Hey Y’all,
Happy start to a new year, I hope that you didn’t make so many New Year’s resolutions that they feel insurmountable and you lose your sense of self, and if they all were accomplished there’d be no way for me to recognize my perfect friend.
Earl Grey Cider!
This was our second time filtering half of our cider and pasteurizing the other. We used Queen Mary’s Creamy Earl Grey Tea. It made a very crisp, citrusy, and lightly floral, cider. Because it’s a black tea, Earl Grey also always gives our ciders a faint pepper and malty taste at the finish. Personally, I would say that the filtered cider was slightly more citrusy and had a bit brighter and sharper taste. The pasteurized, unfiltered cider, had a more creamy-malt taste, and was maybe a bit more sour. But, I’m not certain, definitely the temperature matters a lot. If the cider is slightly warmer than regular fridge temp, it has more of that creamy-vanilla taste. Both taste different from each other, and maybe this time around I like the unfiltered slightly more. Either way, in the future I want to at least include some filtering (filters come in all micron sizes, allowing for larger or only smaller molecules to get through), filtering out some of the larger yeast and apple particles will make things taste a bit cleaner and avoid heavy yeast chunks in our pour and in our keg lines. (I think Chris enjoys some yeast, even though it might sound unrefined, the French call this process sur lie, so it can be classy.)
We brought both versions of our Earl Grey to Chris’s Christmas work party where people were very accommodating and took tastes of each, and very tolerantly responded to our demands that they mark on a sheet of paper along a sliding scale which cider they preferred. Almost everyone (not everyone, but overwhelmingly) enjoyed the unfiltered more. They answered as truthfully as they could, but my old psych and sociology studies come back to mind, and I have to wonder: was the unfiltered popular that day, because it was popular? Friends that have had the cider alone don’t always respond the same way, and often like the filtered. I bet if we added the title “reserve” most people, excluding the sommeliers among us, would like it best.
And we have another at-home cider batch going! Another test, I really want to try this tea that I think will be so magical in our cider! No spoilers, I’ll have to do a grand reveal next newsletter. We also are using a different yeast strain, it’s very similar to the one we’ve been using and we’ve tested this one before, it’s a great strain, the one we’ve been using is just slightly more complex. But most people notice a sour taste to our ciders, and that’s not a bad thing, it can be a good thing, but this yeast strain is known for creating a smoother taste, which people might just like better. It’s not usually recommended to run two different tests at once, new tea with a different yeast, but this yeast strain is incredibly similar to the one we’ve been using. The difference will be exceptionally slight, and so whether this new tea works well or not will still be very evident.
Official Cider
We recently met with “The Facilitator” the guy who owns a cidery that is going to help us make cider that we can legally sell to the public. He’s been really accommodating considering his busy schedule. Very soon, once he’s settled and back from travels and family stuff, he’s going to allot space in his licensed facility and help us get all the legal stuff we need: government approved recipes and labels and all the official paperwork, as well as order and store the juice we need. It’s a lot, and we’ll pay him by the hour, but honestly, he could charge a lot more because without our own car garage (that we could attempt to get licensed and do all the extra stuff haphazardly without experience) he’s really the only option around.
This meeting was a huge relief. The previous time we spoke, we were under the impression that the smallest amount of cider we could make, because of the size of his smallest fermentation tank, was 300 gallons. That’s a whole lot of kegs to move around the city. Instead, we talked about brewing in one of his large buckets (he may have called them drums or barrels, but it’s a big-ass plastic bucket), and he has a number of them in his facility. That means we can ferment batches that are 30 gallons in size. It’s extremely more manageable. We still have to figure out how we want to filter it, it’s a lot to get into right here, but it’s enough to know there’s some drawbacks to not using a real fermentation tank with all the hook-ups. After all our tests, it might be easier to go unfiltered and pasteurize it. Jesus.
Something else about working with him though, is we might go ahead and bottle it up to sell. We were never going to do that, but that’s because we never envisioned making cider somewhere else, someplace where a bottling process is all set-up. In the future, for our business, we probably won’t. It’s either a ton of equipment, or we’d pay a bottling truck to come to our facility. Some of the cider makers around Seattle we were talking to said that it’s worth paying a particular group from Portland to do it because they’re so much better about not overflowing the cans, apparently there’s so much waste with local groups that it’s worth paying the travel costs. What a headache. But, for now, it’d be a great way to get our name out there, and there’s all these flea markets and things opening up in Seattle now… That means label approval though, so I’ve been thinking about ours. I use this nice soft paper I bought years ago and print them at home, cut them out, and then glue them on with rubber cement. They look great, I think, but only temporarily. Condensation, after they warm-up a bit on your counter, warps the paper. I like the homemade/imperfect quality of them, but I think I’ll try printing on bottling sticker-paper, something more water resistant.
Design
I spent a bit of time on our website, mostly just re-thinking previous aesthetic choices for our brand. For instance, we really love the northern lights theme, so I assumed we’d be going with neon greens and really dark blues, like the sky. But on a website, it does my head in. We’re not hoping to open a club, or a Seahawks lounge (love the Hawks, but I don’t want to be just another sports bar) and those colors are not working. So, I’m going with earthy tones for the moment.
Then the big one was the font, I put in our usual, and the umlaut “o” looked awful, like the dots were just stamped on. The font carries it’s own umlaut, that’s why we picked it so many years ago, and this ö was jarring to look at. So, I thought, I’ll just make an image of our typed name to paste in. But, then we went to Palm Springs for a few days over Christmas, and freakn’ saw our font everywhere on t-shirts and restaurants! Take a closer inspection of our hot sauce at home, there it is! Chris looks at a graph of rent prices, blam! There it is. This font we’ve been using, Amatic AC, we’ve used for, I don’t know, not a decade but close, we had searched the web for, and at the time it was hidden on some random free font website nobody was using mixed in with hundreds of others. Now, it’s a freak’n Google font!!! But, since I had gotten kinda attached to it, I tried messing with it, zooming in and adding different angles and thicknesses to different letters so that it was more unique. In the end though, it still was the same core font. In looking up “how to personalize a font” videos, I watched one where the person repeated throughout, “you have to be crazy though if out of all the thousands of fonts out there, there’s nothing you like, and you have to make your own” (said this as they showed how to make your own.) So, I looked for some fonts.
Creativemarket.com has a ton of fonts. I spent, I don’t even want to admit how long, looking at them. There are some beauties. I found a number I liked but I really want it to be more than something I enjoy, I want it to say something to a customer. Now, I might be thinking too hard about this, but I’m thinking of forgoing a hairy monster logo and using the name instead, so it has some importance. It’s going to be on the website, business cards, newsletter, hoodies, mugs, Instagram, signage… It’s going to be everywhere. I want it to give a vibe that’s outdoorsy-woodzy, Nordic, troll like. Something that could imply the company sells organic cider made locally. And unique, unpretentious, and handmade please! Fonts that look like handwriting work well, there were a number of graffiti fonts I really liked. Oh, and you want to know something annoying? The Nordic fonts were more likely not to have an “ö” than the fantasy or graffiti fonts! And, unfortunately, runes really aren’t legible. But, did you notice the new font at the top of this email? Do you like it? We bought a few others if you hate it, just let me know.
That’s all for this edition of the newsletter! We’ve got a busy next couple of months for ourselves. Keeping our fingers crossed that it goes as smoothly as it can. We’ll keep you up to date with it all when we get a chance. Thank you for continuing to take the time to join us and follow along. We appreciate it.
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