Damon here for your monthly Rebel Seed update from the production building. Action is picking up around here and I have great news to share.  In case you haven’t heard, we can now be found in Costco up in Christiana, Delaware. I’m very pumped to see our cider in various places but this one is big. That’s a wholesale warehouse! On the flipside, it kinda makes Jason and I have to work even harder and faster on churning out more quality product. In the short time of this relationship, they’ve hit us hard with product demands, which have forced us to create more batches for the upcoming months. Faster than what we originally intended to. But to me, its all for the good of the brand.

With that being said, lets get into recent happenings. If you haven’t had a chance to try or didn’t know, we unveiled a new and improved sweet red cider. While on a journey to create a master recipe you hit speed bumps, off ramps and delays. Well this was a pleasant change of course.

“HEY CIDER GOD! What’d you guys do?”

Well I just can’t give away all the secrets to the art. What I can tell you is that we worked very hard trying to improve color and taste to create a more pronounced flavor and overall better looking and tasting product. Make sure to stop in and give it a try in the tasting room. Ask for the Cider God special. (I don’t know what that is yet, but maybe by the time you read this I’ll have something in the works)

A couple weeks ago we started inoculation on a new batch of cider. Inoculation is basically introducing something to another organism. So with that being said, we added four different yeast strains to four different tanks of apple juice. We chose 4 different yeast strains just for a mental note to save for later to see how well the fermentation goes for each. All have been fine, you just want to mix it up a little. If you’re real specific and really know what you want, there’s more than likely a specific yeast strain for what you are looking to achieve post fermentation. Three of the tanks are designated for cider. The last is secret and will be announced at a later date.

After you innoculate, you want to keep an eye on them everyday to see how they are doing. First and foremost you want to do a simple smell check to make sure everything is cooking fine. Then you want to get the your tools. A thermometer to check temp. A good temperature for fermenting cider is about 67-75 degrees Fahrenheit. Then you want to check brix. Brix is the sugar content in a liquid essentially. The way we test it is with a hydrometer. The basic rule is as the temperature rises then plateaus around that optimal range, brix should fall as the yeast needs sugars to feast on so to determine you have a finished fermentation, your temps should fall and brix should fall all the way to -2. Fast-forward to today and all of our tanks have finished fermenting. As a matter of fact, I ran my last test this morning. It has taken about 14-15 days.

That’s currently where we stand in the production process. This upcoming week, we may be kegging and bottling some cider already ready to rock as well as starting the clarification process on our new batch. I think that about covers everything. If you have any questions, concerns or just wanna voice your opinion you can message me through the Rebel Seed Instagram page.

  -Cider God out.