Whitewood Cider featured on Serious Eats: Drinks Blog

Although not entirely a surprise considering I gave an interview, I still found myself taken back and more than excited this morning to wake up to the new Serious Eats: Drinks post 4 Up-and-Coming Cider Makers To Watch in 2013. 

Whitewood Cider Co. found itself amongst great company listed in the article alongside 3 other terrific new cidermakers across the country. Sietsema Orchards from Ada Michigan, Blue Bee Cider in Richmond Virginia, and Tilted Shed Ciderworks of Forestville, California. I've had the pleasure to meet or get to know all these folks and it's a great honor for us.

Thanks to Chris Lehault for putting together yet another great cider read.  Keep visiting Serious Eats to catch more of his work or keep tabs of him on Twitter or Facebook.

Traditional Mulled Cider Recipe

To tease your palate, here is Dave’s recipe for hot spiced cider:

Here’s to a cheer filled New Year. This recipe is a particular favorite in the cider regions of England during the Holidays and Wassailing. Americans generally mull "cider" using fresh apple juice. We like it with a dry to semi-dry fermented cider. While making the following quantity is not cheap it does go quite a ways at a party and the recipe can easily be divided into half.

Ingredients

• 3½pts/2L dry cider or fresh apple juice
• 2 apples studded with cloves
• 4-6 cinnamon sticks
• 5-6 allspice berries
• zest of 1/2 to 1 orange (to taste, too much can over power your drink)
• Apple Brandy, Calvados, or Apple Jack to taste/strength. We like to make our mulled cider using apple spirits but rum and whiskey will also work.
• slices of apple for garnish

Preparation method

• Combine all ingredients in a large saucepan and simmer gently for 30 minutes - do not boil.
• Transfer to a heatproof bowl and ladle into glass mugs. Garnish with apple slices to serve.

Updates: Our cider is fermenting. Almost finished pressing.

For those of you following along you are probably expecting a bit of an update. And rightly so. We've been hard at work pressing apples each weekend and have got a few tanks filled up. Here is your official Whitewood Cider Fall Pressing Update.

As you can see by the photos below we've been hard at work since October. Most of you may know I'm still enjoying the delights my day job at Espresso Parts, which means most of this has been done over the weekends. It's been a chore, and a learning experience, but I wouldn't do it any differently at this point. I also need to see that it would have been very difficult to make things go down like they have without the help of my brother Ryan. Thanks man!

Crushin' and Pressin'. This is the future 300 gallons of our local Olympia apple blend.

Our local apple blend being pressed.

Receiving our cider varieties.

In this picture should be Yarlington Mill, Dabinett, Brown's Apple, and Harry Masters Jersey.

8 of 10 bins snug in their cooler.

Pictured: 2) 300 gallon tanks of cider... At Whitewood Cider Co.

The tank on the left is 300 gallons of Yarlington Mill, Dabinett, and Brown's Apple cider apple varieties. It'll be our cider variety base blend #1 and if all goes well will likely be a pretty fantastic cider as is, no blending required. However we may do some slight blend tweaking between now and late Spring when it is finished. It all depends on what the cider tells us it wants.

The tank on the right is 300 gallons of our local Olympia blend made from apples within a 20 mile radius of Olympia. Give or take. Some of these apples came from a ranch in Yelm. I've got my fingers crossed that this is going to be a great cider without much tinkering. However should it need a bit of minimal adjustments it might just get it, but it will be minimal. I'd like to keep this as pure Olympia as I can. I'll be posting more about where these apples came from is future posts. Stay tuned.

Not Pictured:

240 gallons of pure Gravenstein cider from the Yakima Valley. I'm curious about this cider. In my experience Gravensteins make a terrific cider nearly on their own as a single varietal. So we may release a single varietal Gravenstein cider. However this could end up the base for an American heirloom apple blend using the ciders that follow.

We have a couple remaining smaller batches cooking too. 1) 80 Gallion tank with Macintosh and Jonathan heirloom apple varieties. 2) 80 gallon tank with Jonathans and a smattering of English cider varieties we picked up early.