Author Archives: Ray

Sweeter grapes do not make sweeter wine. They make stronger wine. All of that sugar turns into alcohol, so how sweet the fruit tastes in your hand is really a number telling you how hot the finished bottle is going to be. That is why the first thing we do when fruit arrives is measure it — sugar and acid, before anything else touches it. Those two numbers decide most of what a wine is going to be.

This year’s crush was extra sticky. Hands, hoses, the floor, everything stayed tacky all day. The numbers said the same thing: one lot came in at 28 Brix, which is the measure of sugar in the juice, and left alone it would ferment out somewhere past sixteen percent alcohol. The acid side matched it — pH above four, and acid is what keeps a red from tasting soft and dull. None of that is bad fruit or a careless grower. It is what a hotter season does: sugar climbs fast in heat and acid burns off while it climbs, so the numbers outrun the flavor.

So we correct it, in the cellar, before fermentation ever starts: water back to bring the sugar down, tartaric acid to bring the pH back up. That is not a shortcut and it is not unusual — it is the standard correction for a warm vintage, and most serious California reds you drink have had some version of it. What we aim at is the wine we want in two years, not the numbers the weather handed us. Measure, move it a little, measure again. It is the difference between a 2026 red that tastes balanced and one that tastes like the weather ran away with it.

Most of the hopped ciders you will find are built dry — closer to a West Coast IPA, where the bitterness is the whole point. That is a fine thing to make, it just isn’t what I was after. I wanted the other end of it, the soft hazy New England kind, because I think it’s the more fun drink. The trouble is that a hazy IPA gets its body from grain — oats, wheat, sometimes lactose — and cider has none of that to work with. If the hop character was going to come forward instead of the bite, it needed a sweet backbone from somewhere else.

The answer was marshmallow. The sweetness and the body are the obvious half of it. The gelatin is the half worth knowing about, because gelatin is a fining agent some cidermakers dose on purpose — it is listed for exactly two jobs: reducing astringency and bitterness, and unmasking positive aromas. That is the whole problem with hops in cider, and it is sitting in a bag of marshmallows.

We have tried making it without the gelatin. Vegan marshmallows, Fluff — both have gone through the series, and neither one gives you the pillowy thing the real ones do.

Pillow Hopped isn’t one cider, it’s a series. The marshmallow stays where it is and the hop is the part I keep changing, which is the whole reason I built it this way to begin with — once you’ve got a soft backbone that isn’t fighting the hop, whatever hop you put in there has nowhere to hide. So we swap it. Same base, same idea, and a genuinely different drink on the other side of it, which is a lot more interesting to me than making one recipe forever.

Right now it’s Mosaic, and it’s doing exactly what I hoped the base would let a hop do. Juicy grapefruit and fresh pine mingle with soft, creamy marshmallow and a smooth touch of vanilla. The next one won’t taste like that, and that’s sort of the fun of it. Check our menu to see which hop we’re currently pouring.

Amburana is not subtle.

Amburana cearensis is a South American hardwood with a long history in Brazilian cachaça, where native woods became part of the aging tradition alongside oak. Of those woods, amburana is one of the most distinctive.

A big part of that comes down to chemistry.

Amburana is rich in coumarin, an aromatic compound also associated with tonka bean and freshly cut hay. In wine, cider or spirits, it can push intense notes of cinnamon, baking spice, vanilla, caramel and sweet wood.

And it moves fast.

Amburana can give up a lot of aroma and flavor in a relatively short amount of time, especially when there is a high ratio of wood to liquid. That makes it interesting to work with, but it also makes restraint important. A little can add another layer. Too much, or too long, and it can take over the entire drink.

That is part of what makes it so different from the French oak we normally work with. It is not a replacement for oak, and we are not trying to make it behave like oak. It is its own material, with its own history, chemistry and very recognizable character.

And once you taste what it can do, it is hard not to start thinking about where else it might work. In a red wine, especially something with ripe dark fruit and enough structure to stand up to it, those cinnamon, vanilla and baking-spice notes could be fascinating — not as the dominant flavor, but as a small layer behind the fruit. Something like Syrah, Grenache or Zinfandel immediately comes to mind.

We decided to see what it could do.

The result is Umburana Gold, on tap now. What should we try it with next — maybe a red wine? Syrah? Grenache? Zinfandel?

Critical density is a figure from cosmology. It’s the exact amount of matter the universe needs to hold its shape — a little more and gravity closes it up, a little less and it comes apart. Everything rests on one number.

Cut an apple open and it’s not just juice — there’s pulp, there’s skin. All of it is the apple. So how much of the apple matters?

Cider gets talked about on one axis: dry to sweet. Nobody eats that way — there’s salt, there’s fat, there’s umami. If a cider’s sweet, the sugar does the work for you. Go dry and there’s nothing to hide behind, so the interest has to come from somewhere else.

Our theory: the apple is holding more than a press can take, and what it’s holding is exactly what a dry cider needs.

A red wine and a white wine can come from the same grape; the difference is that red is fermented on the skins and white is pressed off them first. Colour, grip, tannin — all of it comes out of the skins during fermentation. A good dry red isn’t carried by sugar. It’s carried by what the skins gave it.

With Critical Density we crush the whole apple, then ferment all of it. The skins break down as it ferments and hand over everything they’re holding — colour, tannin, aroma, character. It’s the most an apple will physically give.

Golden Russet is where it got interesting. It drinks like a dessert apple, and the books put it low in tannin. But it has a thick, heavy skin, and my bet was that the tannin was in there — sitting somewhere a press was never going to reach.

It was. There’s real tannin and real structure in this cider now — and the books aren’t wrong, they’re just describing the juice. That whole system measures what an apple gives up when you squeeze it, and says nothing about what’s still in there if you go and get it.

Tannin isn’t a property of the apple. It’s a property of the method. Doing it this way takes more time and more work than pressing the juice and fermenting that — but it’s the difference between reaching critical density and leaving most of the apple in the compost pile. We think that’s worth investing in.