Distilling Craft
Distilling Craft
Apple a Day
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Colin Keegan and Noya Gilmore from Santa Fe Spirits are interviewed to discuss their apple brandy production. Later, apple fermentation is discussed including different sources and the treatment of freshly picked apples to get them ready for fermentation.
Welcome to Distilling Craft, episode (16): "Apple a Day ". Today, we're going to be talking with Colin Keegan and Noya Gilmore from Santa Fe Spirits out of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Dalkita PromoDistilling Craft is brought to you by Dalkita, a group of architects and engineers who specialize in designing craft distilleries across the US. More information is available at our website www.dalkita.com
Colleen MooreHello everyone. Welcome to Distilling Craft, I'm Colleen Moore. Just a quick thing before we start today's show. When we are hard at work, lining up new interviews and producing new shows, and you are so kindly waiting on us, we're going to reissue a couple of our episodes from season one with some previously unreleased material mixed in. Colin and Noya are going to talk with us all about the history of Santa Fe Spirits, apple brandy production, and then the methods that they're currently using. Later in the show, our radiogenic part-time distiller, DJ, talks with us about apple fermentation, including the different sources and how to process freshly picked apples for fermentation. Collin, Noya, welcome to our show.
Colin KeeganThank you.
Noya GilmoreThanks for having us .
Colin KeeganThanks for having us.
Dalkita DJYou, I guess, plus or minus are responsible for me getting into the industry. I discovered your apple brandy back 2007 ish 2010.
Colin KeeganThat's when we first came out with it .
Dalkita DJIt was right at the very beginning and I just fell in love with the product, and then started to learn more about how it was made. Let's start at the beginning. What got you to found your distillery? Can you give us a little bit of a background on the history?
Colin KeeganI'll talk about history, and then we'll hand over to Noya to talk about where we're going because that's some exciting stuff that she's doing in the barrel aging, etc. What happened was, I was an architect in Santa Fe, designed a house for fella, who wanted to build a house in an apple orchard. Basically, the project fell apart and my wife and I bought the apple orchard, put our house in it, invited some friends over in the fall to squeeze a few apples. And we squeezed a lot. And then, they went bad. So we said next year, we're gonna turn it into hard cider so we can keep it. So the next year, we did. And when we got to our 500 gallons, cause we didn't drink enough every year, in the way of my wife's car getting in the garage, she said, get rid of it. Being linear, I thought I would have some fun and distill it into apple brandy. Basically, picked up a book, made some really bad apple brandy, and played with that and made it better. This was in the early 2000. When the economy took a down turn and decided to focus on my brandy making skills as a hobby. And you know, there wasn't much architecture happening, so it was a good time to extend what I was making in apple brandy, started barrel aging it in very small barrels, and one thing led to another and Santa Fe spirits was formed. It took on a lot of different changes as over the years. But that's basically the history. Every year, w e'd been improving. About t hree years ago, Noya really took over the production and I'll hand over to her right now.
Noya GilmoreI joined about three and a half years ago and knew absolutely nothing about distilling. I had a background in biology and chemistry and came in and interviewed. Johnny Jeffrey was the head Distiller then, and we hit it off and I just started learning all about this stuff. And now for the past year and a half, two years, I've been the head distiller and have taken over production and Colin's let me run away with it.
Dalkita DJI heard a rumor, I guess a handful of years ago, when I was living in New Mexico, that you had a fire, might have lost part of your orchard, all of your orchard that you were originally sourcing your apples from.
Colin KeeganWell, fortunately for us, but there's an apple orchard , very famous one called Dixon between here and Albuquerque basically. They had two devastating things happen. One was a fire that burned through a lot of the underbrush and took away the top soil basically, and some floods as well, which then washed away what was left. So, i t really destroyed the biggest a nd the best known apple orchard i n New Mexico. We were taking apples from my orchard in northern New Mexico and sat into suitcase, just outside Santa Fe, and trying to s ource some other places. And both. Noya and I, are going to roll our eyes here. We tried very hard to source s ome local orchards. So no fault of their own. Mexico's in a very tempered zone. Some years they get apples. Some years they don't. I'm used to every year producing apples and apple juice. So we have to go to southern Colorado now for most of our juice, which is a place called Big B's apple orchard, quite well known in the southwest here. And they can match the varietals that we have, the Jonathan, Gala, golden delicious apples. And Go from there.
Noya GilmoreWe did get 300 gallons from Collin's trees last year and I distilled that separately, so that'll be a special release barrel in another year or so.
Dalkita DJVery cool. How did you choose that mix of apples? Is that just what you started with your trees or did you look around for different varieties? What was your thinking in choosing the types of apples?
Colin KeeganIt was really what was on the trees when we first started doing it. That whole sort of heirloom varietals and J onathan and Gala. I'm told what they are. Here in New Mexico, we get a very small harder apple. We don't have the moisture to g row the big t wo pound apples that you get in Washington state. There's some golden delicious in there. Those are just what we had in our orchard.
Noya GilmoreThe guys at Big B's, he'll have every year have a different mix. Like sometimes, one year I wanted to try higher acidity apples so he had more acidic apples. Some years try a sweeter apple, we get higher bricks . So just been playing around with what he has when we're ready to order and what we can do with it.
Dalkita DJYou have expanded your product line. For me, you're always will be an apple brandy distillery, but you have got a whole bunch of other products out there that you're doing apparently a single malt whiskey that's doing very well. Can you talk a little bit about the rest of your product line?
Noya GilmoreActually, our two top sellers are Colkegan Single Malt Whiskey, and then our southwestern Wheelers gin . The single malt is what we really focus on day in, day out. It's an amazing product. Definitely, my favorite thing. That brandy is my favorite to work on, but my favorite to drink is definitely the Colkegan.
Dalkita DJWhat makes that a special single Malt? Are you dealing with smoke grains there? How are you making that single malt?
Noya GilmoreIt's about 30% Mesquite smoked two row and the rest regular two row, and then we age in new American oak and used Bourbon barrels. I think just our climate here, it's super dry. So we have a huge angel share, but it really lends itself to the terroir of the region, that just makes an excellent spirit.
Colin KeeganI'll chip in on that one. I don't know if it was explained to all the listeners. The angel shares, the evaporation we get. We round the numbers. It's really hard to get a really empirical data on this, but the guessing in Scotland, they may lose about 5% a year, give or take. In Kentucky, it's less than that because it's warmer and the barrels swelled better . But here in New Mexico, we're guessing about 15% of the producat a year, which is huge. However it does mean in three years.We have what we think is a bit of about a product and this works for the apple brandy as well. Aging and Cask is not just about getting the darkest color and as much oak as possible as an oxidation that goes on, and there's the sort of infusion of oak flavor that you want. That's getting into the technicalities, which is really Noya as well. So I'll hand you back to her, but yeah, you can talk about the Wheelers Gin too.
Noya GilmoreFor our gin, we use a lot of southwestern botanicals. So in addition to our juniper, we have a Toya blossom, which is a cactus blossom that we collect once a year. We have white sage, cascade hops and OSHA root, which is a local medicinal herbs that makes it a very different Gin.
Dalkita DJCertainly sounds like it. So with putting in the hops in there , how do you deal with the oils from the hops? I know in distilling beer , they tend to look for a very- if any hops, very low hop beer varieties, but you're intentionally putting hops into your gin. How does that affect your distillation process?
Noya GilmoreWe distill each one separately and the hops fraction is the worst fraction to distill. I have burned it before and that it makes a really nasty mess. But we have a special sort of botanicus tank. It doesn't actually go into our still. We use just the still to power the steam to a separate tank and distill it through there, so we don't have any cross contamination. But the hops are definitely a very nasty oily fraction that you have to do really slow if you don't want to burn.
Dalkita DJSo you're doing a mass aeration with the botanicals and then doing basically direct steam injection. Am I understanding that process correctly?
Noya GilmoreYeah, pretty much. The hops is the only one where we do distill the mass aeration and the botanicals. And then, we use steam from the still to power through our botanicus and through the mass aerated and solids of the hops and then onto the condenser.
Dalkita DJI don't even know where to begin with the questions on that .
Noya GilmoreThe botanic definitely a very interesting piece of equipment that the first distiller set up here.
Dalkita DJWhen you burn the hops, is that a burn flavor that you are getting? I mean, assumed with direct injection steam, there's not enough temperature to actually create a caramelization or ARD reaction. What actually happened ?
Noya GilmoreThe actual flavor wasn't that bad, but the solids and the hops, it turned into this black goo, like PVW couldn't do it, like hot water, it was only caustic or like high proof NGS and it was bad . I only did it once.
Dalkita DJThat sounds like a lesson you learn the hard way. S,o you also have a smoke gin liquor. Is that made from your wheeler's gin or are you doing something different with that?
Noya GilmoreIt is. It's the same base as our gin. And then we'll take a fraction out and we'll smoke apple and hickory wood into it, and then we'll blend it back in with more of our regular gin and add some sugar and lower the proof down. So it makes it really easy drinking soft liquor. It's really neat.
Dalkita DJVery cool. So with your single malts, you said you were using mesquite smoke on that. Are you doing all the smoking in house? What's your setup look like for that?
Noya GilmoreNo, absolutely not. We order now from Greece , the Mesquite. Who did you start with? It was a specialty product.
Colin KeeganHe started with another distiller called Copper Fox distillery in Virginia doing it, and mesquites great and fun, but he was finding that it was a small malting house. He actually did it himself. He and his mother used to eat the green actually. We were ordering a couple of thousand pounds. Now, we've actually gone up in production many times, and we need to basically go to somebody who can reliably keep delivering it. Not that he wasn't reliable, it was just the scale grew away from him. He'd yeast malting house do the mesquite and BSG suppliers with the roller.
Dalkita DJAnd then with smoke gin, is that in house?
Noya GilmoreYes. We built a gin bong , basically. Aquarium pump and diffuser stone.
Dalkita DJAre you sure your distillery is not in Colorado? I don't normally hear about engineer's building large bongs in other state.
Colin KeeganIt's a pretty large bong0 it was a means to an end. I mean, it's just how are we going to get the smoke bubbling to this gin and Noya you and Johnny put it together and have managed to get something that's reliable, which is very clever.
Dalkita DJThat's an awesome idea. It makes perfect sense. And I know in advance, I'm going to butcher this, but you're Atapino liquor.
Colin KeeganYeah.
Dalkita DJWhat is that?
Noya GilmoreAtapino was another one of Johnny's creations. We were trying to come up with something using the local flavors in the mountains here. We have a lot of ponderosa pines that just smell amazing. So, he collected some of the pine resin and put it in whiskey and it just had this amazing smell. And we eventually hit on, we'll take our white whiskey , we'll put it in a barrel with a pound of pinyon per gallon of whiskey, roasted pinyon, and that processed to learning to order them shelled.
Colin KeeganWith that many pinyons you need to order them shelled.
Noya GilmoreSo we'll age the pinyons in the whiskey for about three months, then we'll take it out and we'll add that ponderosa pine resin and again, some more sugar and lower the proof. And it just has this amazing smell and flavor that's like nothing you've ever had.
Dalkita DJI know several other people that are doing nut based liquors and the extraction you get from those nuts is interesting. Are you getting any colors being imparted by the nuts? What do you get from the pinyons?
Noya GilmoreVery, very slight color. Lots of oils definitely have some flavors. I was just actually talking to Brian over at Left Turn and he does pinyon rum, and he'll actually distill the pinos in a little water distiller. And then add that. So I want to try that, but I haven't played around with that yet. But basically, right now, we just put the nuts in with the whiskey and let it sit for a few months until it tastes pinyo enough.
Dalkita DJVery cool. I guess circle back to the apple brandy cause that's what I like. When you are doing your selection, you said you've tried a couple of different things. You've looked at the sugar content, the acidity content , I assume you've looked at the tannins as well. What have you landed on in this, I guess, plus or minus seven, eight years you've been making this product for what is the right blend for apples in an apple brandy?
Noya GilmoreWell, for the past three years that I've been here, it has just been a total mix of what he has, what's available. Seems to be a lot of Jonathan's galas red delicious. I'd love to be able to try more heirlooms, but being able to find them in quantity is really difficult.
Colin KeeganThere's a lot of pounds of apples that go into one bottle. I mean, we'd a one point calculated about 120 pounds. I think, we've been a bit lazy in how we were pressing them and stuff, but there's definitely dozens and dozens of pounds of apples per bottle.
Noya GilmoreWe try when we do the brandy , we have 4,000 gallons of fermentation space, so we want to fill all that 4,000 gallons up at once. We really are at the mercy of what he has available. He definitely tries to get a good selection for me. And so far, it has worked out. I wish I could have more of a steady blend that then I see what the differences are. But for the past three years, it has been different every time.
Colin KeeganI think in the way we distill in the barrel aging has much to do with the flavor if not more than the actual varietals, would you say?
Noya GilmoreDefinitely the distillation. I've changed how we do the distillation and it has really made a big difference in the flavor.
Dalkita DJIt sounds like you're getting raw apples in. How are you processing those apples? I mean I've seen everything from garbage disposals to big hammer mill type things for the apples. What is your process to br eak d o wn r aw apples and get them into a form you can start doing the juicing?
Noya GilmoreWell, normally we don't, we just get the juice. Or when we use Colin's apples and then he has presses.
Colin KeeganWhen we do it in my yard basically, we have two off half horsepower motor presses. We are processing maybe a gallon or two per 10 minutes or so. So it's not very efficient. So Big B's apple orchard actually processes the apples for us. They get rid of the pulp and they just send us the juice. Because of the gallon that you need 4,000 gallons would take about 10 people the way we do it, about three or four weeks actually to do it. So we do contract with Big B's. To be honest, they do the heavy lifting for us .
Dalkita DJThat makes a lot of sense. It totally eliminates my next question about fermenting on the fruit itself to get a little higher tannin content. What do you typically get with your fermentations? What percent alcohol are you getting out of there? You said you're using a ton of apples to get the juice, but how much alcohol are you actually starting with out of that 4,000 gallons of fermentation space?
Noya GilmoreFor the apple juice, we get it in anywhere from 12_14 bricks. And out of 4,000 gallons, we'll get roughly 17_20 barrels, 25 gallon barrels. So, probably around 6%_ 7% alcohol.
Dalkita DJIt's only been three years for you, do you have any sense for what makes a better year in terms of yield? Is it more water or less water? More Sunshine? Do you have any idea of what to expect from looking at the weather?
Noya GilmoreI don't. Not at all. Because, it's what apples he's selected in southern Colorado. We don't know.
Dalkita DJAnd you are a little bit away, so I'm sure the weather in Santa Fe is not the weather up at his neck of the woods.
Noya GilmoreNo. Our apple crops every year we have a late freeze in New Mexico. So, all the blossoms are starting and then it freezes and the crops dead .
Dalkita DJSo you were saying you changed the distillation process. I guess let's start with, what was it and then what did you change it to and why?
Noya GilmoreI did. When I first started, we used to do a double distillation. We do a stripping run and then the spirit run through the column. We did that the first time that we got the juice while I was here, but we also played around with running it from just the fermented juice to spirit in one run through the column. And the first time, we just did a couple barrels that way. Second time did about half the barrels that way. And now, we do all the 4,000 gallons that way. And I just find it makes a lot softer spirit. Not as harsh, not as much solvents , just so much softer just doing it in one run.
Dalkita DJAre you seeing any effect on your yield? I mean, obviously you have a variable input , so that's a little harder to tell. But are you getting a higher yield by doing a single pass distillation than a double?
Noya GilmoreIt's roughly similar. It might be slightly more, but it's hard to know when each batch has different bricks in the first place. So not sure because the distillation and how much is just your starting sugars.
Dalkita DJWhat are you seeing in terms of heads and tails in this switch? Are you getting a larger percentage of heads or smaller? How does that break down in your different processes?
Noya GilmoreI think the heads are probably smaller. It's been awhile now since we did it the other way, but with brandy , I find the heads are a lot smaller because you have a lot of the apple flavor in those very early spirit. And especially coming off the rectification column, you really concentrate those head portio.n and then the tails, all cut in and out of tails . But that's also, I'll cut way deep into the apple water, that's 20% 15% 10% to just really lower the proof of the spirit to age in the barrel. And I also find the lower the proof of the spirit and the barrel, the better aging we get.
Dalkita DJInteresting. What are you putting it into the barrel at?
Noya GilmoreI'll put it in at around between 50% and 55%. And then I'll also do some barrels that are at like 30% and use those to blend back into a blend and that gives it a lot more softness and fruitiness that we don't get when we just use the higher proof barrels.
Dalkita DJYou are just answering all my questions before I get a chance to ask them. I was just going to ask about aging the water to use for dilution. It's come up several times over conversations and it seems to be coming from a brandy background and so I was curious if you were using that as well. I guess one difference you just said is, you are taking tails or a dilute version of the hearts right off the still into your 30% aging in that barrel versus taking the cut at 60% off the hearts and then diluting that with clean water. Is that a good understanding of the process?
Noya GilmoreYes. When I did tails, I just divert a few gallons at a time, and then I'll just keep cutting back into my heart's tote, so that I will go really deep into the, I don't know what you call it, sweet water or late late tails , but just cutting out the parts that I don't like and then running as much of that kind of, it's not a lot of alcohol in it, but there's still some flavor into it, and using that to reduce the proof instead of just cutting it at as soon as I get to tails and then cutting that spirit with water. I'd rather use some of the more flavors that are coming off the still later.
Dalkita DJAre you doing anything with the tails that you're not putting back into the spirit? Do those get recycled into the next year's program or do they just get disposed of?
Noya GilmoreThe tails definitely get recycled into the next batch.
Dalkita DJHow big is your still with 4,000 gallons of fermentation? How many batches do you run from from that?
Noya GilmoreWe do 250 gallons at a time.
Dalkita DJWhen you do brandy, you're doing brandy for awhile ?
Noya GilmoreYeah. We used to do it twice a year. Now, we're cutting back to once a year because of our whiskey production is really taking off. So the whole 4,000 gallons with the fermentation and then distilling it takes about three to four weeks.
Dalkita DJHow much of that is fermentation time? How long are your brandy ferments?
Noya GilmoreThere are about seven to 10 days, so lot longer than our whiskey . We ferment at a lower temperature. We did have one year where the temperature got a little hot and could definitely tell some more hop flavors in the final spirit. So I like to ferment around 65 and that seems to work for about seven to 10 days fermentation.
Dalkita DJAre you using like an early yeast then? I mean are you using a conventional yeast? Are you looking at a low temperature yeast to be active at that?
Noya GilmoreIt's a champagne yeast. It's at about half of its range. It's the champagne yeast has a huge range and the 65 is about in the mid range of it. Someday, I would like to experiment with some other yeasts, but haven't gotten to that yet.
Dalkita DJWell, and with other products taking off, I'm sure the experimentation phase of the apple brandy may be behind you as you are growing other product lines.
Noya GilmoreWell, the apple brandy is still the funnest to play with because we do only do it once a year that I try and tweak things a little bit every year and see if we can make it even better.
Dalkita DJVery cool. I might have to store up a couple bottles over a series of years and taste the difference between them. So barrels, we talked about this a little bit earlier. You are evaporating an unbelievable amount out of your barrels. Let's start with how many years do you typically age your brandy ?
Noya GilmoreThe brandy average is about one to two years. Now, it is getting younger. The stock is only about one year old, but I have used some barrels that have only been three to four months in a blend. So it's a big range.
Dalkita DJInteresting. Why is that?
Noya GilmoreJust the flavors. We age in 25 gallon barrels and for a while when I first started, we had a lot of really, really oaky barrels. I've taken them out of that oak and then put t hem in used brandy, so that they can just mature without picking up more oak. But then when I changed the distillation, I found that some of those younger barrels were ready to use right away. So when I do a blend for the b randy, we don't have any sort of age statement or anything, so I'm just sampling all the barrels and whatever works in the blend works i n the blend. I don't really pay much attention to the age.
Dalkita DJYou definitely had a very oaky brandy originally, which I appreciated because it was more of an apple flavored whiskey profile in some cases. So I can see stepping away from that and dial in back your oak a little bit. So aside from smaller casks, are you using a heavy char or just a toast? How are you treating those barrels? What type of barrels are you using for your new ones ?
Noya GilmoreWe have a wide range. We have toasted. We have some Chard , number two and number three, char. Some medium toasts. But then we using our barrels as much as we can. So I just completed right now we took out a lot of the spirit that had been in some new char for about six, seven months and took it out and we barreled it into some used brandy barrels, so that it'll just age without picking up more oak. And we also poofed them down and since our angel share is so high, I like to be able to do that whenever I can to top off the barrels so that we're not losing even more.
Dalkita DJThat makes sense. What do you look for in the low proof, the 30% spirits that you're aging? Are those all done in new barrels? Are those all done in old barrels? Is it still just a blend like you treat the hearts? What's the difference there?
Noya GilmoreLately, they'd been in used ones, when we just did all this re-barreling, I did put it back into a newer ch ar t o see if that wi ll m aybe pick up more of the oak flavor, and see how that will work to blend back in. T rying to do like, what did they call the bl ahzay, t he oak water. So experimenting with that, we'll have to see how it goes
Dalkita DJWith you constantly diluting at that 15% a year. I mean now middle, you're only doing one year age on these things. What proof are you typically getting coming out of the barrels if you're going in 50_55%, what do you get in coming out?
Noya GilmoreIt comes out 57_ 58%. I've had them some come out at 60%. So the good thing is we are only losing water and not spirit in our angel share. So our proof definitely goes up in the barrel.
Dalkita DJThat is an awesome thing for the few people who were able to experience it to have proof climb over time. At least makes you somewhat breathe a sigh of relief that you're keeping the important part of your product.
Noya GilmoreExactly. At least angel share is high but it is water.
Dalkita DJBefore I run too far past barrels, what is your aging program look like for your scotch? You were talking about that a little bt earlier.
Noya GilmoreIt is the same mix with the like Mesquite two row, it's about 30% new American oak and about 70% used bourbon barrels, and those are all 53 gallon barrels. We actually just last year put up a new building with a new barrel room that Dalkita helped design, with the special humidity control that we're hoping will really help reduce our angel share.
Dalkita DJWhat are you doing with that Malt whiskey? Are you also doing the aged water as well or is that done in a more conventional style?
Noya GilmoreIt's done in a more conventional style. I'll barrel that anywhere from 55%_60%. I haven't done any of the like barrel water at all. So I won't barrel the barrel water, but I will do the same thing cutting in and out of tails and using that late run off from the still to dilute the heart's cut instead of just cutting it with water.
Dalkita DJThat's interesting. I don't think I've run across that. So, you're actually using basically new make to cut your spirits. Do you have an age statement on your product? Does using that new make effect that age statement?
Noya GilmoreWe do not have an age statement. Well, it's not necessarily new make. When I'm running a spirit run , in my h eart's cut, same thing as I do with the brandy, I'll just cut out the t ails, the parts I don't like, and then continue running that 30%, 40%, 20% alcohol into my h eart's cut, to use that to get it to barrel proof instead of just cutting the h earts with water for barreling.
Dalkita DJAre you storing that water till that particular distillation is ready? Or, are you taking what you've pulled off of your the late water from today's distillation to use in today's dilution and bottling?
Noya GilmoreIt's all going into the same tank. When I make cuts, I'm like diverting it into a bucket, so it's either into the bucket or into the tank.
Dalkita DJIf you were going to start your distillery over again, what would you do differently?
Noya GilmoreWell, now this is where we need Colin again, because he is the one who started the distillery and I jumped in later. But I think having a growth plan is very important. Where you want to go and when you want to get there is really important. I've noticed as we've been growing, it's in leaps and bounds. And if you had it all thought out initially , we might be able to run into less issues, especially around building equipment and space saving, things like that. You run into a lot of issues if you don't have a good long term plan.
Dalkita DJWe certainly run into that a lot where people want to expand, but it's either a major deal to rebuild their space or they can't expand as much as they'd like. So, where do you see the industry going in the next five to 10 years?
Noya GilmoreIt's really picking up and expanding with the craft market taking a larger share from the big guys. I definitely think what they say were like 10, 15 years behind craft beer. And with the rate of distilleries opening, I think we have three or four trying to open in New Mexico this year that I think it really is expanding, but at the same time as we are expanding , it's going to be a little more competition. Some of the people that can't hang in there are going to have to drop out for good or bad. I think, we all want to be in the game and we all want to make amazing products, but when there's more of us out there, you really need to be making a good product or you're not going to be able to stay open.
Dalkita DJThat makes sense. If somebody came to you and said they were going to start a distillery and like everybody else there very budget constraint , what would you tell them they should focus their limited resources on to ensure their distillery is a success?
Noya GilmoreWell, I'd say don't open a distillery. With such limited resources, it is a lot of money and it's a lot more than you would ever think of. Me, of course, I'm on the production side, so I'm all about equipment. I think Collin would say focusing more on sales plans.There's just so many aspects to it. It's a hard business. It's really hard business to get into and stay in.
Dalkita DJRelated to that, what do you think is the key to getting a product, placed on people's shelves? What do you think is necessary to get that first b ottle sold?
Noya GilmoreYou have to have a good product. But you can have the best product and if nobody knows about it, you're never going to sell anything. So you have to have a way to get it out there. Eespecially being craft , nobody's going to want to carry you unless you have people going into liquor stores and restaurants and asking for your product, so you somehow have to get it out to people and you have to get them asking for your product or else the liquor stores and the distributors don't care about you. So it really is about reaching the people and connecting with them and they have to ask for it. That's the only way to get it out there.
Dalkita DJI think a lot of people discovered that. Well, Noya, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate you appearing on the show.
Noya GilmoreAbsolutely. Thank you so much for having us.
Dalkita PromoToday's interview is brought to you by the team of architects and engineers at Dalkita. Dalkita has been serving the craft distilling industry for over 13 years, and committee to production facilities that work. Now, let's get back to the show.
Colleen MooreA special thanks to Colin Keegan and Noya Gilmore from Santa Fe Spirits for talking with us on our show today. Up Next, our field reporter, who wants to be a distiller one day and his lesson on apple fermentation, including different sources and how the process for actually picked apples for fermentation.
Dalkita DJApples are probably my favorite fermentation base. That's why I got into all this was a drinking apple brandy. I really enjoy it. At one point in time, I wanted to have my own apple orchard and make my own brandy, but it is expensive to buy an orchard and waiting for those trees to matures more than a little bit brutal. That being said, apple brandy is fairly easy to make. We don't need big mash tons , we don't need a lot of other equipment and much like our other sugar mashes, the sugar itself is directly edible by the yeast. So we don't need to do a whole lot besides get really high quality juice and presented in a way to make the yeast as happy as possible. It's slightly more complicated than that as well. We'll go through. So the most common problems with apple brandies are methanol and cyanide. Cyanides less of an issue with apple brandies than it is with some of your stone fruit brandies , your plums, your apricots, that stuff because the seeds of the apples are much smaller and they're much harder to crush and get that cyanide extracted out of there. That being said, if you are treating the fruit yourself, and then you were leaving those pits sitting in your spirit for a long period of time, you will certainly build up cyanide in there. So we need to make sure when we're making our brandies that we're extracting those seeds, or if we are using them through the process to get the juice out, we get those seeds removed from the spirit as soon as possible. Generally speaking, when we talk about apple brandy, everybody gets something different in their mind. Some people picture Applejack, that's not what I'm talking about. Applejack is typically has additional alcohols added to it. In some cases in apple brandy with the NGS back, some cases it's apple juice with an NGS back . There's a million different definitions and I'm not just talking about the product on the market called Applejack. Beyond that, we generally have two types of brandies. We have our clear brandies, ODV and then we have our dark br andies. I n the U.S, historically, we've tended towards th e C alvados style and in fact we use it even a heavier type of brandy that I like to think of as A merican style that basically has a lot more oak in there but also has a lot more tannins and is a little heavier hitting than a Calvados style. That being said, with the craft trend, everything's moving all over the place and we are seeing a lot more ODV just because it's a product you can turn out much quicker. So if you ar e m aking a light colored brandy, o ne that won't have the heavy oak influence, typically the main thing you're looking for is to preserve as much apple ch aracter a s p ossible. So the ways to do this are to pick apples that have a lot of apple c haracteristics that smell like apples on the front end. If you're going to be using apple juice concentrate, whatever, your focus is really on that smell and sense of a pples. When you do your fermentation, you definitely want to be in a closed tank, so that again, that apple s cent and sense of a pples stays in the liquid as much as possible. And then when we're doing our distillation, apples have a tendency to have that flavor come off the still first. If you're doing something like berries, that flavor tends to come off l ow closer to the t ails. But with apples it's definitely on the forefront. So, we need to be careful to capture a little bit more heads than we'd normally be used to, that causes some other problems, and I'll get into that here in a little bit. And, so creating as much apple flavors possible. These are also ones that are fermented much colder. We use champagne yeast that Lalvin EC-1118 i s certainly the traditional yeast for this that don't impart a lot of flavor themselves. And we really do a lot to baby the yeast, s o that they don't have an opportunity to get crazy and really participate in the flavors. On the other hand, if we're trying to make a darker brandy. One of the first things we're going to do is look for all the different ways we can bring flavor to the party. First of all, one of the things t hat people can do is actually ferment and distill on the pulp and the skins, most importantly. That'll increase our tannin levels. That'll do a lot to crank up t he "A ppleyness". Unfortunately, it can also increase the methanol, which is just g oing t o be a running problem throughout all of this. We also have a tendency, particularly in say a Calvados style to have a lot of oak flavor. I really dig that. I know there's a trend right now to decrease the oak flavor and let that apple play a little farther forward in our barrel maturations, but historically that's how the Calvados was made. The last major category of apple stock as people making schnapps. For schnapps, you can follow the same fermentation plan and path as you would for an Eau De Vie. One of the main differences I like to do here is, if you save a little bit of your wash and add that back in, it can help boost your apple flavor a little bit without necessarily adding in the sugar flavor. Another way to do it is to take apple juice and use that as your liquidator schnapps on that w ay you're adding sugar and apple flavor. Typically, apples are fairly high on the sugar end. We're looking somewhere about 8%_12% sugar. Obviously, this is not straight sugar or anything like that, but we're getting a fair bit of sugar in that liquid. Now on the other hand, if you can pair down and focus particularly on cider apples. In generally speaking, apples break down into table apples, juiced apples, and then cider apples. Cider apples tend to have more acidity and more tannin than what you're going to get from your juice apples. And then table apples have tendency to have more starch that they hold up better in transportation, and when they're sitting in that pretty bowl. I like cider apples both from the historical perspective. This is what was used back in the day. But I also like them because of that higher acidity and higher tannin level, I think it makes a more complex spirit. That being said , most cider orchards in the U.S were cut down during prohibition, so it's very difficult to get cider apples in particularly the large amount of apples and juice that we need to make brandy here. And so I'm going to talk about cider apples, which you can use these same characteristics to look at the table apples and the juice that you have available in your area and to try to pick out something that's closer to the cider end of the spectrum. Generally speaking, there are four types of cider apples and what they do is, they break them down along two axes. There's the sharp axes and the bitter axes. And so sharp and sweet are on opposite ends and then it's bitter or not bitter. Sharp refers to apples that are more than 0.45% acid. And then bitter refers to apples that have more than 0.2% tannins . Historically, the bitter sharp apple is the most popular type of cider apple. Either that or they'll use a blend. They'll use some straight sharp and some straight sweet with some bitter sharp and try to create a profile that they desire that has a mix. You can see a wide range on these numbers. Acid for apples runs from about 0.1%_1%, and then tannins are all over the map from never zero cause that peel has a bunch of tannins. But generally speaking, if you're using say crab apples that have a lot of tannins in there. You can kit up over 1% tannins . So those are the different categories. Inside these ranges, what generally you're looking for is more acidity and more tannin. The tannin helps provide body in the cider or the wine portion, but it also provides a lot of the flavor complexity. And it's one of the things we're extracting from the oak . And you can actually pull those tannins and their flavor components all the way through your still. The acid is mainly for two reasons. One, there's a ton of wild yeast that live on apples. So, the process of removing all of the yeast is very difficult. One of the ways we control our apple fermentations is we drop the Ph really low. We've been talking about beer, the last couple episodes, and we're talking about a 5 Ph or maybe a 4.8. Typically, with the apples, we're looking something closer to like three to four is where we want that Ph. You want it really acidic and it just helps bring out some of those Appley flavors for your yeast. So basically, high tannin, high acid is really where you want to live. And then you want apples that just smell like apples. The most apple aromas you can get your hands on, and then of course high sugar, cause that's what we're looking for. Once you have those apples, they're only gonna be available for a short period of time. Particularly with that really strong smell and high sugar. The rest of the year, if you don't have the ability to make a year's worth of product in say that month that that is available, apple juice concentrate is certainly the way to go. Apple juice concentrate is a bulk commodity. You can track it on the stock exchange. It's typically 70 degree brix. Basically, it has all the apple flavor and sugar you could ever want in place. The downside is they've stripped almost all the nitrogen out of it. But you can take this concentrate, dilute it back with water to the sugar range you'd like, and you can actually make very acceptable ciders and brandies from it. And for the places that are making, say , cider year round , the big houses, this is how they're doing it. There is some degradation in flavor, but mostly you'll just find it's different than what you're getting with the fresh apples. Pressing apples sucks . It's a lot of work. And if you've done it, you realize how little juice goes into a really large volume of apples. So for most craft distilleries, the correct answer is to find somebody else to do the crappy job for you, which means you're going to go out to the apple orchards and you're going to find somebody who will sell you juice. That's great. The downside is without having those peels and the pulp in there just a little bit longer, you are losing out on some of the tannins. You're losing, luckily, out on some of the pectin. If you can talk that orchard descending along some of the solids with you, sometimes that'll help out a lot. That being said, if you want to do it all in house, let's say you've managed to live my dream and you have your apple orchard and you've set up a big press, what should you expect? So cider apples are actually designed to be easier to press than table apples or juice apples. The main reason for this is that their starch breaks down to sugar without losing the shape of the apple. So typically, you'll harvest your apples and then you'll let them sit for about two weeks just in bins, sitting around outside. The old tests used to be that you'd pick an apple up and see if you could make a thumbprint in it by squeezing. Once it was soft enough you could leave that thumbprint, then that apple was ready for pressing. From there, you need to break the apples down. So step one is to mill them. If you have hammermills and stuff in place, you can certainly use that. Just give them a real thorough cleaning before you do anything else with that. Traditionally Roller Mills are actually what was used. It was able to break the apples down into a fairly large chunks without any damage being done to their seeds. Nowadays, they actually use something called a greater mill. Basically, is is a block that pushes an apple along, which looks like a cheese grater. And so this is able to just cut chunks off of it as it goes. This is a really nice process that you can have two of them in one bin fills while the next been grates and it works very well in a continuous system, and you can get very small chunks and again, without dealing with some of the damage either to the seeds or the stems both which will cause bad flavors, but you want the opposite of the pulp because that's where most of it is, and then the skin as well. From there, what we're going to do is, we're going to take this pulp we've created and we're going to put it in some kind of press. There's several different types out there. The historic being basically the cheese cloth bags that are filled with pulp, and then multiple bags will be put into a bin with slats on there to help them hold their shape., but still the juice escape. And then oppress comes down on the top and juice runs out the sides. Occasionally, the press is lifted up. The bags are basically fluffed to ensure that you're getting a good mix and that no parts are being bypassed by the press, and then squeezed a second time. You're going to get about 75% of the juice out doing this. The other methods are much more industrial. They're much more expensive and you can get up to 90%_95% juice extraction with some of them. But just know if you're going to be doing a conventional juice press in house, you're going to get about 75% of your juice. You could have a great way to deal with this though is then to take that pulp you've extracted and put it in some warm water a hundred degrees or so. From here, you can actually continue to extract sugar , and just do basically water changes. Now, you don't want to do too many water changes cause you want to keep that sugar as concentrated as possible. This is basically equivalent to a lottery system , that we'd do for beer. And you can treat those liquids the same way either by using them as an input to a process that will then get more sugar in there or just knowing, hey, I'm going to have a little bit lower sugar percentage in here, but I'm going to extract all the sugar that I possibly could have. Like I said earlier , Calvados is mainly done with juice and just juice. This is probably the easiest way for most of us to do it. But if you're looking to get a little bit more sugar out of your fruit, if you're looking to get a little bit more flavor out of your fruit, fermenting and distilling on it is certainly a great way to go. The problem with doing that is, you're also going to bring along all that pectin. And pectin breaks down to form methanol. There's really no way around it. If you have pectin present , you will end up with methanol. So that either means, we have to do more work on our heads or it means that we just have to deal with having a spirit that has that burning nastiness of methanol in it. I'm not willing to deal with the methanol in my final spirit. I think that's terrible from a craft perspective. There is another option though. So what you can do is, most people have heard about it, particularly if you're home distillers is, peptic enzyme. Actually, what we're talking about is Pectin methylesterase. This is an enzyme that will actually break down the pectin without it turning into methanol. So what you can do is take your fresh squeezed juice or actually the apples themselves and add this PME, make sure it's cold. We want to do this process somewhere in the neighborhood of 40_50 degrees. The colder, the better. If you get over 50, the wild yeast are going to start fermenting your juice, we don't want that and much colder in the enzyme doesn't work. So really 40_50 but stay on the low end of it. And hold it there for about two days, that'll give the enzyme time to break down all of your pectin. The more you break down, the less methanol you'll create, the less hedged you'll have to deal with. Really, this is an important step. Now, I'm going to go on to talk about how slow fermentation is. We've already talked about how many apples you need. Something to keep in mind with brandy, and one of the reasons that it's so expensive to buy and produce is that, this takes much longer than pretty much everything else. None of the steps are hard. I mean, putting juice into a fermentor and holding it cold while enzyme works for two days isn't effort, but it's certainly time that you could be using that fermentor to do other things with. As with all things, there's the right way and the cheap way and the right ways, not cheap. So next thing we're going to do is, we're going to take that, we're going to warm it up just slightly. We don't want a lot of temperature when we're fermenting apples. Really high temperature start putting out a lot of sulfates and doing really bad things to our spirit. Apples are certainly fermented colder than what you're going to b e fermenting anything else. We're typically looking somewhere in the 59_77 degrees. And then for the clear spirits, Eau Di Vie's and w hat n ot, you're going to be on the colder end of that spectrum and really hovering right around 60 degrees. The next thing is, a pples don't have as much nitrogen as what you would get from beer or molasses or even grapes. So you w ere going to need to do supplemental nitrogen. Typically, we're looking at about 250 parts per million, with sand ammonium phosphate, that will give you the additional nitrogen you need to really make your yeast happy and push this thing through. But we're still looking about a week for fermentation and keeping those temperatures down in that range. Obviously the lower you do it, the longer that ferment is going to go. I've heard of some places that take over a month to do their fermentation. Now, if you start talking about European style , ciders and brandies , there's a strong trend towards wild yeast. Obviously, while the yeast is going to give us even slower fermentations. I'm not a fan. In this case, I want a little bit more control and I want to bring my flavor to the party a little bit different. When we're talking about yeast with apples, the most common is a UVA from either a CM or BC and then the EC-1118. I think, the champagne yeast is the most common in the industry. A whole lot of people using the UVA firms. The UVA firms are going to give you a little bit of a faster fermentation, they kick off a little faster. While the champagne yeast is going to carry you farther and deal with more crazy conditions. Just depends where you're looking at. When we get done with these fermentations, our Ph is going to still be low, like I said, three to four, but unfortunately alcohol is going to be low too. We're looking at 6%_8%. If you can get 8% alcohol in your f erments, y ou got some really good apples. I've heard rumors of people getting 10% but either they're doing something to increase their sugar content. I don't know how, maybe they just bought the best apples ever. Getting that much sugar in there is difficult and so you are going to tend to have these ferments be on the lower side of percent alcohol. So that's the basics. That's all you really have to do is just slow and cold and you can move it through. Something to keep in mind with preserving apple flavor is, apple flavor is very volatile. Generally what that means is, it's going to evaporate off first and so that means you're going to get it wanting to come off in your fermenter . You're going to want to get, have it come off in your choose. You need to try to keep your juice and fermentor everything sealed. I really don't like open fermentations for apple brandy. Oxidation is a concern with the juice in particular. So we need to try to keep it sealed up as much as possible and get that CO2 to have a nice head on there. When we're moving from the fermentor into the still, we need to move it quickly. Sometimes, particularly if you're really trying to preserve a high amount of apple flavor, you'll actually cut your fermentation short. So even if you hit the potential for 8% alcohol, you would intentionally cut it down to 6%, so that you could get more apple preserved in your fermentor. As soon as you're done with fermentation, or like I said, even before, we need to move it over to the still. A apple brandy isn't something that's happy sitting in the fermenter . You'll start getting some of those Malolactic fermentations going on, and you will lose apple flavor. So, I'm getting it moved through those first two stages very quickly as important. Honestly, even with your low wines , we want to keep them away from oxygen and we want to move them through this process as quickly as we can, so we can get as much flavor either into the bottle or into the barrel. With apple flavor being volatile, it wants to come off starting in your heads. Probably the most difficult decision that anyone's going to make distilling apple brandy is where it is my head's cut. Do I want to leave a little bit extra methanol but get a little extra apple kick? Or, am I going to remove all the ethanol and remove a lot of my apple? That's tough decision. I've always leaned towards letting the apple go and having less methanol, at least it's less burny that way. The other option is to, if you are barreling it, have a little more methanol in there, get it in the barrel and let it sit longer in the barrel. And let some of that methanol vaporize off as part of your angel share. That is a really long winded talk about apple brandy, but it's what I like, so I have a tendency to get a little bit more excited about it.
Colleen MooreAre you interested in filing a report with us? Well, we're actively seeking professionals to give us the lowdown on the technical aspects of distillery operations for our listeners. Contact us via our website with your pitch. Do you have feedback on this show? Well, send us an email to (distillingcraft@dalkita.com). Of course, if you want to find out more about this specific episode, go to our show notes on our webpage, that's: dalikta.com/shownotes. Remember, you can subscribe to this podcast at Apple podcasts, or however you get your podcast. Our theme music was composed by Jason Shaw, and is used under a Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license. And finally, a special thanks to the Dalkira team behind this production, and the man that puts it all together, our sound editor Daniel Phillips of Zero Crossing Productions. Until next time, stay safe out there- I'm Colleen Moore.
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