Our cidery was featured on the front page of the Baker City Herald recently! This came out after our state liquor license was endorsed by the Baker City Council. We now have both state and federal licenses in place, and production will be starting towards the end of the month (late May, that is).

A new 10-barrel (310 gallon) brite tank was purchased and picked up from Practical Fusion in Portland on Thursday (13 December 2018). We loaded it into the bed of my pickup and I drove it back to Baker City. Fortunately, there was little to no snow on the roads, so the drive was uneventful (although I-84 ended up closing the next day due to high winds and poor visibility: crisis avoided!). Hauling a large, top-heavy tank was a bit nerve-wracking, so I was happy to not have any added obstacles.

This is probably the biggest equipment purchase for starting up the cidery. A brite tank is basically a large pressurized vessel for adding CO₂ to the finished cider prior to packaging (e.g., bottling or kegging). A couple of instructional documents on how they are operated are here and here. I previously had a smaller brite tank (1 bbl) that was used in my basement for R&D, so this one is a nice step up.

R&D 1-barrel brite tank

Securing the brite tank to a pallet

Loading the tank

At Multnomah Falls

I picked up a Pall 16″ × 4 lenticular filter housing in October 2018 for cider filtration. This is a nice addition for rough filtration—as opposed to aging and settling—prior to packaging the cider. Dry ciders likely won’t get additional treatment beyond this—as in sterile filtration or pasteurization—but off-dry or sweeter ciders will be pasteurized for shelf stability.