University Place

Hi, as she said, my name is Deirdre Birmingham from the Cider Farm, and I'd also like to introduce my husband John Biondi, who's seated over. And so John and I started the Cider Farm back in 2003. We've always wanted to do a farm-based business together and decided we wanted to grow true cider apples to make premium ciders, or hard cider as if often the term today, from those apples. So when we set out to do that back in 2003, nobody knew what true cider apples were. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about those today. But that meant we had to learn to graft our own trees. Make your own trees. It was a DIY project. And we've been grafting and planting ever since and now finally have some products that only hit the market just a couple years ago. But I'm excited to talk to you about a beverage that we love. And how many of you currently are cider drinkers? Raise you hand, please. Oh, yes.

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Wonderful. And how many of you actually even have your own apple trees? Oh, wow. That's great. Okay. Good. All right. We've got some good company here. So I'm going to try to stay tight to this mic like I've been instructed to do, and as they are recording the session. So we'll take questions later on in the session unless I've said something that you couldn't quite clearly hear. I'm happy to repeat it as I'm sure the taped session will appreciate as well. All right, so this is our agenda for our session. I'm going to talk about what is hard cider, cider's history in the US, we'll talk about styles of cider, how to experience cider, although, I can see we've got some experienced people in here, the kinds of apples that are used to make cider and what is best in making cider, and then just a little bit on how cider is made. Some of you were in our session this morning that my husband led, and that was on the ins and outs of making cider. And that presentation is up on the Garden Expo website, and this presentation is also up on the Garden Expo website. So you don't have to write fast and furious. It's all there for you with some other references for more information. All right, so what is hard cider? Well, technically, when you press apples, you get apple juice, and when you ferment it, it becomes cider. It's only in the US that we call it hard cider. And that is because of Prohibition. So like we have been to England. That's the world's largest number of cider drinkers are in England. The most cider is consumed in England. And when we were there once, we were asked, "Oh, yes, you in America, you call cider", no he says, "You call apple juice, cider. So what is it now that you're calling cider?" So we said, "Well, we're calling it hard." "Oh, yes, yes, yes, hard cider." So, actually, when we think of hard, it's usually used with the term liquor, like hard liquor that's 40%, 43%. Well, apples only, have a little bit of sugar in them. Far less sugar than grapes. So when you ferment out that sugar to alcohol, you're only getting something that's like 3%, 5%, maybe at most 8.5%. So it's not really a hard liquor, but because we have started, because of the history of cider in the US, we are now calling it hard cider. But what cider is, as you all know, it's one of the most refreshing beverages. I know personally I often in the evening I'm thinking I don't really want a wine, I don't really want a beer, what I really want is a cider. A well made cider. It's crisp, it's naturally effervescent, and it was actually one of our first beverages. So you're all experiencing a bit of history when you have cider as well. It was just called cider then. Apple trees came with settlers from the UK. They are the first people to come over here. So they brought apple seeds, they brought apple trees, but that was their beverage. They brought it with them because they don't grow wine grapes in the UK. And, in fact, they don't grow very well in northern France either. So in northern France, they have an apple culture, and they drink cider called -- there, and they also drink apple brandy. And if you really want to know the story on Johnny Appleseed, he was not mom and apple pie, but he was more about real estate and booze. So because people, to claim land, you often had to have trees growing on it. People drank apples back then, and so he could get a jump on land by getting those trees already started or having a nursery that people could buy trees from him. They were just wild apple trees just grown from apple seeds. But if you've heard of Michael Pollan, an author who's written a lot about food, he wrote a book maybe 10 or so years ago called The Botany of Desire, and he has a chapter in there on the apple. And so when people hear about what we're up to, they often refer to that book and to that chapter, and that's also where you can read about the real Johnny Appleseed. As I mentioned, it is a very popular beverage in the UK. The most consumption of cider is in the UK. And we had a chance to experience some of that just very much on a local level. A lot of farms will be selling cider. Here we stopped by this one man's orchard and his little cider house here. You can see he has different barrels there. So he had cider in the barrels, and people could come, as this gentleman in the middle did, came with his own jug and filled it up to take it home, but might as well enjoy a glass while you're there. In the US, cider was popular because it was safer to drink than water in the early American cities. We didn't have sewage treatment plants, and so water wasn't necessarily safe. So roadhouses would have a jug of cider on the tables, and they would say cider happens because apples have wild yeast on the skins just like grapes do and most fruits do. And so when you press out that juice, you're pressing some of the wild yeast goes into the juice, and that wild yeast will just start turning some of that sugar to alcohol and to carbon dioxide, and so they say cider happens. And have any of you ever gotten a fresh pressed jug of-- we'll call it apple juice-- from a farm or farmers' market and you enjoyed some of it, but you put it in the fridge, it kind of got moved to the back, and you discover it three weeks later and the sides are starting to expand. Well you were making cider in your own fridge. And if you sip some of it, you notice maybe it wasn't quite as sweet, had a tiny little tang to it, a little effervescence to it, and I'm seeing some nods. Yep, so, in fact, I know some people enjoy their apple juice better that way now.

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Because it's actually becoming cider. So you're all, if you've done that, you've dabbled in home cider making. But what happened, although it was America's first beverage, it declined. And that happened with the rapid westward expansion when they were the Homestead Act and they were really pushing people to settle into the Midwest and into the Great Plains. Well, it takes a wild apple tree maybe eight, nine years before it's starting to bear fruit. People don't wait that long to have their drink. And we had all this German immigration come along, and so beer became one of the most popular beverages. Then we had Prohibition in the 1920s, and for young folk here who may not be familiar with it, that's when alcohol consumption and production were actually outlawed throughout the entire United States. It's sometimes just unreal to think that that could actually happen, but it did. But it didn't work out very well. So Prohibition was repealed in 1933. But during that time, even some of the orchards that had been planted for the purpose of making the beverage cider, those were even cut down. So cider just really declined and just slipped off into history. But now we're starting to experience what we might call a cider renaissance. So cider now, in the US, is the fastest growing beverage category. Outstrips everything. It's growing faster than craft beer ever grew. So now we were just at the cider con in Chicago, and it probably had over a thousand people. Whereas last year, there were 600 people, and it only started in 2011 with 45. So it's certainly a beverage that a lot of people are getting into now. It is naturally gluten-free, and who hasn't heard of gluten-free. Maybe two years ago you didn't know what that meant, but cider just naturally doesn't have wheat products in it, like beer does. So it's appealing to a lot of people also from that perspective. And people are just finding it is so refreshing. So, experiencing cider. Well, basically, cider tasting is like wine tasting because it is a wine. It is made like a wine. It is not made from grain like beer is. Back up one. There are different styles of cider. It's naturally effervescent, so it can taste carbonated. It can be added to it to make it even more carbonated. Or it can be still, like a white wine would be still. It can be dry, it can be semi-dry, or it can by sweet. So when you make your own cider at home, you use wine yeast to make it, and they will just take all that sugar out and ferment it to dryness. So it's naturally very dry. It's a challenge, actually, to make it somewhat sweet. You have to add some sweetness back into the product. So most of the ciders that are widely available in the US now have some kind of sweetness added back into them. And it can be filtered or unfiltered. We were-- the kind we were experiencing there in the UK was just rough and ready cider at the farmhouse, and so that was unfiltered. Whereas, a lot of what you buy now in the US is filtered. So it looks more clear. It has a lot of clarity to it like a wine would. So the way to experience cider is very much like a wine. I have over here on the table three of my favorite wines that I bought here in Madison, and they're all from Wisconsin. So these two that are in wine bottles, this is Island Orchard Brut Apple Cider. Brut means dry. So it is made like a wine, and they have made this into the naturally drier product. They have roots back in northern France, so they like to use more of a, they call it more of a French-style cider. They actually use some French apples. This is from AeppelTreow Winery in Burlington. This is from Door County. And this is from Burlington, the southeast part, AeppelTreow, and that is actually on an orchard where they use a lot of heritage apples as well as some of the true cider apples. This is another Wisconsin product from Maiden Rock, which is along the Mississippi River up towards the Twin Cities. So this is his product that he calls Scrumpy, and that's a very English term. That's what a lot of the farmhouse ciders are called because they're just kind of rough and ready ciders. But this cider is not rough and ready at all. He just calls it Scrumpy because he's used some of the English cider apples actually from grafting wood that he got from my farm to make this cider. So I'm just going to open this one up for you.

bottle being opened

So this is Maiden Rock. From Maiden Rock Winery and Cidery. This is his Scrumpy Cider. So, as you can see, I've poured it out into my wine glass because cider tasting is basically like a wine tasting. So, first, we evaluate its color. So you can see, this has quite a golden color. It can range from a very sort of light straw to an orangey amber color. It is clear. You'll notice this has been filtered. And so whereas some ciders can be actually quite cloudy. You probably can't see the little fine bubbles coming up, but it's effervescent. I don't know if they've added some carbonation or if it's all just from the fermentation itself. But there's several bubbles coming off of that. And now we can swirl it around a little bit, and we smell the aroma. So, off of this, there are some fruity esters that are coming off, but you can, just like you do for a wine, you want to evaluate what kind of aromas are coming off of that. It can be very yeasty. It can have like a barnyard kind of flavor. It can almost smell notes of caramel in some, some butterscotch kinds of things. Those kind of notes. Then you actually go to taste it. I love the mouth feel of this because there are tannins in there from using the English cider apples, and that also gives you, then, it has just a little more complexity to it. It hits different parts of your palate because your palate has the front, the middle, and the back. But very much, just like if any of you have done wine tasting, you know then you're very much evaluating ciders like you do wines. And this one is actually rather dry as opposed to sweet. There's just a little bit of residual sweetness, which does also add to the mouth feel in addition to those tannins. So you can all leave here knowing that many of you are cider makers from that juice in the back of the fridge, and now you're going to be cider snobs because you all know the fine art of not just wine but cider tasting. Okay. So, styles of cider. I've already alluded to some of that. The UK traditionally is known for drier ciders. They are exporting some ciders to the US that you may have tried, and they do know that Americans tend towards a little sweetness in their likings. So some of those do tend to be somewhat sweet. I mentioned there's a farmhouse cloudy kind of cider with lots of yummy stuff in it to very finely filtered. French ciders, I mentioned northern France, it's too cold to grow grapes so they do have an apple culture there, so those ciders are often a little bit sweeter because they rely more on a natural fermentation. So they're using the wild yeasts that were on the skin, typically, or historically they do this, and then let the fermentation start by those wild yeasts. Now, one thing about wild yeasts is that they kill themselves off by producing alcohol. So the yeasts produce carbon dioxide and alcohol. Those are those two byproducts as they eat the sugar, but then they get killed off by their own alcohol. So when the alcohol level starts getting above 3%, then the yeast start dying off, and then the fermentation slows down and so not all the sugar gets converted to alcohol and carbon dioxide. So those ciders can wind up being a little bit naturally sweet just because some of the leftover apple juice is still there to sweeten it. Has anybody had a Spanish cider? There's a part of northwestern Spain that is more Irish in heritage, Gaelic they call it. And so they have a cider culture there as well. But theirs tend to be rather acidic and almost a little bit vinegary-like. And those they will typically hold way up in the air and then pour down into a glass below just to aerate that cider a little bit and reduce some of the acidity. But if you ever have the invitation for a Spanish cider, I suggest you try it, but it will be somewhat acidic. And then the US, as you've all experienced, those ciders, relatively speaking, tend to be quite carbonated, and also a little bit on the, definitely on the sweeter side. So your Angry Orchard, Woodchuck, and a lot of the widely available ciders definitely, because we've been drinking Coca-Cola and soft drinks for so long that our palates are just used to something that's sweeter and definitely carbonated. And you can see, this is another farmhouse cider maker in the UK. They also do a variety of styles of cider to appeal to different people. This one happened to be at an organic orchard, and we visited that because we also manage our apples organically as well. And then you can also have very large scale cider production as well, where this is at Thatcher's in England where they have many, many huge stainless steel tanks as well as large oak barrels in which they're making thousands of gallons of cider a year. So, experiencing cider. Well, as many of you know, it pairs well with a wide variety of foods. And, fortunately for us in Wisconsin, one of the best foods it pairs with is cheese. And when we've done cider tasting classes, we also serve little bits of just a mild cheddar cheese as your palate cleanser in between each style of cider that you're tasting. So if you ever gather around with friends to do some cider sampling, you want to get a variety, like if you were going to get a variety of Wisconsin ciders, you would also want to get just some mild cheddar cheese to just serve little slices of that in between your different ciders that you're sampling. So it also goes well with cream sauces, dairy products. It goes wonderfully well with pork, pasta. It goes well with chicken, seafood. It's probably not something you're going to pair with a big steak. Go for your red wine for that or a beer. But anything you want to serve it with, it's, of course, up to you. But we're fortunate here in Wisconsin to have some of the world's best cheeses, and now we're getting world class ciders as well. So, how is good cider made? Well, I've already alluded a little bit to the apples. The apples, the apples are key. It's just like chefs preparing good food or winemakers making good wine. To make a really good cider, you don't just use regular table apples for them. They can be made from, you can start it with the actual apples that you might have access to, or you can buy juice. Often, you want fresh pressed juice, preferably unpasteurized, if you can get that. Juice concentrate, actually a lot of the cider that is available widely is made from apple juice concentrate that they buy on the global market. And, actually, the largest producer of apples in the world is? >> China. >> China, right. And China also produces the greatest amount of apple juice. So they largely export not their apples as much as they do apple juice. So a lot of the apple juice that comes into the US made from concentrate is actually made from Chinese apples. Of course, we make apple juice concentrate in the US. Turkey is also a major producer of apples and apple juice. But a lot of ciders are made from just what's readily available, and that's the juice concentrate. But the best apples are the kinds that have tannins and acids in them. And that's very similar to wine grapes. Fine wines are made from things like Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, and on and on. And there's also the wine grapes of apples. It's very important to use diverse apples. This is Brown's apples that we harvested from our farm. That's actually an English cider apple that is known for its aromas and for its acids. It's not an eating apple. It's a cider apple. So, just like there's wine grapes and there's table grapes, there are cider apples. You can use wild apples and tart apples to make cider. And one reason that we really advocate for people to use the wild apples is because a lot of those, not all of them, but some of them have tannins in them. So if you ever bite into a wild apple and just spit it out, there's your cider apple because that bitterness came from the tannins in that apple. And you'll notice it will turn brown fairly quickly. So that's got the tannins in that. So get all those apples, and if you're able to press, then you're going to get some tannin in that juice. But we say a mishmash of apples, they make the best juice. We've had friends come over and make apple juice at our farm, and we have a fairly large press, and so we can't always keep every load of apples separate. People kind of combine to make a critical mass to go through the press. And some people in their 60s said best apple juice I've ever had just because they got some of Margret's juice in there and had some of Ken's apples in there, and so it was top notch juice just because it was a mix. It was a mishmash, and so you had some acid in there, some tannin in there, aromas, but complexity, that's what you want. Often, you're lowest grade of apples, it does not matter how they look. So if there happen to be a little insect that visited there, a little worm, fine. A little blemish, fine. They're just going to all get mashed up, and you're going to get the juice out of them so it doesn't matter what the apple looks like. And smaller is actually better. Most of the apples in the US, their growers are paid for the size of the apple. The bigger the apple, the more money they get. So it drives the size of apples up. But, actually, more of the flavor compounds, and particularly these tannins I've been talking about, are associated with the skins. So the smaller that apple, the more skin it has, and thus the more flavorful the juice might be. And the only thing you need to avoid in an apple is just rot. You don't want to put anything fuzzy through there or anything like that. But some bruises that just happened or whatever is fine. In the UK, they have a cider apple classification, and it goes like this. Your bittersweets are you ones that are very tannic. So this is one of ours called Tremlett's Bitter. And I one time was noticing a woman who works for me making a funny face, and I looked at her like what happened, what's wrong? She said, "Oh, I bit into a Tremlett's Bitter." Not tasty. It was quite tannic. Bittersharps happen to be apples that have both the acid and the tannin all in one apple. Those are, there's fewer of those than there are of the bittersweets. And then your sharps are, basically, your tart apples. So a Granny Smith is a nice, tart apple. So some of your baking apples are nice tart apples. Those are good for cider. And then you have your sweets. So most dessert apples fall into that category. When you get apples, you want them to be fully ripe. So I let our apples hang on the tree longer than my fellow growers who are growing for the table market do. Because I want mine falling on the ground ripe. Because they have maximum sugar, the maximum flavor compounds, everything's been able to fully develop in that apple. It's kind of like a tomato when it's fully ripe. It's got everything I want. And when you cut open the apple, the seeds should be dark. They shouldn't be white or tan. They should be very, very dark. And then you can even just get a little bottle of starch from a drug store and just slice the apple open and dot it with some of the iodine. And if the iodine stays dark or the apple stays dark, then you know there's still a lot of starch there because the iodine will turn starch like a purple color. A very dark color. But if a lot of that apple starch has converted to sugar, there's not as much purple there. So that's kind of a good, I run around with my little starch bottle in my pocket in the fall to just test and test and test. Sometimes it's getting kind of cold and we want to get the last pressing done, but we keep them on the tree until they're really, really ripe. So, how is cider made? Well, as I mentioned, a lot of it's from juice concentrate. That's what's most widely used in the ciders that are sold in the six packs. And they are primarily from sweet apples. And so we, like all food products, it's good to read the labels because it should say on there if it's being made from apple juice concentrate. We notice on one brand of cider coming over from Europe that they said it was made with handpicked apples, but then when you looked at the label it said from juice concentrate. And I thought, well, there were probably some little hand some place in the world that picked that apple.

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But, actually, if it's from England, there may not have been any little hand at all. So they wait until the apples are on the ground. They will even use tree shakers. Kind of like here in Wisconsin there are cherry shaker trees. But they come in and rattle the tree to make sure it's all on the ground, and then they come in with these sweepers, almost like Zamboni-type machines that just sweep those apples up and load them into hoppers in the back. And they are not pretty apples. So, see, when I say it doesn't matter what the apple looks like, I mean these are not gently handled apples, so... But at home, when you're making your cider, you want to start out by washing your apples. Don't use any bleach because the bleach, the chlorine molecules can adhere to the skins or any plastic that you might be using. The only thing you want to avoid is rot, so we tell people don't pair out every little thing. Just if there's something really rotten looking, black, fuzzy, or whatever. The blemishes are just fine. Then you have to grind the apples. This is how they used to do it in the day in England I think they had a horse that probably turned that thing. We have a hammer mill press at the farm. Our hammer mill, and then it goes into our squeezebox press right there. But people are using all manner of machines to make the apples, take the apples into some kind of apply saucy-like consistency. So those can be kitchen, what do you call those? Garbage disposals. You might buy a new one to dedicate to your new apple cider venture. People will use lawn chippers. But whatever will shred and finely pulverize the apples. The finer the apple, the more juice you get out. And this is another kind of press that we had called a racking cloth. And there are homemade versions of that. So there's all kinds of DIY, do-it-yourself, stuff on the web for both making the apples into a pulp or pressing them. And we did a session, my husband led a session this morning on making cider. So he went into the details of that. And, again, both this presentation and that are up on the web as well as some links to some other resources that are out there. So, from the press, you want to capture that juice, and clean vessels are very, very important. You don't want to use empty milk jugs, and you don't want to use empty vinegar jugs. Yes, because you want cider. You don't want to say, well, I guess if it gets a little acidic, you'll just say, oh, I did a Spanish style, right? Now that you know the styles of cider. But that's because there's some little acetyl bacteria that could be in the plastic of those jugs. And those little organisms can start turning that cider to vinegar. So cider won't be happening; vinegar will be happening. So sanitation is key. And we use a little bit of bleach on our glass bottles. We use a lot of glass. And then rinse that out very well because the chlorine can stick to plastic so it's not good to take a milk jug, put some chlorine solution in there, bleach solution. You don't want to do that. And all those things-- this is basically of a list of kind of the equipment that you need. Clean jugs, clean cups and spoons, a thermometer, a hydrometer is what is used to measure your, kind of it gives you the level of, they call it specific gravity. So that's kind of how thick that juice is, which can help indicate how much sugar is in that juice. So then when the yeast convert it, you want to see that all, the apple juice has kind of thinned out, basically. And that's a device for measuring that. Airlocks, as you saw in there a funnel, and then what we call racking, which is moving your cider from one jug to the other because you want to get it away from the yeast so you would rack it, and then some bottling supplies. And, again, the details of that are in this morning's presentation. But this is what, when I mentioned the airlock, the thing sitting on top of that jug, that's a five gallon, they call them carboys. I don't know why the jugs are called carboys. But if you go into a wine and beer making supply store, that's what they're called. But the airlock on the top helps keep oxygen out because oxygen is kind of the enemy of cider. You want CO2 to just fill, it's giving off CO2 from the fermentation, so you want that to be like a layer on top of the cider. You don't want air because the air can have other organisms and start having other things happening in that cider. So once that cider went into that jug, we actually put some wine yeast in it. So we didn't rely just on the wild yeast, but we added wine yeast to it, and it starts bubbling and fermenting, and the airlock is on there to keep the air out, the carbon dioxide flowing out. And then it's started to clear. You can kind of see that bottle is a little clear. And then we, when that bubbling slowed down and the clarity was appearing, then we just siphoned it off into another jug that was clean for that. And then what you can also do with your cider, and this is a French tradition, is when you're trying to make room in your vessels for your new crop of apple juice that you're going to make to cider, you take the old crop and you put it in the still. So you take your cider from last year and put it in the still, and you make your brandy. And so apple brandy in France is called Calvados, and that's actually a region of France just like Champagne or Champagne is a region of France. So, true Champagne only comes from that region of France. So the only Calvados come from the Calvados region of France. But we also make apple brandy. That's our first product. And ours is, we call it a Calvados style because we're using true cider apples, as they do in France. We've gone through the fermentation process to make it to cider. We're using-- we also have some pears on our farm, which the French use, and they are the pears that are true, they call them peary pears or true. They're not table pears. You don't want to eat them. They're hard and bitter. But they are kind of your wine grapes of pears. So we add that to the mix as well as some wild applewood from our farm and age it for two years in a charred oak bourbon barrel, and out came a wonderfully Calvados style brandy. So that is when we released the brandy at the farm. And this is how you can also learn more about the Cider Farm or get in touch with us. We will be releasing, finally, our own cider this spring. So if you are interested, you're welcome to join our mailing list so we can introduce you to another fine Wisconsin cider. So, we have time for some questions, so I'm happy to take any questions you might have. And thank you.

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Cheers.

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