Carroll Park orchard clean up

I went to the historical property at Carroll park to help prune and clean up the orchard last week. This is a beautiful old property and the folks that manage it want to bring back the old orchard that has been neglected. I was told by Pamela Charshee who runs Carroll's Hundred they have plans to add back some interesting ambitious historical agricultural features to this colonial property.

I learned a lot in this pruning session and met some great orchard aficionados, it looks like there will be further opportunity to work at this property and maybe even explore some cidery options.

A great craft approach; the vineyard at La Clarine Farm

Hank Beckmeyer of La Clarine in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California has built the vineyard version of the orchard and cidery I would like to cultivate. My primary interest in craft is rooted in wine making but I moved away from it because I think the terroir challenge of MD lends itself better to producing high quality apples. Over time I might discover another truth in this matter but the pursuit of cider in this region seems to offer a very satisfying journey.

Hank Beckmeyer is a reformed musician and I imagine the land looks more like a piece of un-sculpted clay to him than an extractable resource. He has done a lot of experimental planting and uses a natural wine making approach. His wines are almost mentored into the bottle and go through several iterations until they are finally bottled. Some of the whites are unusually colored, or I should say normally colored since this is how wine should look. I have only been able to taste one vintage but it was such a superb wine, one of the best whites I have had. Half the taste profile came from my awareness of his approach; its the first time I felt like the wine maker, the land, the process had already impacted my senses to such a degree.

If I am able to procure an orchard I would like to plant it like a living symphony and allow the terroir to produce apples that will make the cider in the orchard.

WLP810 San Francisco Lager Yeast racked and tasted

I racked this one early this morning. Its a 1 gallon tester batch using Brown's orchard cider from their Pennsylvania orchards. To date without a doubt this is the most interesting taste I have produced. Many of the champagne and white wine yeasts have fermented wonderfully into very dry pleasant ciders but none of them have vaulted above what I consider average. I do not have control over the apple blends except for the few batches I have hand pressed and nothing has aged long term but potential finished tastes can be determined early on. I will use this WLP810 in several future cider batches if I can age out the sulfur side effects. I read that WLP810 can impart a sulfur smell and taste on the cider and I can confirm this is true. 

I found the taste to have an almost whiskey over tone with the body of a Chardonnay. My goal is to let it age for a short period in a used whiskey barrel and then move it back to glass for longer term aging.

Beta orchard plan

I have ordered mostly standard root stock. My plan is to build an orchard that leans towards biodynamic or an echo of the style of the orchard Masanobu Fukuoka cultivated. I read in The new Cider Maker's Handbook that Claude Jolicqeur lives about an hour away from his orchard, his trees are on standard root stock and his orchard seems to be in the biodynamic style. I have seen the devastation of deer but as long as they don't knock the trees over I hope that eventually after 5 years of growth a significant portion of the apples will begin to grow higher than they can reach.

The yield per acre will be much less than a dwarf of semi dwarf based orchard but I am doing long term planning on this orchard and hope over time the trees will yield a significant quality apple.

All of this is subject to change as I am an inexperienced acolyte of others significant orchard work. 

Goodbye car, hello apples

I ordered 33 trees tonight. Behind our house is a nice 3 car parking pad which will be the new home for my transitory trees. I decided to put the cart before the horse and buy the trees so I wont miss out on a year of growth.

Here are the varietals I purchased. My intention is to work on single varietal ciders but I wanted to get a large diversification of trees to see which ones do well in this climate and the micro climate of the future orchard. 20 Tree varieties but I ordered 2 of some of them for a total of 33.

From Fedco Trees:

Bramtot 

Redfield 

Sweet Red 

Winekist 

Burgundy 

Frostbite 

Opalescent 

Hansens Red Flesh Crab

From Century Farm:



Ashmead's Kernal

Golden Russet

Arkansas Black

Black Twig

Esopus Spitzenburg

Father Abrahams

Grimes Golden

Newtown

Roxbury Russet

VA Winesap

Red Siberian






From Cummins:



Wickson Crab

The continued success of small craft fermentations

After visiting Brown's Orchards I did a map search for brewery/distillery and saw that 10 minutes away in a town called Seven Valley's was a new distillery named Old Republic Distillery. I stopped in to sample and buy a bottle, luckily the woman pouring was extraordinarily kind and forthright about their journey to opening. I have heard from almost everyone who has started a cidery/vineyard/distillery that they barely made it through an almost two year process from planning to opening. There is a lot of bureaucracy in the way which hangs like a fog over start ups. Its like the specter hangover from prohibition, a kind of puritanical nervousness that makes alcoholic production difficult. Its probably easier to open a shop selling marijuana in Colorado than opening a distillery in Pennsylvania.

I told her I was in the very beginning stages of planning a cidery and she was kind enough to mention a new farm cidery that just opened. It just so happened that cidery has a booth at the farmers market in downtown York so I got in the car and drove up there. I tried their champagne style cider with forced carbonation. It was very pleasant and their booth was well visited. I did not get a chance to talk to the cider maker but hopefully next time I am up there I am able to. There are now 3 places (that I know of) making apple cider within an hour of Baltimore. The folks at Nepenthe tell me they get a lot of requests on how to make cider at their home brew shop. Lot happening in the cider world around Baltimore!

Added 6 gallons from Brown's orchard in PA yesterday

This is a massive orchard in Pennsylvania that a lot of cider makers are sourcing from to get their cider start ups going. In addition to supplying start ups they are providing a lot of home fermenters access to reasonably priced quality juice. I look forward to visiting the orchard in the spring to see the trees blooming.

At the moment I am thinking of trying to make a champagne style fast fermented cider, I want to bottle it close to 1.010 so it retains carbonation. I tasted a forced carbonation cider the other day and I felt the co2 was battling the flavor of the cider, the carb and the apple didn't seem to be fused together. Down the road if I have an orchard I will probably focus on making the cider in the orchard and keeping the orchard on the biodynamic side of the spectrum. I would like to stay away from additives and forced carbonation.