Slightly More Professional Now
Getting ready and gearing up
Hey! What’s happening?
A crow is flying by with something that appears to be a Cheeto in its mouth. Are you someone who likes to feed the crows? So that you can become a crow whisperer or establish your own crow army? There’s a lot of providers for the crows around here, not sure with what intentions, can’t all be good. I know that there’s plenty of bird-edible trash in Capitol Hill, but I’ve personally witnessed many people feeding them. More than once, I’ve seen people go through Volunteer Park with big canvas bags scattering food for swarms of excited crows, as if it’s a bird version of Super Market Sweep and they could win a million crow dollars if they can get the most feed. They get all riled up and start screaming.
There’s a lot the critters can find to eat around here. I learned from a neighbor that Sunday mornings walks with her dog are a battle to prevent it from being hot dog-scraps breakfast days. (There’s like, at least 3 hot dog vendors within a block of our place.) Now every time I see a dog with a muzzle, I assume, not that it has an aggression problem, but a food problem, and that it’s eaten something off the sidewalk that made it very sick. They always look so sad.
Festivals!
Speaking of a free-for-all and losing your head with the excitement of a special new find to shove into your mouth, are you going to a cider festival???
Sounds like we might be pouring at lots of festivals this summer, but we have just 2 right now that we are registered for and officially in at the moment.
*UW Bothell Block Party & Brewfest*
This is our first one! Come for the drinks, the food trucks, and the bands! But most of all, to watch Chris and I do this for the first time. We’ll probably spill, make the pours too big, get too excited and forget to collect tickets, and maybe get kicked out for doing something wrong that I don’t even know is against the rules yet. You get 8 tickets, each one will get you a 5 oz pour of cider, beer, or wine? Really? 5 oz for wine? I’m not sure about that. Our mentor said I absolutely cannot over pour or give free drinks because the TTB will be there, disguised as people and they’ll destroy me. They’ll be all kinds of food trucks, 2 stages for music, it’s going to be a party!
*Washington Brewer’s Fest*
This festival is going to be truly monumental. So much craft - its attendance list of beers and ciders is so long! I don’t know how any of you are even going to find us. And there’ll be wrestlers and DJs, and unlimited pours! It’ll be at the Seattle Center, Fisher Pavilion & South Fountain Lawn, so take the light rail and go nuts on the unlimited pours!
20% off promo code that will expire in 48 hours or so: WABF2025FRIEND
Friday and Saturday June 20-21st Get Tickets
Making Cider for the Festivals
Here they are! The tea concentrates, so these carboys each have a different tea in them, and they will each get individually blended with our oak concentrate (that’s what filled that big 30 gallon white tub behind them) and then blended further with more cider and/or juices. We have four flavors, 3 sixtel kegs each, and are taking only three flavors to Bothell. (I forget the reasoning, maybe that’s what the festival asked for?) So, we’ll test them out beforehand and pick the best 3. Because the Brewer’s Fest is only 3 weeks later, we did have the option to make twice as much, and do it all at once, but we wanted to see how people like these first, and then come in to either make them again or try something different. Our flavors are: Da-da-da DAAAH!
Sunny Jackfruit
Pretty Berry
Afternoon Royale
Earl Grey
Pretty epic, huh? Probably the best part of making these was when our mentor took a whiff when it was time to remove the tea. The tea just smells so crazy good in the cider, like some sort of heavenly candy.
Gearing Up
Even with our mentor sharing what he has, we need so many supplies! Tap faucets, picnic pump rods, gaskets, keg couplers, manifold for the CO2, and hoses; we’ve spent $600 and we aren’t even done. We still have banners, signage, and we’re lucky that these first 2 festivals supply the table and tent. But, it’s been good. Really nice to learn some equipment names and how it works. We’re going to put everything together with our mentor this weekend, because I’m just afraid of cutting tubing, crimping metal, gluing, and screwing tightly without a little supervision. I can just see our keg becoming a fountain at the festival and not knowing why.
I think we’ll try to get registered for as many festivals this summer and fall as possible. We weren’t sure at first that we were going to do that, our goal was to show investors that there’s a demand for our product and that we can make it, seems like a couple of festivals would be good enough to do that. But we’re learning a lot doing this. It’s going to be hard to recoup costs, some of the festivals want you to donate some, if not all of your product, but it’s worth it. All the gear we’ll use in the future anyway, and making at his facility is great experience. A lot of the steps for cider making for a festival are the same as at home (it’s mostly cleaning and sanitizing), but the equipment is different and it’s going to take a minute before I’m really confident in it. I am also learning through our weekly mentor meetings, that I really don’t know how to talk about our cider. Doing these festivals should help me develop a way to explain what makes our cider special in just a few words.
Mentor Meetings
These weekly meetings are a bit difficult. Right now what’s hard, is going through all these numbers and budgeting I’ve done over the last few years and realizing how all of them are so out of date. Even if they’re just a year or two old, prices have really skyrocketed. The most heartbreaking thing though, is our little glass mugs for people ordering flights (we ordered four of them to test out a couple years ago, they are so cute, 3 oz glass mugs with little handles) aren’t sold anymore!!! Discontinued. I’m devastated.
Another thing that has gone up more than 50% is branded clothing. I showed our mentor our working logo, and he was really supportive of it, and thinks we should buy shirts for the upcoming festivals. Well, the website he suggested does do some very nice, extremely affordable shirts. But! Man, something like 10 years ago, I spent a long time researching clothing and it’s a truly horrifying industry. From the people who pick the cotton, to the people who make the clothing, it is such an abusive industry, and I said to myself, maybe I can’t afford a $50 organic, ethical, American made shirt right now, but I can damn well order ethical for our business when it’s in bulk and so it really counts. I have it in our plan that we’ll go with Ethixmerch, and not only are they 3X as expensive as our mentor’s suggested wholesaler, but you have to buy a lot at once. So, it’s tough. I don’t think it’s smart to be swimming in pricey t-shirts in our apartment, but I don’t want to go with the cheap ones, because it like, really? I’m breaking already? So, no shirts for now.
Homemade Cider Batch!
This latest try was our second attempt at making completely dry ciders at home with our regular methods. Most ciders you buy that say they are dry, are not entirely dry. Entirely dry cider doesn’t really have an apple flavor, it has some fermenting flavors but rarely if ever, will you taste anything remotely apple-like. My favorite farmy dry ciders from other makers, even they add a touch of apple juice at the end. But if we can make one we like, it’s much easier to deal with. We don’t have to worry about cold storage or pasteurization, that’s only for dealing with that touch of fermentable sugar that can explode a bottle. Last time we tried coconut tea for one and Earl Grey for the other. I thought the Earl Grey was way too strong and needed to be toned down, and the coconut was okay, but not really good. This time I thought I should try to add teas that included dried apple pieces and see if that worked better. So I picked Queen Mary’s Raspberry Cream (green tea, pineapple cubes, apple cubes, freeze dried raspberries) and for the other, Queen Mary’s Wild Strawberry (white peony tea, rose hips, hibiscus, apple pieces, strawberries).
Verdict: much improved. The flavor is a bit faint on both of them, I think the strawberry is pretty nice and the raspberry okay. Overall, I don’t think this is working all that well though. They’re good, they’re just not near as good as what we usually do. I could see having one tap of bone-dry cider just to mix things up, but these exceptionally dry ciders might need to be left for cider makers with orchards and access to a lot of extremely tannic apples.
That’s all I can think of to share at the moment. Thank you so much for reading and the support over the years. It’s meant a lot to us and helped us keep going. We’re excited and nervous about finally getting the chance to pour for the public. There’s still a few more things we need to prepare for it, but hopefully it will all come together and it will be beautiful day and lots of fun.
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