Hello!
How’s your spring going? Seattle is looking pretty glorious with all its new leaves and petals. And, across the street, the store front window of Cupcake Royal has gone completely bonkers with Easter. She does such a great job advertising. Man, a couple weeks ago, she had to randomly close on a Friday, (there was a note on the door, some unforeseen business calamity) and all afternoon, whenever Chris would look up from his computer work, he’d start hollering at me, “Angie! It’s another one! It’s another kid, crying at the door! Oh jeez, this one is really bawling, come look!” It’s a teeny storefront, I don’t think anything is baked there, and it seems, from our window anyway, that business is great.
Here’s a photo Chris ecstatically took on Valentine’s Day:
Speaking of a business that is booming, we’ve been so busy with our mentor! For a month and a half or so, we’ve been working with a mentor that I’ve been calling The Facilitator. He owns a cidery in the Seattle area, is a business lawyer, and for a fee, is willing to help us gain some experience and knowledge in the industry. Last newsletter I was pretty down about the fact that we wouldn’t be able to actually ferment our own cider until the fall, it’s too late in the year to brew in a 30 gallon bucket (it’s got to be cold), so jacketed fermentors are the only way to go, and not only would that be an incredible amount of cider for us to try and sell without a regular distribution plan, but I think all are full of product or are spoken for this summer.
But! He made a suggestion. He has lots of “base” apple cider product, cider that is pretty basic, just straight up fermented apple juice. So he suggested we try to get in on some of the festivals coming up, buying 100 or so gallons of his product, and doing our changes to it, adding our oak and spices or teas.
drum roll…
We’re Heading to UW Bothell Block Party and Brewfest!
Yay! We’ll be serving our cider! I gotta say, even if you have no interest in cider, let alone ours, this sounds like a killer freakn’ event. There’ll be beer, spirits, seltzers, non-alcoholic beverages, and of course, cider. There’s also a bunch of bands and food trucks. I really LOVE festivals, so I’ve been to a number, and I have never heard of pours like this. Each ticket comes with 8 - FIVE ounce pours. That’s huge. I’ve been to many events where the pours are 2 ounce. I had to do a double check just now, because earlier Chris said he thought people were getting 8 and I said no, it had to be 4 or 5. This is definitely an event to arrive thirsty and ready to celebrate! It’s May 31st, 2:30 - 8:30pm $45 advance tickets, AND, I just checked out the website, and it is so fun to see us listed! Come by, say hi, I’ve missed you!
And, That’s Not All…
We’ll be here too! This is a whopper of an event. There’ll be over 70 Washington craft breweries, cideries, and artisan beverage groups, plus KEXP DJs, and for entertainment, wrestlers! The glass is something like 2 ounce, I believe? BUT, the pours are UNLIMITED! They’re not even going to mess with paper tickets and plastic collection buckets. Once you’re in, you’re in, drink away the day. Please come to our table, and just plant. I’ll water you with our 3 cider selections the whole time. Maybe you could leave once in a while, just to tell others how amazing the ciders are at the Jötunn table. You should get your tickets right now, because they have an early bird special. Here, I have to post the promo video for it, it’s pretty good:
Early bird discount tickets go fast get them here!
Preparing for the Festivals
This is pretty much all I’ve been doing. I’d say it’s taken up my life, but that happened a long time ago, but this past month or so, I’ve been more busy, tired, and at times, stressed about it. But that’s not a bad thing! It’s fine. It’s owning a business right? Or just what happens when you dream bigger than maybe advisable.
Tea
I’ll start with the fun decisions. Both these festivals are in the spring, and we have made very few spring flavors in the past. That’s because our apartment gets too hot to ferment anything for half of the year, so we have a ton of winter and fall flavors. I do have a couple summer flavors though, but those are so close to my heart. I haven’t seen anyone use them in cider either so there’s no way I can risk bringing them to a festival and have some company steal them. Once we have a location I would, because then if anyone did copy us, at least people would have the choice to come get ours instead, not just learn to love the flavor and seek it out somewhere else! So I investigated some tea options. We’ve used a lot of herbs and oak chip types before, but for spring I wanted to lean in on fruits and floral flavors.
I looked into using Market Spice (at Pike’s Place). We’ve used their tea before with success but a large number of their fruity teas add hibiscus and, although it’s a great ingredient for cider, their particular hibiscus maybe inter-cropped with peanuts. It would be so horrific to hurt someone with a peanut allergy, so I’d have to say a warning before each and every pour. No, not worth it. I had tea recently that I really liked from The Montana Tea Company, and checking them out, they have dozens of teas that sound delicious, but looking at the ingredients list they often include stevia leaf. That may not be a bad thing, stevia is not fermentable so we could safely add it without the fear of our cider changing. But, I don’t really want to. We’re making an organic cider, and stevia, just doesn’t really belong. But hey, if you like the idea, write me back and convince me.
So surprise, we’re doing Queen Mary’s Tea! Always may favorite. So much luxury. Hey, it costs more for a reason.
Trials
So Much Testing! The cider base we’re using is pretty different from ours. There’s no oak, it’s filtered, and arguably more important, the yeast strain and apple juice are different. It’s more tart, has less body, and is very clean, so unlike using our cider, I couldn’t predict as well how the tea would taste in it or how much to use. We also always add tea to the base and heat it up for 3 minutes, and this time we aren’t going to be able to do that. Instead we have two choices: we can either heat the tea in regular juice and add it to the dry cider or dry hop it (put it in the cider straight and cold brew it by waiting X hours and removing it).
Here’s our first test using the cider base. We brought our keg to his place, filled it up, I bought a bunch of little jars, measured out a bunch of teas, and we waited 24 hours, letting them steep on the counter. Here’s the first attempt:
First thing we noticed was that the oak was waaaay too powerful. Our usual amount of oak was 3X too much. We picked out a couple of favorites but really wanted to test it with less oak so we set it up again.
This was so sad. We set everything up, waited a day, and the cider had gone bad. We got part way through our taste tests before we realized it couldn’t be that the tea was making this strange, unpleasant flavor, and tasted the cider from our keg, and all of it had a yucky lime-rind tang to it. This is still so weird to believe. We’ve never had this issue, never added sulfites, never needed to cold store dry cider, but it happened. So, we bought sulfites, and went back for another fill-up. This may have happened because of the air that got into the keg to fill it, but we had filled the keg full of CO2, so another theory is that one of the keg posts was loose so a little oxygen was getting in. Either way, we needed to try everything again.
Before our next trial we spoke with our mentor about our process, and the way he crafts his cider is approaching it as a winemaker. Ours has been more of a beer brewer’s style, we make a recipe, and everything happens to the entire product. A wine maker makes blends, so for instance because we want to add oak, he would make a concentrate of oaked cider (use more than he wanted) and does his regular cider with the oak concentrate to get exactly what he wants. He suggested doing that with our teas as well, so we’d make a concentrate of oak, a concentrate of the tea and blend those with straight cider in tiny amounts until we have what we’re looking for.
This table has 20 more lines. This was not fun. Interesting, but really hard to set-up, and each freaking test took us a couple hours to get through, so we were tired. But, we still had questions.
I’m not going to bother posting even another portion of a table. Substack is getting mad at me and saying it’s too long and the letter is going to get chopped up in your inbox. The next test was stupidly long, but told us exactly how much of everything we wanted, it took taking a dab from that jar, and a touch from that jar, and you’d think it’d be fun, but at 1am, you just want everything tasting how you want it to and all the decisions made.
Yesterday, we went to the cidery and figured out what containers we can use and how we can get all of this blending to work. We’re going to make four flavors and take three of the best with us to Bothell. While there, our mentor gave us some different cider of his to try. He thought maybe we’d rather use it than the one we’ve been testing on. It’s different. Changing the yeast strain really changes a lot. It’s still a bit tart, but it might honestly work better for our teas, so the new jars I set-up yesterday are ready to be tried after I send this off. This is our final test though. Next week, we make our ciders!
Festival Thoughts and Feelings
I’m really excited to be serving under our own business name. We’ve also learned so much about equipment. We have a big list of stuff to buy so that we can pour from our kegs: keg couplers, CO2 manifold, connectors, and much more. It’s a good process to go through. It’s also nice to learn how to make concentrates and blends, we’ll probably stick with our original method, but it’s another option to understand.
I am disappointed that it isn’t our own cider base. It’s not organic, and I like how our cider tastes and this is a bit different. That’s really why we’ve worked so hard to test everything, we really want to make the best cider we possibly can and make it the most distinctly ours.
Will we make money? I’m not counting on it, we had to buy the cider base, and all our other ingredients, and for the festival in June everybody donates the first few kegs, but that’s not why we are doing it. This is to see if people like our product and get experience with the equipment and the process.
I wanted to share how our weekly meetings with our mentor have gone, but I’m running out of space. I’ll just say it’s gone okay, it’s definitely not the highlight of having a mentor. Mostly because all I’ve done for years is work on the business plan, so every week having the written plan be the focus is a pain and hard not to see it as almost a waste of time. But I am getting something out of it, and this week the focus has shifted more towards the product, so it’s been tiring, but easier to feel that things are moving forward.
That’s all for this edition of the newsletter. Thank you as always for continuing to read and follow along with us. This hasn’t always been easy or enjoyable for us, but knowing that there are others out there that care has really helped us. Thank you.
Previous newsletter: No sugar, No limits