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Cider Digest #1148
Subject: Cider Digest #1148, 10 July 2004
From: cider-request@talisman.com
Cider Digest #1148 10 July 2004
Forum for Discussion of Cider Issues
Dick Dunn, Digest Janitor
Contents:
Crown finish glass ("McGonegal, Charles")
Re: Cider Digest #1147, 6 July 2004 ("Terry Maloney")
on *which* shelf?? (Dick Dunn)
on the shelf? ("John Howard")
Re: Cider Digest #1147, 6 July 2004 (Bill Rhyne)
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Subject: Crown finish glass
From: "McGonegal, Charles" <Charles.McGonegal@uop.com>
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 07:49:05 -0500
As Dick Dunn notes, champagne bottles are heavy, but readily available.
The design of the top is called the 'finish' - and is usually specified as
cork, crown or screw - and I think there might be more than one style of
screw top. 'Crown' is actually a company - I have a box of overruns from
the crown cap corp. Overruns are great for the tirage step - since they get
thrown away at the end.
Crown finishes come in two main sizes - as discussed. 'American' - also
used by the beer and soda industries - is 26mm. I believe that's the outer
diameter of the rounded lip. 'French' is 29mm.
Supplies can be hard to find for various combinations. 29mm caps, and a
29mm bell for your crown capper can be tough to locate - but a certain
amateur/small commercial supply shop in North East, Pennsylvania carries
them. Finding a 29mm bell is a little harder, but a google troll of
homebrewing stores shows that they can be had - or at least ordered. The
nicer Ferrari/Agata bench capper has easily replacable bells - they simply
thread on and off.
In the US, small champagne producers seem to be converging on 29mm - so some
26mm supplies are getting hard to find. (An observation also noted by a
Canadian equipment importer I've contacted.) For example - try locating a
decent supply of 375mL champagne splits. They don't appear to be made on
the continent anymore. They can be imported by the pallet - but they come
29mm crown - and bulk. That means without cases - just shrinkwrapped to the
pallet. Not the easiest thing for a small producer to handle. What's just
as frustrating is locating corks for 26mm. The ID of the American glass is
a touch smaller than the French, and stuffing a 31mm (diameter) champagne
cork into 26mm glass makes it unreasonably tight. I use 28mm champagne
corks - which are plenty tight in 26mm glass. But my main supplier - the
aforementioned place in PA - has recently run into problems. They have been
selling the 28mm size for twenty-some years. Last year _their_ supplier
told them that those would now be a special order, and not gauranteed by the
producer. Somebody must have retired at the second-tier distributor - for
they had no idea that they had been carrying the 28mm corks for decades -
they thought it was a new special order.
By comparison, a table wine cork is what, 18mm? The opening in the bottle
is about the same size - that gives you an idea of the compression a
champagne cork gets.
Lastly - be careful with the equipment. Manual champagne corkers are
available from several winery supply houses. They tend to come with guide
collars for 29mm glass - so 26mm bottles aren't reliably centered under the
cork.
I've tried plastic champagne corks in my basement-made cider - but I think
they let too much O2 through.
DD notes that champagne glass is heavy. The readily available styles are
usually about 25oz empty, up to 32oz empty.
If you try to re-use commercial champagne bottles, you have to be very
observant. A number of the cheaper brands - especially those that use bulk
sparkling process - use glass made to look like a crown finish - but it's
not. It has the flared skirt to catch the wirehood - but the rounded top
edge is not the right shape, nor made to tolerance. Since it's bulk
process, the bottles never saw a tirage step - or a cap.
I see a crown failure fate in tirage of about 1/2000. I think problems
usually arise due to sloppy capping. But you try doing 3000 bottles in a
day by hand. You'd get sloppy, too! A more experience champagne producer I
know says that his failure rate in tirage is about 1/5000. Usually the cap
leaks. Less often the neck has broken. Even more rare is for the cap to
come off entirely.
Charles McGonegal
AEppelTreow Winery
------------------------------
Subject: Re: Cider Digest #1147, 6 July 2004
From: "Terry Maloney" <terry@westcountycider.com>
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 11:32:17 -0400
> Subject: Bottles and capping of cider
> From: Benjamin Watson <bwatson@worldpath.net>
> Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 06:16:25 -0400
>
...........>
> On a related note, I notice some cider producers, like Terry and Judith
> Maloney at West County Winery have switched from crown caps to
> "mushroom corks" and wire cages. I suppose this is a marketing issue,
> to make the product look "classier", like an imported French cider.
>
> Ben Watson
> Francestown, NH
>
We have found a definite marketing advantage to a cork and hood finish. Its
also expensive- decent manual equipment doesn't seem to have been
manufactured for decades and it means another person on the bottling line,
at least at our scale. We had been using crown caps on a sparkling bottle,
but they tended to get shabby looking with time, and our varietal ciders
(with tannins) age well, and occasionally require aging. The cork and hood
does better.
Terry Maloney
West County Cider
Colrain, Massachusetts
www.westcountycider.com
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Subject: on *which* shelf??
From: rcd@talisman.com (Dick Dunn)
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 11:58:19 -0600 (MDT)
FYA and apropos thinking about where the cider ends up in the store...
the weekly sale flyer from a nearby large store (certainly in the ten
largest in our state) has about 20 categories--e.g., domestic beer,
imported beer, micros, several for wines, a dozen for spirits. Guess
where cider ends up.
The (single) category that includes cider is
Mead, Ciders, Coolers, Malternatives & Non-Alcohol
(!)
If, as the saying goes, "you're known by the company you keep"...well...
OUCH!
Dick
------------------------------
Subject: on the shelf?
From: "John Howard" <jhoward@beckerfrondorf.com>
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 14:58:15 -0400
Here is a heretical argument for putting the artisanal next to the
industrial. As select representatives of the few truly enlightened drinkers
of the world, we here on the cider-digest enjoy our disdain of industrial
cider. But, we should curb our snobbery and heed the maxim, "there is no
such thing as bad publicity." With our modest resources, we should be riding
the coattails of the marketing machine behind the big industrial ciders.
Could it be that industrial cider is just a stepping stone to the enjoyment
of the real thing? As a teenager, my first bottle of wine was something much
less than the Spanish temporarily I now prefer. (Come to think of it, it was
boones farm apple wine, concealed in a canteen and enjoyed on a boy scout
camping trip, for which i was summarily ejected from that august
institution. Not the first or last time I have honorably served as a warning
to others.)
Us human animals learn incrementally by progressive associations. If someone
likes the taste of mike's hard lemonade, then they are halfway there to
liking woodchuck, and if they like woodchuck, they are halfway to liking
real cider. We should be encouraging industrial cider consumers to advance
their tastes. Put the good stuff next to the woodchuck and let the packaging
and price point speak for itself. Most of the blurbs on the back label of
artisanal ciders do a fine job of explaining the difference. We just need to
get them to pick it up, read it, and take it home, once. I have enough faith
in the product, and the rabble I suppose, to feel that many will be back for
more. Looking down our noses at the fledgling cider drinker strikes me as
cutting them (our noses) off to spite our faces.
BTW - One way to get your own shelf is to provide it. On my way home from
Ciderday last year I noticed that West County Winery had a special display
rack for their cider at the Table & Vine store in Northampton MA (a
particularly good wine merchant). Not knowing where to put it, someone had
located the display over in the gourmet food section. I decided to test the
cider knowledge of the fresh faced young sales assistants in the wine
section. After directing me to the woodchuck, followed by further
explanations on my part, they acknowledged they had it somewhere, but had to
go ask the manager to show them where it was.
John Howard
Philadelphia PA USA
------------------------------
Subject: Re: Cider Digest #1147, 6 July 2004
From: Bill Rhyne <theo9us@yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 14:16:31 -0700 (PDT)
Re:Crown caps on Champagne bottles
Rhyne Cyder has used crown caps on champagne bottles
since 1995 since we do in the bottle fermentation and
in the bottle pasteurization. The bottles were
purchased from Encore Bottling in Richmond, Ca where
they are recycled bottles but we have use new glass
from California Glass and rejects from Roederer Winery
up in Mendocino. The bottle caps were from the Oak
Barrel supply store in Berkeley, CA and we got some
reject caps from Sonoma Mountain Brewery before they
closed down.
>From our experience, the caps work well for us as they
cheaper, easy to apply, no risk of cork taint, and
easy for customers to remove.
Green champagne class has several properties that
serve our purposes. The green color helps to protect
liquids inside from exposure to light and the
thickness of the glass helps to prevent breakage as
the product inside is under pressure. When we
pasteurize in the hot water bath, the pressure inside
the bottle is extreme so we occasionally have one or
two bottles explode in the bath. The caps don't come
off so if there is a fault with the bottle, it
explodes. We feel confident that if a bottle of our
cider can survive that pressure, it can survive abuse
during shipping or storage. So far, that is our
experience. Also as previous mentioned, the punt on
the bottom of the bottle helps to collect the small
amount of yeast sediment as our cider is not fine
filtered.
Before you buy a quantity of glass or caps, take a cap
and put it on the bottle to make sure that they fit
correctly and securely. Don't assume anything.
Good luck!
Bill Rhyne
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End of Cider Digest #1148
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