purchased fresh-pressed cider from a local grower in Hudson, NY. This was the kind of lead that I desperately needed because it would reduce my human contact and interaction by at least 50%. With great trepidation, we drove over to meet this mystery man. After passing through a good ¼ mile of beautiful orchards and descending an impossibly steep gravel drive to the cider mill, we met Jim. Let me say now that Jim is “THE MAN”. I mean, a salt-of-the-earth, overall wearin’, permanently callused and stained hand, honest, hardworking, straight-shootin’ American. The kind of guy who tells you that everything will work out if you just put in the hard hours and effort. He’s lying of course, because we all know that’s not how it really works in America, but I also subscribe to the illusion. Jim comes from a family of apple growers. He has like 23 brothers and sisters, all 6 foot 5 inches tall, and they all work 8 days a week from 5am until 9:30pm. Sadly, these families are rapidly disappearing because WE all think that apples and other produce come from Chile and Mexico and are sold in Stop & Shop. They do, actually. And that’s the problem. The guy living next door to you probably grows amazingly flavorful and nutritious fruits and vegetables, like 1 mile from your home, yet you drive 5 miles to ACME and buy cardboard tomatoes and weird garlic from China that have been in controlled atmosphere storage for 9 months after being shipped halfway around the world...cuz they cost less. End of rant. After shootin’ the shit for a while (which is very hard for me because it requires “talking” and “looking” at people), Jim handed us a list of all the apples that they grow and said, “Just let me know which ones you want and how much”. Really? Just like that? After all my worry and panic, all I have to do is “let you know” what I want? But then I looked at the list of apples and my 3 seconds of relief was stomped flat by the feeling of falling headfirst into a dark, silent void. The list was long….and it was August….and some of those apples are harvested in August! I needed to make some decisions fast.

Jim’s daunting apple list

Fortunately, having come from the wine world, I already knew which varieties were best and what they would contribute to the final blend. Except for one thing. These were apples. Not grapes. We were cocked and loaded to spend a LOT of money on fresh-pressed cider, but I had barely even heard of half of these varieties. Much to my chagrin, the chart, while helpful if you’re going to bake a pie, or eat apples fresh, does not have a “quality in hard cider” column for dummies like me. Now, when writing a blog, it’s essential to take some dramatic license and create some kind of narrative. My favorite narrative is: “I’m dumb and don’t know what I’m doing, but then I succeed in the end!” In truth, our hero (me) does know a FEW things. Jim’s apples were primarily what are called “Culinary” or “Dessert” apples. They’re not the cider apples that are common in old-world cider-making cultures like England, France, and Spain. However, this is New York, and I live in American apple country. I wanted to make American cider. Specifically Hudson Valley, New York cider. Jim’s apples differ from “true cider apples”, as those who are fortunate enough to have some like to call them, in that they don’t have as much tannin (for those that don’t know, tannins are responsible for your lips sticking to your teeth when you drink red wine) and they are generally larger and sometimes lower in sugar. The one thing they DO have in spades is ACID! If you remember from Blog #1, I’m an acid freak, so the prospect of dealing with some tangy-tart juice is A-OK with me. In fact, it excites me. Gets me all tingly in my special places. Makes me salivate and do that eye-popping thing that happens in old cartoons. I knew that I wanted to make acid-driven cider, and I now knew that Jim was going to be my acid dealer!

Jim and Our Hero

Selecting the Best Cider Apples Varieties

After much research (Google) and consultation with other cider makers (Google) I came up with a short-list of varieties that I wanted to purchase. The lion’s share would be Northern Spy because I knew that it could make great cider and I knew that it was high in…wait for it…you know what’s coming…any guesses?...yes….that’s right...ACID!!!!! I also knew that I wanted as much alcohol as I could get in the finished product because I’m an experienced over-drinker. Jonagold is a high-sugar apple, so that was key. More sugar = more alcohol. Science. I also knew that Winesap and Idared were sure bets with strong reputations. After that, however, I just wasn’t sure. My strategy would be to try a handful of other varieties and just do some good ol’ fashion investigating. If you don’t know, then figure it out! To round out my experimentation list I chose Arkansas Black (nice heirloom variety), Honeycrisp (we all love em’), Macintosh (I have a macbook and an iPhone, so that makes sense), Liberty (because Jim grows a lot and I was doing him a favor...and heh, I like personal liberty), Empire (for this one I closed my eyes and randomly pointed to a spot on the list), and Opalescent (WTF? Never heard of that one, but I was intrigued.) I asked Jim if he had any crab apples (tiny, bitter, sour, nasty little buggers) in his orchard because although you would never eat them fresh, crab apple juice can make some mighty fine hard cider. Crab apples are typically planted throughout orchards as pollinators to make sure there’s enough pollen floating about in spring to ensure a healthy crop of apples. Jim had already promised his crabs to friends and neighbors who wanted to make hard cider at home, but he referred me to another orchard nearby where I could check. It turns out that they had some crabs (if I was willing to pick them myself) and another pollinator variety called Crimson Crisp. Hmmmm. Interesting. They weren’t crabs, but they were relatively small and I had heard rumors about their potential, so I pounced and bought enough to get about 300 gallons of juice. With enough fruit to yield a “crap-load” of cider in hand, we were all set to begin our first Merchant’s Daughter production! The next step would be finding something to ferment all this luscious and tangy juice in. I’m gonna call it quits here cuz I’ve had enough of talking for one day (this actually took me two weeks to write, but hey...the narrative baby!) In a future episode, our hero (me) needs to turn all that apple sugar into apple booze for his adoring fans. Stay tuned!

Our Hero picking crab apples

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