Christine Walter—a fifth-generation farmer living on land that her family first homesteaded in 1895—grew up there pressing juice and selling fruit. A decade ago, she realized the family was missing an opportunity to ferment even a small percentage of the 40,000 or so gallons of apple juice they were pressing. She took it upon herself to read up on cidermaking and start fermenting small batches on her own.
She had the fruit. She had the press. “I had nothing to lose,” she says.
In 2016, Walter invested $5,000 and started perfecting her recipes, selling at the farm store and soon moving into self-distribution. In 2023, Bauman’s produced 140,000 gallons. After growing their business 50 percent every year over the past eight years, they opened their first taproom in the former Ecliptic Brewing space in Portland, Oregon, in April. That taproom will let them expand their output while keeping small-batch production on the farm.
Bauman’s ciders fall into four different categories: year-round, harvest series, seasonal, and limited release. Walter estimates their harvest-driven ciders make up about 13 percent of their overall volume, with most of their ciders falling under more modern styles. Even so, Bauman’s has become one of the most respected producers of harvest-driven ciders in the United States. “Modern ciders pay your bills, so that you can afford to make the harvest-driven ciders that bring you so much joy,” she says.
Here’s how she does it.
Photo: Courtesy Bauman’s Cider
Harvesting with Intention
“Unless there is impending disastrous weather conditions, [when] we’re trying to get it off the trees in time to avoid something, then we are waiting until full starch conversion in the field. We’re measuring, we’re waiting for the right Brix, then we pick.
“If it’s a high-tannin apple, you sweat it, which means you’re letting it sit in the bins for a few days to weeks to get ideal pectin balance in the juice. Nothing that doesn’t have tannins gets sweated on purpose. We press it, and—partly driven by market forces and partly because I love to tell the story of a specific apple—I tend to always pick for single-varietal production. If I’m picking Golden Russet, I’m going to make a Golden Russet single-varietal unless I cannot—[if] we don’t have the yield, we don’t have the volume to fill a tank. Or, once it starts fermenting, if we’re not loving the way it’s going, we’ll intervene and blend because some apples inherently have too high of a pH for fermenting on their own safely.
“But most of the time, when we’re picking apples, we go into it intending to do single-varietals. If we get the single-varietal and it’s finished cider, and then we taste it and we’re like, ‘Oh, it’s missing something,’ sometimes we can just stick it in barrels, or we can let it age for a minute. We’ve got an amphora we can stick it in, or we blend it with something else. So, that’s kind of our mindset, to always go for the single-varietal. Because people love to buy single-varietals, even though it is a lot harder to make a fully balanced, well-rounded cider from a single-varietal than it is to do a blend. But it’s always my goal.”
Releasing Harvest-Driven Ciders Year-Round
“We want to sit on a lot of [harvest-driven ciders] for a while, to age the tannins and let them find themselves. If we do end up doing a blend rather than a single-varietal, we want to give it time to amalgamate the flavors so that it tastes like it belongs together. It’s no problem to release it throughout the year—it’s better. There’s no way you would want to release all harvest-driven ciders in January, when they finish. Some of them want to sit around for a while. Some of them sit around for two or three years.”
Fermentation
“Ideally, we’re fermenting everything in stainless. That’s part of the reason we freeze some of our juice—even the harvest juices or high-tannin juices—because when we’re fermenting in stainless, we’ve got temperature control. It’s just such a more reliable ferment, and there’s no sense taking chances on a greater likelihood of malolactic fermentation and other crazy things happening.
“We do a lot of our co-ferments in macro bins. If we’ve got whole fruit—cherries or gooseberries or grapes, whatever—we’re punching down in macro bins for at least the first half of fermentation. But typically, we’re doing that at the time of the year when it’s warm enough. It’s hard to catch them when they’re fermented and finished within a week. We have fermented in the amphora, but I’m a bigger fan of aging in the amphora just because it does such a crazy thing to the pH. The calcium and other minerals in the clay tend to shift the pH of the must upwards; until I have a little more experience with how this affects fermentation chemistry and kinetics, I prefer the amphora for post-fermentation time.”
Photo: Courtesy Bauman’s Cider
Building a Harvest-Driven Cider
“We know what’s given us good stuff in years past. We take into consideration the way the apples are looking, the way the weather has been, the Brix as we’re picking them, and we make a decision right then: Are we going to pitch a yeast, or are we going to go spontaneous? Do we want the yeast to struggle, or do we want to give them nutrition? The decision tree of a normal fermentation is complicated.
“Then you get it started fermenting. You’re tasting it every day, or every other day, just to make sure that it’s got what it needs—that it’s in a healthy spot that’s not going too fast. If you go too fast on a high-aroma apple, you’re blowing off aromatics. So, we’ll slow it down either with a partial filtration or we’ll rack it off the gross lees to reduce the big yeast load in there. We want to just bump along nicely, and sometimes we’ll control the temperature to do that, but then you risk making the yeast unhappy if you drop the temperature. It’s all of these subtle manipulations that you do when it’s in tank, in primary.
“We’re about half-and-half on harvest series, whether we pitch yeast or go spontaneous. We’re doing a little bit of pied de cuve, where you take a bottle from last year or even fresh juice, and you grow a yeast rather than letting it go spontaneous, in a really slow, slow, long lag phase. You’re much more likely to get Kloeckera, Candida—some of the funkier things will come in before the Saccharomyces. But if you do pied de cuve, you’re increasing the likelihood it’s just Saccharomyces, but it’s wild Saccharomyces.
“Once it finishes, we’re tasting it. Does it have the structure we want? Is it something that’s going to grow into the structure we want? We have a sense of how tannins develop in different apples, and you can bet that they go from being grippy and dry to becoming more juicy without gaining any sugar. They just taste juicy and have a perceived sweetness over time from those tannins.
“But I can tell [that] if it’s missing mid-palate, it’s never going to get mid-palate in aging unless it has time in oak or gets a little bit of oxidation. But controlled oxidation is best done in oak. Even if you take only a portion of the batch and put it in oak, so that we’re not taking up a ton of barrels for each batch, then you can blend it back in with this oak-aged stuff. We also have stuff that’s been [on] oak for years. We can always blend that back in. I have Porter’s Perfection from three years ago in an oak barrel that I can pull into a Porter’s Perfection blend if I want.”
Single-Varietals Blended from Different Batches
“There are no laws surrounding single-varietal ciders. Each appellation in France or Italy has different rules about what a single-varietal wine is. It can be 80 percent, it can 85 percent, it can be 100 percent in some places. Single-varietal does not mean it has to be 100 percent in the market.
“For us, that’s the way we do it, primarily because it’s an easy reminder. If it says SV, then I know it’s 100 percent. If it doesn’t say SV, but it says Porter’s Perfection cider, then I know that we blended in something at some point. Under the rules, it’s still a single-varietal, but we just don’t say it. It’s no high-horse thing. It’s just so we know because different batches we do differently.”
The Future of Single-Varietal Ciders
“In an ideal world, in my mind, you would go to a bottle shop that would have all kinds of 750 ml bottles, and you would pick out three single-varietals of the same varietal by three different producers. You could put them side by side and say, ‘How much of this difference [among them] is because of the maker? How much is because of the land? How much is because of the geographical location?’
“The whole goal of harvest ciders is to have them tell a story. In cider, we are fighting so hard for harvest-driven ciders to be understood in the same way as wine, to have the same message that terroir matters, the weather matters. It all matters.”