How’s it going?
As I try to think of something entertaining to share, I’m listening to piano music that is coming from outside. I think someone is practicing cause they keep stopping and restarting. The last song was “Dancing Queen.” I realize now that not all instruments sound crappy as you learn to play them. Unfortunately for me and my entire family, as a young person I tried to learn to play the viola. That does not sound nice when you miss a note or use inconsistent pressure on your bow. Rhythm, that’s a luxury, just not sounding horrifyingly flat or sharp was pretty much the goal. But, all the efforts of this pianist sounds pretty good, it’s soothing. Hopefully they keep at it, maybe it’d calm down all the crazy folks that like to randomly scream profanity. We’ll I shouldn’t make assumptions, maybe they aren’t crazy, and maybe they are perfectly calm. Add in the piano, and I’m at an opera.
New Cider!
I just finished labeling up our latest cider test. There was a lot that went into this one. We tried a number of new things in the hope that it would inform our next steps for making a batch of legal cider. The situation has changed a bit, but we did a lot of things this last month based on the premise that we were going to ferment in a big bucket at a licensed facility (for anonymity I’m calling the man we’re working with The Facilitator) and give the cider we make to bars and taprooms in the area, for free, in exchange for information on how well it sold. All in order to gain experience in the industry and show that there is a demand for our cider, making everyone including the bank drop everything and start waving cash in our faces begging that we take their money.
If we were going to brew in a bucket, one large problem we’d have is how we were going to filter it. The contraption we used the last two times hooks up in between two kegs, one keg is full of cider and is attached to a CO2 tank (CO2 is pushed into the keg which pushes the cider into the filter), the filtered product is then pushed into the empty keg on the other side. So CO2 is like the motor that moves the cider through the filter and the filter has keg hook-ups on either end. So literally nothing that can attach in anyway to a giant bucket we’re planning to ferment in. To fix this, I found and bought this somewhat extravagant machine that has a motor and siphons (so just tubes that can be dropped into buckets). Meaning, it can pull from a full bucket of cider, push it through the filter, and then push out to an empty bucket or keg.
The drawbacks and the upgrades:
First thing we realized I kind of forgot, was that using a motor instead of CO2 means everything gets full of oxygen, which typically is not that desirable when creating beverages, it possibly changes the flavor a bit. On the other hand, air is free and CO2 can get expensive. (And we didn’t notice a taste difference after all.) The other thing is it ate up 1 1/2 pints of cider! The last of the cider just gets stuck sitting in the two filter containers without something to push it out. That’s a ton of homebrew to lose, but not much of a 30 gallon bucket, so it should be less painful next time. And it went much faster. That little motor was quick.
For this batch we used a different yeast strain too, one that should make smoother, less sour tasting ciders, and tried a new tea we thought might be nice for whatever time of year our cider is finally ready to sell.
Speaking of selling, I also tested a new label. I like the feel of the linen paper I’ve been printing on and then gluing to our bottles, but I thought I should try something more water resistant, because that might be nice if we’re asking people to spend cash on them. So I bought a bunch of sticker paper to print on that’s supposed be more durable.
There’s a learning curve. It’s not as forgiving as paper and rubber cement that I can move slightly as I lay it on. With the stickers, I have one shot to lay the first piece on perfectly straight, if it’s not perfect it will end up looking completely wonky in the end, but don’t even think about nudging it correct as you go, keep laying it on crooked because the air bubbles that moving it makes will look even more ridiculous. Some turned out though.
Coconut Tea!
It’s Queen Mary’s black coconut tea. Guys, I’m telling you, this stuff smells so GOOD. Like toasted coconut. I bought it because the best LaCroix flavor is coconut, but this is better. It smells like I just toasted up coconut shavings to top a dessert. The cider really turned out, both the filtered and unfiltered. It’s smooth and creamy. Yum.
Becoming Official
In preparation to plead with bars to take our untested cider and put it on tap, I designed some business cards and made a website. After messing around with different looks for our cards, I changed my mind and went back to no northern lights, and instead created a jötunn image, because the people I’ll be handing these to, probably don’t know what a jötunn is and I think asking them to correlate the name of the company, northern lights, and hard cider, might be more confusing than it needs to be. I think they look okay. Good starter cards.
I made a website that will be easy to build on. I tried to give a little background, our goal, and what we’re doing right now. In putting it all together, I realized I have very few photos of Chris and I making cider. The stuff I do have is like five years old. My goal this month was to take more pictures, but the thing is, is that while processing cider, my hands are always gloved, sanitized, and busy. It’s going to take a little creativity. But I do have a lot of pics of our finished ciders because I always take photos for the newsletters. Going through dozens of cider images was strange. It kinda felt like I was going through bridal photos of unique cider couples. Having only two kegs meant two ciders at a time, so they’re all paired up. They look so pretty and proud. Oh! And here’s the website: jotunnciderhouse.com
Changes
Besides this stuff, the main focus has been on e-mailing The Facilitator and planning out how this is all going to work. About a month ago, he emailed us some questions and then the sort of, first steps, legal documents to read over. All of it made sense, it was all fair, things about what is required of him, what is required of us, what happens if any of us doesn’t fulfill our promises (him not giving us the agreed time and space, us not moving out all of our fermented cider within X hours, intense logistics). It wasn’t going to be cheap, and it didn’t seem all that easy. He doesn’t have cold storage, so once our 50 gallons of cider is finished it needs to be kegged or bottled and gotten out of there. We have to have our bottles and rental kegs and transportation all lined up and legal places to take it. It was going to cost us quite a bit to do, like take any vacation you can think of and double or triple the price, so we really want to get everything right. And reading through these documents made all these questions come up like:
Do I order the juice or will he? I’d need his address and having it shipped to his business and I don’t work there, is uncomfortable.
How/Where do I make and send recipes for approval?
What do I need for label approval?
Do I need to register our business with the feds, the state, county, the city? All of the above? Or do we not because we’ll be working under his liquor license?
Is it even LEGAL to give kegs away for free?
That last one is the kicker. We were both pretty suspicious it wasn’t, but our mentor from the Small Business Association suggested that we do it. It’s not legal. That might be why no bar owners have gotten back to us. Probably think we’re undercover feds doing sting operations.
At this point, it was obvious in my mind that we are asking too much from The Facilitator. He is a business lawyer, and when we met him last summer the first thing he said was that, yes we could use his facility, but he also mentors. Everyone has recommended free services, and at the time, we just got in contact with the SBA guy, so it felt like free was the way two people with little money should go. So we turned that down. But reading these legal documents, trying again to look up everything ourselves, and our SBA guy suggesting we give up and buy a business, I just broke. Chris was stressed. I couldn’t handle it. I’m usually more stressed and nervous than him, and this time he spent the next week talking about how we maybe need to hire our own lawyer in the alcohol industry so that we don’t inadvertently break the law and dig a hole too big to get out of. That’s when I was just over it. Find a wine lawyer (all in Eastern Washington cause there aren’t cider ones), pay the price tag, just to keep the free mentor that hasn’t read our plan, doesn’t know what cider is, and then said it was all a bad idea?
I wrote the Facilitator. I said we don’t know what we’re doing. We’re going to need more help than I thought, and paying only for the space, when what we could really use is his time and guidance, isn’t right. He said no problem, he’d meet with us and talk up a new plan. :)
He’s helped a number of cideries start-up and he has a lot of stories. One group he was working with tried using their own mentor and just use his space, and they ended up making a cider that their own distributor wouldn’t take, it was too carbonated. He didn’t know the recipe or their distributor, and then had to fix it for them. There’s just a lot to coordinate, and one mentor that thoroughly knows what’s going on sounds much easier. He’s really friendly, he likes our idea of a tap house and the homebrew we’ve made, and he really wants to help us get a location. There’s a lot of different ways we could get a business going and he mentioned ways I hadn’t thought of.
As far as a licensed batch with him goes, we’ll still do that. It’ll be a great learning experience. It’ll be baked into the mentor price, he charges yearly, and it’s a lot, but we can’t do this on our own anymore. There are so many rules and regulations in this industry, it’s too big of a project. I’m really tired of figuring out if the advice I’m getting is good or if it even applies to our business. At this point, this is a more important way to spend our money than saving it for a larger share of the business. I really think this is going to make our business possible.
We talked about what this official batch can be and what we can do with it. He thinks it’ll be easiest to do it dry. Do you know what that means? NO added back apple juice. No sugars that could referment, so no need to filter or pasteurize or refrigerate. I’ve never made a dry cider flavored with tea. The way I put the tea in is through heating up some apple juice with it for a few minutes and adding it. Luckily, we’ve been using extremely little added apple juice this last year, so the sweetness might not change too much, but how do I add tea? So even before the coconut cider finished we pitched some more yeast in a whole bunch of apple juice to try again. This time we’ll add some tea bags and wait, I don’t know, 12 hours? 6 hours? before taking it out. It’s going to take a few tests. I think this weekend we’ll run down to Chuck’s Hop Shop and get a growler loaded with their dryest, unflavored cider and drop a tea bag in and see how it goes. I’m worried about bitter flavors if I leave it in too long.
I don’t think we’ll be able to order organic apple juice for the official batch, I think the 50 gallons will be the extra off of a tanker The Facilitator is using, and nobody understands or uses organic apple juice in this industry. So unfortunately, that will have to wait until we order juice ourselves. But, here’s something flattering, he said he’s going to have some specialty apple varietal juice coming in in a few months, and he thinks we could make something good with that and we should try. He said a few times that he thinks our cider we’ve been making will sell well. :)
To start this dry batch at home to test the tea technique, we needed to go get another four gallons of juice. We’ve been buying Columbia Gorge Organic, but everywhere was out! So we got some non-organic in the cold section, and then caved and got some organic but shelf stable apple juice. The last time we tried shelf stable apple juice it wasn’t good, but we had no choice, we went to like, 4 stores. So we had an apple juice tasting.
Shockingly, the shelf stable were the best. The Knudsen organic reminded me of apple juice I had as a kid made from apples out of our yard, and the North Coast had very nice acidity. This dry cider is going to have them all. We added the yeast and they’ve been happily fermenting the last couple of weeks. We’ll pick out some flavors we’ve already tried in the past for easy comparisons. It’ll be an interesting challenge, like most of this has been.
Whew, it’s been a lot since the last newsletter. Thank you so much for being with us through this journey. These last couple months have felt a bit more chaotic than we’re used to, and it’s nice to know that we have some friends out there supporting us. We appreciate you.
This is a video that was in a funny newsletter I get. Thought I’d just pass it on, cause it’s really good.
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