Cool Spring = Happy Cider
Perfect for making and/or drinking
Whatup y’all?
Happy June. Hope you had a nice Memorial Day weekend. We’ve been doing pretty well overall, but last weekend we had a crazy encounter. Chris and I were downtown middle of the day Saturday with our family, little nieces there and everything, and we were waiting at a corner to cross a street when this guy comes towards us crossing the street early, and really violently shoves Chris. He pushed Chris so hard that his head cracked into the side of mine, breaking Chris’s glasses and making me feel kind of sick and dizzy. The guy just angrily strode off and we found a place to sit down. Chris looked totally fine at first, while my head was aching (man, it’s still sore to touch) but about three hours later his forehead and eye on the side where his glasses broke swelled up to the point he resembled Quasimodo, and then he developed a very black eye. We ended up calling 911, because all the police stations were closed for the weekend and we couldn’t report it online like we wanted to because of the type of crime it was. We were really hesitant about it, but now they have a report and description if he does a random attack again. It was so bizarre because, the guy just looked like a normal dude, not hard up or anything, and Chris wasn’t wearing anything I think that could make him a target, just a DNA hoodie. Anyway, look after yourselves, folks seem really angry right now.
Chris asked if I was going to post pictures of his black eye.🤕 I think I’ll pass, but I did take a few. I had to! Looking at his face, it just like, wow Amber Heard’s photos looked nothing like this. Lots of swelling, black-blue, then red-purple, now it’s greenish. Thankfully, Chris didn’t ask me to cover it with makeup for him, cause I definitely don’t have the skills to do that. I think it would just make it look like he had some sort of skin rot.
THIS SQUIRREL! This little one, definitely a “pre-teen” or “teenage” squirrel, really wanted either in, or more likely, wanted to find a way to get the bird seed on the balcony above us without doing the big leap from the fence the older ones have been doing. A few nights before, he sat outside our glass door and placed his hands on the glass staring intently in at us, so it’s not impossible that it was searching for a way to invite himself to the club. The left side of the glass slides open so we can walk through and there’s a screen we can close, but not the right side, it’s just glass. So it crawled up the screen side and couldn’t do anything else, the glass on the right it couldn’t use, and the balcony is big and so it’s just a massive cement slab above the glass. The cement goes like two or three feet and this dude was no Spiderman. So it crawled up and down the screen crying for over an hour. We thought maybe we should help it down, but it seemed to be able to, it just refused to give up, and just stayed there crying about it. Eventually it was done and left. It was so weird.
Cider Tests!
We started another batch of cider. This one is more tests of yeast strains. When we went to the Northwest Cider Symposium a couple months ago, we talked with Fermentis, a yeast supplier that has developed their own cider yeast strains. Years ago we got a bunch of types of yeast at a homebrew store and did a number of different cider experiments trying out yeasts. We selected a strain that is used for making champagne, we still really like the flavors it produces in our cider, but “pitching it” (prepping it to put in apple juice) is involved. There’s lots of steps and it takes time. Frementis has developed strains that are “direct pitch” so you literally just measure it out and drop it in the juice. Ridiculously easy. The last batch of cider we made, we tried one of the Fermentis strains that was most similar to the champagne yeast, and we liked it. There were differences, the Fermentis strain produced a cider that was a bit less complex, but overall very similar. We were given two other stains to try though, so we want to see which one we like the best. We ferment in four different gallon jugs, so the plan is to test the two new strains (AS-2 and AB-1) and compare them with the strain we just tried (AC-4), as well as have a jug left to see if we can use less yeast than we typically do (half as much because Fermentis used less yeast in their tests and it worked for them). Left to Right: Previously tested strain at half a gram, previously tested strain at 1 gram as a control, new yeast strain, and another new strain.
Advisors
I finally finished the management team section of the business plan. The next part asked about our advisors, who we will turn to if we need help. After just finishing writing about why Chris and I are the perfect people to invest in because of our past experiences, skills, expertise and successes, this section turned out to be calming to write. I sometimes get pretty anxious working on this project. My parents owned a bakery when I was a kid that they just couldn’t manage to keep afloat. They had some bad luck for real, like one thing I remember was a woman with a cast on her foot slammed on the gas instead of the brake and crashed her car through the glass front of their shop. Then they had trouble distributing, one business got angry when they found out that my parents were distributing to other cafes, and even though it was never stated in the contract, the guy got angry about not being the only one and stopped his orders. This was their biggest client. So they really struggled. And, for that and other reasons, I get worried about this business working. But, when I sit down and think of it, we have a ton of resources, we know all kinds of friendly and knowledgeable folks.
I ended up writing about the week long class Chris and I took a few years back through OSU. Not only do we still have the contacts of everyone that came to speak, but we made friends with a couple that since the class have opened up a cidery in Colorado. Their plan was very similar to ours, and they have a lovely taproom. We’ve contacted them a few times and they’ve been really generous and enthusiastic about sharing actual numbers for our financial assumptions.
Then there’s the Northwest Cider Association and symposium we went to. Besides all the vendors sharing advice and contact information, we ran into a guy who taught a few of the classes at OSU. I was shocked he remembered us and he said he’d totally be a mentor. He used to own Wandering Aengus and Anthum Cider, but I guess he sold it, or at least stepped down because now he mentors cider start-ups full time.
And of course I talked about you. Some of you reading this I talked about specifically, and if I did, I will let you know before anyone reads it. Stop worrying! I didn’t just drop your name and phone number and call you an expert on testing levels of carbon dioxide in solution. But, we know designers, servers, and brewers. Our “call a friend” list looks pretty strong.
Key Assumptions
Real quick, the next section I started asks me to explain our financial forecasts and how we made our assumptions. I’ve started going back through all our notes so I can clearly explain our numbers. There’s a lot of numbers to go through, and some assumptions we made a couple years ago now, so it’s going to take a minute. The good news is all our numbers are legit, we didn’t just pull any estimate out of thin air (or our rear end).
That’s all for this newsletter folks. Thanks for continuing to stay with us. We really appreciate it. Have a good start to your summers and give us a holla if you’re doing anything fun.
I really loved this song when I was a kid but didn’t see the music video until recently, and it’s so funny, John Malkovich and Hugh Laurie are in it.