452: Kanin Routson on Apple Cider.
Making more than just fruit juice from a popular fruit.
Kanin has devoted his life, including two graduate degrees, to exploring and promoting apple tree diversity. His latest work has been co-founding Stoic Cider, a local hard cider company based out of Prescott, Arizona. Through the RAD Project (Restoring Apple Diversity), Stoic Cider works to find, propagate, and promote unique apple varieties and to celebrate this diversity through hard apple cider.
Stoic Cider is growing and preserving local heritage apples, wild apples, and European and American cider varieties in several orchards on the family farm. They utilize white wine making techniques to create premium, dry, fruit-forward ciders.
In This Podcast:
Our apple expert Kanin Routson joins us again to help us understand the process of making delicious apple cider using white wine making techniques. He explains the difference between juice, cider, and hard cider, and how the new modern ciders vary from the heritage ciders. And we learn more about his dedication to apple tree diversity with the RAD project.
Listen in and learn about:
- An update on getting through the licensing and paperwork to start their cider project
- The difference between juice and cider, and the third version – hard cider an alcoholic beverage
- Heritage ciders and the modern apple ciders
- Dan Bussey – author of An Illustrated History of Apples in The United States and Canada
- Why apples are so connected to cider
- The elements in cider that give it the most desirable flavors
- A general process to make cider and what happens in the process
- What goes into the cider
- Why they use white wine yeast and what the results are like
- Some of the equipment they use to help produce the larger quantities of cider
- Why cider needs to sit for a while before it tastes good
- The difference between apple cider or apple wine
- Flavor profiles and how this affects the ciders
- The family farm near Prescott Arizona
- The challenges they’ve run into on the farm and orchard and what their goals are
- RAD – Restoring Apple Diversity Project
- How to find or order Stoic Cider
As well as:
- His new advice – Nurture pollinators! Orchard mason bees pollinate 16,000 times better than honeybees, and they need holes to make their homes. Create the habitat for what you want.
Our other releases with Kanin:
previous podcast interview – 199: Kanin Routson on Apple Tree Diversity
Article on making Cider – Making Cider the Stoic Way
How to reach Kanin:
Website: StoicCider.com
Email: cider@stoiccider.com
Instagram: @StoicCider
Stoic Cider can be found in most Whole Foods Markets across Arizona
UrbanFarm.org/stoiccider
Special thanks to our sponsors:
gemplers.com/urbanfarm
(use code URBANFARM01)
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