What’s Happening in the Orchard

Seminary Hill’s cider master Stuart Madany gets us up to speed on what's been happening in the orchard and the cellar this winter.

The Orchard

We started cover cropping to prepare the ground in 2012, and most of the trees went in between 2014 and 2019. The vast majority are semi-dwarf which take six or seven years to bear fruit. The 2021 crop was 9x greater than 2020, which naturally thrilled us.

I came from central Virginia, where I was the cidermaster at Castle Hill Cider. I have been delighted by all the new varieties: Stoke Red, Ribston Pippin, and Zaubergau Reinette come to mind. 

Still, we're increasing cider production this year, so our estate fruit will account for a minority of our juice. Fortunately, we've partnered with two great growers to get us more top-quality cider fruit. Big thanks to DeFisher Fruit Farm and South Hill Cider. 

Here's hoping for another jump in crop this coming year with more trees coming online.

The Cellar

We've just completed fermenting the year's first tankfuls of cider. We have a couple of side projects going between racking those tanks and pressing the last of our estate juice. We're running some piping, and we're building a pasteurizer. 

When Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization, he also solved the problem of stabilizing wine. Milk, juice, and all sorts of things eventually used the same process.

If we want some of our ciders to have a bit of sugar, we need a way to prevent it from fermenting in the bottle. A touch of apple sugar often accentuates the flavors in the cider, and if we don't protect it, it will ferment.

There are just a few options. We can filter out all yeast, chemically impede it, starve it, or pasteurize. We need to use a tight filter that a yeast cell can't fit through to filter out the yeast. The problem is that some of the flavor and color will also get left in the filter along with the yeast cells. And if some airborne yeast (they're all around us) gets in a bottle, it may still re-ferment. 

Chemicals are very reliable, but it wouldn't make much sense to eschew harsh or toxic chemicals in the orchard and risk introducing them in the cider. And, it's just not our way.

Starving the yeast is an interesting method. French cidermakers use it a lot, but it is risky. It relies on stressing the yeast and can make them produce off-flavors. It also requires high pectin varieties of apple to work.

Pasteurizing works on the sealed bottle so no yeast can sneak in. It doesn't require the cider to be filtered, and no chemicals are involved. One must be careful to monitor the pasteurization units the cider is undergoing to not carelessly over-pasteurize, but we've got that in hand. Perhaps we'll have some progress updates on this in the future.

The piping project is needed because we are the world's first Passive House cidery. Passive House is probably the second best-known sustainable building certification after LEED and was a much more appropriate certification for our project. 

The catch for us is that Passive House buildings have a very tight envelope (the outside surface of the building). Almost no air leakage is going out or coming in. Effectively, all of the air being exhausted or coming in goes through an energy exchanger, requiring minimal energy to condition the fresh air. 

The process is excellent, but the CO2 produced by the fermentation still needs to get out of the workspace for safety reasons. So, the vent from each tank goes through a sensitive check valve. And then, it combines with the CO2 from the other tanks and is vented directly outside. 

The check valves prevent outside air from coming in, and it also prevents the yeast from one tank from floating into another. I don't know of any other cidery that has attempted this sort of system. We'd love to recapture the CO2, but at present, that technology only exists for a much larger scale operation.

One Final Cellar Note

We've partnered with the fine folks at Strickland Hollow to distill some of our cider into apple eau de vie. This cider will become part of a future offering, but more on that later.

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