Review: Bushwhacker Cider Bar

Bushwhacker Cider is an all cider store and Portland’s first cidery that opened this month in inner SE Portland, OR.

The outside had a bit of a “cider garden” set up for people to drink their cider outside. Inside is white walls with colorful murals,  and there was a wooden bar with four ciders on tap, and one beer. Behind the patrons back’s at the bar was a case full of cider, and one small rack. Bushwhacker Cider does not have a corkage fee, so if you want something from a bottle instead of on tap, the experience would not be all that different.

The back of the place they are still setting up for cider production, which they didn’t have completely up and running yet. They hoped they could serve their own cider by Christmas 2010.

We were able to go there for their soft opening on September 4, 2010. At the time, the ciders they had on stock were mostly English or the cheaper mass produced American 6-pack style ciders, though the three active craft cideries in Oregon were well represented. Following them on Facebook, one hears they do tend to change out the kegs fairly often.

It tickles me that someone is gutsy enough to do a cider only store, and I love them for it. I hope they find lots of success.

Picking Gravenstein Apples

There are a few apples that are ripe before Gravensteins do, but Gravensteins are probably the best know and the first heirloom apple to ripen in late August/early September. And heirloom apples make for decent cider.

With my new five-gallon carboys, I wanted to ferment in one of them and have a little left over for topping off and/or backsweetening when it was all done. As I posted before, 1 bushel = 45 lbs = 2-3 gallons, so I decided I wanted 100 lbs of Gravensteins to meet my goals.

I found on Craigslist an older couple with a few acres who had Gravensteins they sold after you picked them. My husband and I went out there one morning, all set to get my 100 lbs. While they were imperfect in ways that doesn’t matter to cider – small and scabby – I grew quite disgusted with how green they were. They had given us a “picking cane” to use, a cane that was about six feet long. I was having a hard time getting apples to come down when I wrapped the cane around the stem and pulled down. She came along and told me I had to hit the apple in a downward motion to get it down. In my book, no matter what kind of fruit, ripe ones will come off with very little effort, and green ones have to be forced like she was doing. She told us they were ripe and that one man had already picked 200 lbs of them. However, these people were probably using the apples for sauce, and could compensate for the greenness with sugar, where as the greenness would only taste horrible as cider. She would have no troubles selling her remaining apples to other people, but we stopped picking after 50 lbs.

Disappointed, my husband and I drove to a discount produce stand to get the remaining apples. I knew it would cost me twice as much, but I figured they would be riper apples, though maybe still not as ripe as I would like. The store was happy to sell to us, and in fact reduced the price by a dime per pound. I now had my 100 lbs.

The results of the different apples became obvious. The u-pick apples were hard, while the store apples were softer and easier to cut up. The sugar differences were evident, too, as a blend of the two kinds of apples’ juices resulted in 1.040 SG, where as the store bought apples’ juice alone was 1.050 SG. While it was more expensive, the store bought apples were definitely the riper apples and worth the extra money.

I should note that since then, I have been able to find free apples that are of good quality and are ripe.

Raw Juice Safety

Note: To avoid confusion on this blog post, remember that Europeans think of cider as being a fermented apple drink, and it is only due to Prohibition in the United States that the term morphed to mean “cloudy, unfiltered apple juice.” When I say cider in this post, I mean the alcoholic version.

One extreme word of caution about using the apple press to make raw apple juice for consumption is that it is possible to get sick on the juice as there are potentially the deadly germs and bacteria such as potentially salmonella, E. coli, cryptosporidiosis in it, and Patulin if moldy apples are used. These same deadly germs and bacteria die during fermentation with the exception of Patulin, so there are no worries about getting sick from cider if good apples are used, but the germs and bacteria are alive and well in raw apple juice unless it is treated. This is main reason cider, wine, and beer were so much safer to drink though the ages than water, often because water was polluted with sewage, and alcoholic beverages kept longer than milk did. And remember, apple juice would have naturally started fermenting on its own.

Up until 1996, it was common practice for orchards to pick up fallen fruit, called windfalls or drops, and sell them for eating. These fruit would have been very ripe if they fell off the tree, and therefore have good flavor. However, the ground is not a clean place, and there is usually fecal matter from birds, wild animals, dogs, and sometimes animal manure is used as fertilizer. The fecal matter can carry salmonella and E. coli, and in 1996, people became sick from raw apple juice contaminated with E. coli.

Stories:

• Deadly Bacteria a New Threat to Fruit and Produce in the US
• E. coli Primer
• Juice Patrol: How safe is that raw fruit juice?
• Excerpt from Verocytotoxigenic E. coli

 

As I had mentioned, the E. coli die when apple juice is fermented into cider. To drink raw apple juice, it has to be treated via pasteurization to kill these harmful bugs. So while it is tempting, please limit how much raw juice you drink straight from the press so that you do not get sick, and really seriously consider not giving it to children.

If you are going to consume it raw, only use fruit in which you would eat, so throw out any moldy apple, which are the Patulin carriers. Next, try to keep things as clean as possible, which will actually help prevent the apple cider fermentation from becoming infected with vinegar causing bacteria and other off taste creating infections. These infections are safe to consume, but taste horrible. If pressing only for fresh juice and not for fermentation, do not use windfalls or dropped apples off of the ground. I suggest you wash the apples and press parts with cold water, and rewash an apple should it fall on the ground after the initial washing. Of course, the best thing to do is to pasteurize the juice before drinking it, which means you need to heat it to a temperature of 160⁰. From there, you should keep the juice refridgerated so that airborn bacteria do not start growing in warm juice.

Steps to Make Cider

Note: To avoid confusion on this blog post, remember that Europeans think of cider as being a fermented apple drink, and it is only due to Prohibition in the United States that the term morphed to mean “cloudy, unfiltered apple juice.” When I say cider in this post, I mean the alcoholic version.

Here is a general outline of how to make cider:

1. Gather and sort ripe apples, removing all moldy ones. If you wouldn’t eat it, then it wouldn’t make good cider.
2. Rinse the apples to remove dirt and other debris.
3. Proceed to crush the apples into pomace.
4. Press pomace to get the juice – stop here and pasteurize juice if wishing to consume juice and not cider.
5. Test the sugar amount in the juice using a hydrometer to determine the alcohol potential.
6. Check the acid content and the pH, adjusting if needed using either other juice or acid blends.
7. Add sulfites using either the package instructions or the pH to guide you.
8. Allow to sit for 24 hours.
9. Pitch the yeast.
10. Once the juice is fermenting, add yeast nutrient.
11. Rack after three weeks.
12. Rack after another one to two months.
13. Rack after another three months.
14. Blend – combine different apple ciders, add sugar, juice, water, etc. Use sorbates if more sugar or juice is added.
15. Bottle. Is it going to be bottle conditioned if dry?
16. (Optional if dry, or still but sweet with sorbate ; Required for carbonated sweet) Pasteurize

Other Resources:

• “The Science of Cidermaking.” Andrew Lea. 
• “How to make cider.” UK Cider
• How to Make Cider

Book Review: Folk Wines, Cordials, and Brandies

I found an old gem at the library. Folk Wines, Cordials and Brandies was written by M.A. Jagendorf in 1963. What makes it a gem is that it talks about both making wines and making liqueurs all in one book, causing it to be 400 pages long. Books these days only specialize in one or the other, not both.

Like a wine making book, it goes though equipment you need, yeast, racking, bottling, and aging before giving you recipes for fruit wines, flower wines, cereal and vegetable wines, herb wines, berry wines, and other wines including cider, mead, and a few others.

From there, the book moves into liqueurs, talking about neutral spirits and then flavors. Then there is about 21 pages of recipes for that.

Next, there are 9 pages of “unusual drinks” towards the back, followed by an outdated “to help you” section of organizations and businesses probably now long gone.

The book periodically has poorly printed illustrations and pictures, but that isn’t why I like this book. It is just a flat out well rounded all in one book, and you don’t see that being published anymore. It offers several recipes using the same main ingredient to give you different ways of making a wine. It has unusual ingredients, such as daisies, goldenrod, spinach, caraway, chickweed, dill, tea, and rosehips. Part of the reason Jagendorf wrote this book was because he was a folklorist, going around collecting stories and recipes of what people were making, and goes on to talk about the importance the ingredient has been in culture.

Wine Review: Honeyrun Blackberry Honeywine

I first tasted Honeyrun Blackberry Honeywine at a mead class I attended. I was going through my collection and realized I had a bottle of it and decided to give it another try.

At 12% alcohol by volume, it is a decently strong wine, but it is really sweet. At the class, the instructors were suspiecious that the blackberries were fermented independently of the mead and then blended together, but sometimes I wonder if they didn’t just flavor the mead with blackberry juice. Still, I’m sort of in the camp of I like good medium or semi-sweet wine, and this is a bit sweet for my taste. Still, it is good, but I think things like this sometimes give fruit wine a bad reputation because of the sweetness.

One thing very interesting about this product is that they label it as no added sulfites or preservatives. That is to say, they recognize that sulfites are naturally occurring during fermentation and even have lab work to prove it, but they don’t purposefully go and add sulfites. They are taking a big risk that their products can spoil on them and they loose the batch, but apparently it hasn’t been bad enough to make them start using sulfites again. Kudos.

Glass vs. Plastic

I recently started attending a local winemaker’s club. One of the members had recently purchased some stainless steel tanks, and offered to sell his plastic 5 gallon carboys for $8 each.

I mentioned before that my husband and I are a little twitchy about plastic because it allows plastic flavors and can breathe a bit, and glass doesn’t. I am comfortable using a plastic bucket for just a few weeks at the beginning of fermentation until the first racking, but beyond that, I’m nervous. Other issues include the fact that plastic is easy to scratch up, which allows a place for bacteria to harbor and grow.

However, the price on these plastic carboys seemed really good! I asked the winemaker about why he was using plastic instead of glass. Quite simply, it was because they were lighter and safer to handle and carry. He dropped a glass carboy one time, and managed to slash up his wrists, hitting an artery and spraying the ceiling with blood. He said he had bought the carboys used, which were former Calistoga water cooler jugs. He had had them for five years, and felt there was no issues with off flavors from the plastic in wines stored in them up to two years.

So, due to the price and the willingness to trust him partly because of his reputation, I went ahead and purchased ten used plastic carboys. Actually, it was good that I did, as I needed to rack 5 gallons worth of strawberry wine out of buckets and off of the fruit!

Update on Tour Maps

When I was getting ready to post the new Tour Maps page, my map broke, and I had to scramble to get at least the Pacific Northwest portion up and going for my scheduled post release. That bought me one extra day to get the Rest of the West and a few other important outlying locations that I have blogged about mapped. You can now view it by clicking on the Tour Maps page and scrolling down to the different maps I have posted.

New Blog Page: Tour Maps

Today I am debuting a new page on my blog: a Tour Map of cideries, fruit wineries, distilleries, and other places I have either toured, blogged about, or think it fits the theme of this blog.

I see a vacation in the future with lots of tastings!

Book Review: Pear Cookbooks

While there might be a lack of books devoted to growing pears, there are books devoted to cooking with pears.

Pears by Linda West Eckhardt with photographs by Karl Petzke is almost 130 pages devoted to cooking pears published in 1996. It starts with a little introduction to common store bought pears, indicating where it originated from, when it is available, and how it tastes so that you know how it will affect the recipe. Next, it moves on to how to core, peel, and cut pears for the dishes. Finally, it gets into the recipes, breaking the chapters into soups, salads, and appetizers, main dishes, side dishes, condiments and preserves, breads and desserts, and accompaniments (sauces to go on the pears). The final pages in the book include a table of pear availability by month and a table on pear characteristics. I find this book very easy to use, and the pictures very tempting.

Pears: A Country Garden Cookbook was written by Janet Hazen with photographs by Kathryn Kelinman in 1994, part of a series of “Country Garden Cookbooks” and published by Collins Publishers San Francisco. The introduction talks about the history of pears, provides a glossary including how to select, store, eat, prepare, and cook pears, with further notes on European pear varieties including photographs before giving the same attention to Asian pears. She does make a point that pears are one of the few fruits that successfully ripen after being picked off the tree, and they transport easily without much damage. From there, the 71 pages of recipes begin with openers, accompaniments, main courses, and sweets. There is even a recipe for Pear Liqueur, using a pear, vodka, sugar, and pear eau-de-vie. Again, I find this book very easy to use, and the pictures very tempting, so but it lacks the table of pear availability, and the other book had more recipes (though less pictures) that I would probably recommend West Eckhardt’s book first.

I also recommend checking out USA Pear.com’s website for a lot of pear recipes.

Pear recipes I recommend:

• Eating pears with gingersnaps together as a snack.
• I do cook up this Pork Chops with Pear, Caramelized Onions, and Rosemary recipe.

Other delicious looking recipes:

• Bon Appétit: Buttermilk Spice Cake with Pear Compote and Crème Fraiche
• Best Health: Our Best Healthy Pear Recipes