chuckg's Cellars

I've been making my own champagne-style sparking apple cider, known as "chuckg's Apple Ambience", for a number of years now.  My father made wine for many years and even tried champagne, but it was Mark Godfrey who introduced me to sparkling cider.  First, you have to know that real sparkling hard cider is not like the "hard cider" products being sold in stores these days.  Those are more like apple-flavored sparkling wine coolers.  They're artificially carbonated.  If you check the label (thank goodness the law requires those labels so that we can tell what it is we're drinking), you'll notice that one of the key ingredients is corn syrup.   These products are sweetened way up to appeal to child-like tastes.  Many of them are artificially flavored too.  

I start with raw apple juice from orchards around Hood River, Oregon and don't add much else except yeast (the exact formula is, of course, secret).  I use the fabled Me’thode Champenoise, the Champaign method, in which the bottles are capped and then inverted for secondary fermentation.  The bottles are gently shaken every day for about a year so that the yeast sediment settles into the neck.   The neck of each individual bottle is frozen and then the bottle is opened and the frozen plug containing the yeast is removed.  The result is sparkling clear with no yeasty taste.  It's very champagne-like.  It's a year-long project, but I think the product is worth it.

Here's the current batch in process:

Several friends here at InFocus recently persuaded me to try making beer too.  So, "chuckg's Ambience Ale" was born.  My first batch, playfully titled "Old #1", was good enough to encourage me.  Old #2 was a bit better.  Number three is a bit of a disappointment.  It's not undrinkable, but it's nothing special either.  Fortunately, I entered Old #2 in the Portland Rose Festival Homebrew Competition and the judges, who were overall complimentary (nobody checked the "Solvent Like" box on the evaluation sheet), gave me some good suggestions.  So, I'm planning to begin number four soon.

I tried some Blue Berry wine last spring, and it came out very nice.   I'm working on some Pear right now.