 My name is Matt, and my wife and I started a apple orchard just a few years ago in 2014. We planted our first apples. We've been planting more ever since. We're experimenting with over 70 varieties of apples and trying to see which ones work well. We got our first tiny harvest this year, and we also started a cider company this year, a hard cider company. When I say cider, I'm referring to hard cider. Just to be clear, and so it's Bricks Cider LLC is the name of the cider company. We found out there's already a Bantum Cider out there, so we went with the new name Bricks. So I'm gonna talk today about my Sara Farmer Rancher Grant and the bit of research I did under it. And with Farmer Rancher Grants, where we typically start is with a problem. And the problem, as I saw it, is that we have a growing craft cider industry. That's not the problem. That's a great thing that craft cider is growing. In the North Central region, we're up to over 130 hard cider producers. And five or six years ago, that number was about 30. So it's been growing quite rapidly. And there's a lot of interest among all these small cider producers in using specialty cider apples, as opposed to just eating apple seconds, in order to create a higher value product, product that they can differentiate in the marketplace from the more mainstream large brand ciders. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of information about apple varieties other than common eating apples. So, and there's just a little bit of a few research articles here and there that you can find, but it's not like wine, where there's whole fields of study and viticulture and analogy with cider. It's a very new field. And here's some shameless product placement. That's our new cider that just hit store shelves two days ago, literally. So I've been a busy guy. All right, next slide. So our solution to the problem is to do some cider apple research. And I feel very privileged to be able to get a little bit of money to make hard cider and drink it. So not many people are that lucky. And granted, there's a lot of research to be done. There's more to be done than I could do in a relatively small project, but I tried to start somewhere practical and interesting to me. And so what we did is we started with 40 different apple varieties. We got about a half bushel of each. I got most of them at one orchard in Wisconsin and then I could only get 30 from them, so I got the rest from another orchard. And we pressed each of these half bushels of apples individually and fermented them separately. So we had little one gallon batches of each different apple variety. And I tried to do everything the same with each one so that if you see any difference from one batch to the other, it's just coming from the apple. So they all have the same yeast. They all have the same yeast nutrient. Before fermentation, I put sodium metabysulfide in each one and that just kills any potential spoilage organisms. So if you see a wine that says contains sulfites, that's what they're doing with their wine as well. The same exact process, same temperature so that hopefully we're just gonna kind of see the differences from apple to apple. And then with each one, I tested the bricks, the pH, the total acidity and total tannins. And I'll get more into that in a second and what those numbers mean. And then we are still in the process of doing a more qualitative evaluation of things like aroma and different aspects of flavor and color and our overall impressions. So we've tasted most of them, there's still a couple left to do. Here's a couple photos of the process. You can see we started with half full bushels over there of all different apple varieties. And in the middle there on top there, all in their little one gallon fermenters fermenting away. And then over on the right, that's after we bottled them and then on the bottom in the middle, that's the finished ciders. And you can see there's some variability just in the color of them. So here's some results. I know you probably can't read all these specific apples on the bottom, but that's not that important. What this is is just a comparison of the bricks and what bricks is is the sugar content in the apples. If you make beer, you think in terms of specific gravity, specific gravity and bricks are essentially the same thing. And what the sugar content or bricks of the apple determines isn't so much how sweet the cider will be because the yeast is gonna ferment out all that sugar. What the bricks determines is how strong your cider will be, how the alcohol percentage is likely to be. And so these over on the right are gonna be a much stronger cider than the ones over on the left. I tend not to like to make a cider that's under 10 because it just starts to get a little, it tastes a little watered down. It's not as exciting. Unfortunately, none of these apples that we did were under 10. And some of my favorites were really these stronger ones over on the right. I think they tend to just have a little more body and a little more complexity to the flavor. Another thing we tested was acidity. And this, you're not necessarily looking for lower high. Most cider makers want something that's balanced during the middle. So you might blend a few different apples to get in the middle. And typically someone might wanna blend to get around six. So somewhere, a lot of our apples in this test aired towards higher acidity. But really acidity is a matter of preference and some people like a real tart, kind of green apple tart cider where others like something that's a little milder in terms of acidity. And then tannins, tannins are the interesting one. This is sort of the, this is really the key difference between the eating apple and a true cider apple because tannins are, they're really a whole range of compounds. They're sometimes grouped in a bigger category called polyphenols. But tannins tend to give some bitterness and some astringency to a cider. And if you think of an eating apple, you don't tend to think of it being bitter or astringent. But if you think of like, if you've had a dry red wine and after you drink it, your tongue's a little dried out, that's typically tannins. Or if you get that kind of woody flavor, that's tannins. Or, you know, beer's, bitterness is getting as big in beers right now with IPAs, indiapalials, that's one of the contributions of hops is bitterness. And with cider as well, we kind of like a bit of bitterness, like a bit of astringency. It just fills out a cider, makes it a little more interesting. And typically to consider an apple, a bitter apple, they say, if it's above this 0.2% threshold, for which we only had four that were considered bitter apples, then we had another handful that were kind of on the cusp where you could, as we're tasting, and we definitely note the tannins, but it's not very strong. If you go way over on the side over here, a lot of these are common eating apples, Gala, Gala, Cortland, Red Cortland, Snow, Honey, Crisp. There's not much at all for tannins and those. I would ideally have liked to have gotten more that were on this high end and I'm hoping to do a similar process next year working with some other local growers who have been growing cider-specific apples for 10 years or more where we could get some of these and we'd also have an initial filter from these growers of which apples are growing well for them based on their experience. So fingers crossed that that project comes through. So I thought I'd then mention just a couple of the apples that I thought were standouts that were pretty interesting, exciting ciders from my point of view. And one was this one, it's called the Arlington Mill. It's a traditional English cider apple. And as you can see, the cider itself was really an interesting, super dark color, chocolatey brown. And the aroma was very complex, very strong. My wife and I were sitting and drinking it and a bunch of different words came to mind to try to describe it. Nothing pinned it down perfectly, but it was like caramel, apple, brown sugar. There was something spicy like clove. There was something fruity like banana. It was really a complex aroma. And then the flavor matched. It was also really an enticing flavor. It would remind us of spiced rum or molasses and then there were some spicy notes like a niece. But also a little bit of bitterness and astringency. So it was really an interesting cider, unique. And as we drank it, we're like, if we could make a few hundred gallons of this, it would sell in an instant. Just if people tasted it, they'd want more. And I should make a quick note. If you look at some of these apples in the pictures, the orchard where I got most of these apples does not spray a thing. And so you'll see this has some sooty blotch and some fly speck on it. And that doesn't matter one bit for cider. Sooty blotch and fly speck are purely cosmetic. They're not gonna harm a cider whatsoever. So that's another interesting aspect of cider is it creates opportunities for a little bit more relaxed management strategy. I wouldn't recommend not spraying anything the way these folks do, but you can take a little more relaxed approach with growing cider apples. So here's another stand out. This one is a black ghillie flower. It's an heirloom American apple. And the cider that came out of it was really, it just reminded us of a white wine. It was fairly strong. It had these interesting fruity flavors like passion fruit or green grape. And this one also had a bit of tannins, not strong, but still there in the background, kind of a woody background that filled the cider out. So we thought, it's not a known, it's not a cider specific apple, but it really made a great cider. The next one, this one is, I had to put it in here because we're in Illinois. This is an heirloom cider apple from Illinois. Back in the 1800s, when cider was the drink of choice in the United States, this was one of the apples that they were growing around here. And it made a pretty interesting cider. And I wonder if it would have been even better if I had harvested it a little later, because I know this is a real late ripening apple. And as far as if I'm gonna do this type of research in the future, I think that's one improvement that I could do is really being careful about harvest dates. But even without even harvesting in early October when I did, it was still a very interesting cider, kind of earthy, spiced. It's often called minkler molasses. So it gets a darker color like that from the cider. And it was used for cider back in the day. So if you're looking for an heirloom Illinois cider apple, this might be an interesting one to go for. And then I added one more that I found pretty interesting, the Wisconsin Russet. And I added this one because it's actually just a wild apple that somebody found on their farm and made a very interesting cider. It was really acidic and just reminded us of tropical fruits. And we drank it on a cold, snowy winter night in Wisconsin and it kind of brought us to a more tropical place. But the point is that there's thousands of potential apples out there that we just haven't even tested. And this one from a pasture in Wisconsin made a pretty delicious cider. So if you have some pastures or some apples on your pastures, press them, give them a try, see what happens. You never know, you might find a really good one. And here's my last slide. If you want more results, so we have all those apples that were originally listed. We have more results on our website where you can look at, you can see a photo of each apple. You can see all the results, the bricks, the acidity, the tannins, you can see our description of the cider. We're still adding the photos of the ciders. We haven't finished all of them, but the website has each apple and the name of the apple and you can click on the apple and it'll take you to the more information on each one. So feel free to visit brickscider.com to learn more about any of these apples that you're interested in. So with that, I am done, I'll take some questions. How did you measure total acidity and tannins? So there are, so total acidity is fairly easy. There's, you can go to your local homebrew supply shop and get a acid testing kit. And it's just a simple titration and or you use, I don't even remember the reagent and then a polyphenol indicator and you just slowly drip it in and instructions are right on the box. That's pretty easy to do. Total tannins are a little more complicated. I wouldn't recommend it unless you are used to playing with dangerous chemicals. Because there's some sulfuric acid involved and a few other things. So I wouldn't recommend doing that one at home. Unless you have a chemistry lab or something like that. I'm curious about your overall ambitions for your business. And also, I know this is maybe premature, but what do you anticipate the difference year to year will be in terms of the same apple, you know? Yeah, so I'll take the second part of the question. First year to year differences, I think there definitely will be year to year differences. This year in particular, we had a weird year in Wisconsin this year and there was a late frost and so a lot of people didn't even get a good harvest. But then we had a super rainy fall and I think some of the, in some cases, bricks might be higher in a drier year because you're not gonna flood the apple quite as much. I saw some information from Washington State University just put out, just in 2016, they put out a little bit of research from some of their apples where they've been testing this over a couple of years and they're definitely seeing some variation from one year to another within the same apple. So yeah, I think there's gonna be some change, but at the same time, that variety is going to have something distinct about it that comes out each year. As far as our ambitions for our business, we are just getting our feet wet right now. We just did a few hundred gallons this year and we're test marketing it now and we're hoping next year to do about 10 times as much and then see how that goes and we're looking at a facility. So right now we did it. We produced it at a winery. We don't have our own licensed winery right now so we worked with a winery under a custom crush arrangement. So that's a way to get started if you don't want to invest in all the equipment and do it all yourself. You can work with a winery. I'm not sure what the rules are in Illinois, but in Wisconsin, cider is considered a wine and so it's the same licenses and permits and everything. And so we're looking at getting our own facility, hopefully going in 2018. We're looking at this coming year again using that same winery, but doing several batches with them instead of just the one that we did this year. As a follow-up to that, because I was wondering too, as you're doing all this great work and finding the individual descriptions of the varietals. So what you have on the shelf now is that a blend of different ones and what do you see as the future for a couple of these, would you put them out? Just as a single variety or is that kind of what you're trying to figure out along the way? Yeah, the cider we have out on the market right now, we actually made two batches. One was a bigger batch and then we did a small batch. The bigger batch is a blend of most of the eating apples from an orchard near us. And that's just because that's what's available and we didn't yet have much production on our farm. And the other batch was actually all wild apples that we harvested. And we only got about 30 gallons of cider, but it is really an interesting cider, came out really good. As far as longer term, we have about 1,000 trees growing now on our orchard and we're hoping to plant more of the variety, if we identify varieties we really like. And like I said, we have 70 varieties growing. If we find ones that are growing really well and we really like the cider, we're gonna try to feature more of those and plant more of those so that we can do some of the single varietal batches. And those would be, so it's our idea for our businesses is we'll have kind of a couple of standard ciders that are just using eating apple seconds that we purchase and then some more specialty ciders that are maybe a little higher price point that feature interesting cider apples. Sounds like what you're doing is very exciting. Could you talk a little bit about the setup at the startup, collecting your trees? Did you plant rootstock? Did you graft? And then talk a little bit about maybe pests, deer brows and then also pruning and how you're gonna manage your orchard. Yeah, we've grafted most of them ourselves. It can be pretty expensive to get more rare uncommon varieties from a nursery. So we've grafted the vast majority of them. We've grafted ourselves and we've gotten scion wood from kind of all over wherever we find interesting cider apples will buy the scion wood or even some of the ones on from the orchard where we got a lot of these apples, they just gave us some free scion wood. And then we've grafted it all on mostly on Geneva 11 rootstock which is a dwarfing rootstock which the advantages to dwarfing rootstock are number one, it produces a lot sooner. You don't have to wait eight years. You get some fruit after two or three years. And the other advantage is it's way easier to pick and manage and prune because it's not this big monster of a tree that we have to be climbing up and down a ladder. It's something you can just do from standing on the ground. And as far as pests and diseases were, like I said earlier, we're not too worried about cosmetic things but at the same time we need to keep the trees healthy and productive. So we still need to manage for things like fire blight. A nearby cider apple grower has lost a lot of trees to fire blight and so we're gonna be careful with that one. We can have a bit of scab or rust but you don't want it to get to the point where it is weakening your trees. So we're still managing for those but in a little less aggressive way than someone who wants a picture perfect apple that they can sell at the store. You mentioned that you were selling your cider. Where are you selling it? Is that in stores or where are you marketing it? Yeah, for now we're selling it at stores in the Madison area because we're just west of Madison. We're planning longer term to have a tasting room and we're looking at a facility this Friday which is a possibility and you can get a lot better margin selling and direct to customer obviously. So we're hoping to get a facility that would bring in some tourism, where we could host events and things and bring in people and build some brand loyalty that way. Have you encountered challenges with any licensure or distribution things and lessons you might want to share with people who are interested in pursuing something like this? It is a legal maze, definitely, to make alcohol is really carefully regulated and some of the previous presentations were about food processing which is also very carefully regulated. As a cider maker you are also a food processor so you have to follow all those rules just like anybody else. But then on top of that you need to get a wine permit and there's special tax code for wine and cider and cider is different than wine and it depends on the alcohol percent and it depends on the level of carbonation and it's very confusing and it just takes a little while to learn it. Labels can be very complicated as well. If you're below 7% you fall under FDA labeling regulations. If you're above 7% as then under the Tax and Trade Bureau and you're gonna need to get their label approved. So it's this Byzantine legal morass and you could spend a whole day talking about it. In pursuing the tannins in a nut production there can be too much tannin. Is that even an issue in this? I would say no. So if you saw that where I had the tannins listed there was that one apple that was way off the charts. I think if you, and it turned out that that was the one apple that I didn't get enough of the apple to actually produce a gallon and ferment it out. I have a feeling if I tasted that one on its own it would be too bitter. But at the same time I would love to have a bunch of that apple so that I could blend it with some eating apples and still get that tannin. And you could probably do like 10% of that apple and 90% eating apple and get a bit of tannic flavor. And then there's also, people are experimenting with adding other ingredients to get tannins with mixed results. And generally what you add is gonna be different than the tannins in an apple. But you can still get some interesting ciders adding. I haven't tried adding nuts, maybe it's a good idea.