A Producer’s Guide for Success: How to Produce Cider Styles from Standard to Specialty

Award winning cider maker, Charles McGonegal, will share his years of experience and expertise on how to produce the different cider styles from Standard (Heritage, Traditional, and Modern) to Specialty (Fruited, Botanical, Spiced, etc.). You will learn the nuts and bolts of producing each cider style: apple selection, specific chemistry, fermentation strategies, yeast selection, and nutrient management. The afternoon will host a panel discussion with experienced cider producers about the lessons they have learned as a cider producer: Deirdre Birmingham (The Cider Farm), Walker Fanning (Hidden Cave Cidery), Richard Ihrig (String Theory), and Charles McGonegal (AEppelTreow Winery).

 Register for this workshop here. 

  Charles McGonegal, Certified Pommelier started AEppelTreow Winery (pronounced “apple true”) in 2001 as an elaborate ploy to buy his wife more jewelry. Starting with a biochemistry degree from Michigan Technological University, a modicum of food analytical chemistry experience, a burgeoning relationship with a grower of heirloom apples, and carboy of insanity, Charles leveraged a basement cider operation into the smallest nationally distributed cider brand. Charles practices an esoteric branch of cidermaking, growing traditional bittersweet European cider cultivars and perry pears and exercising the fine art of the methode champenoise. Charles has been an active participant in the developing American cider community, as Vice President of the Great Lakes Cider and Perry Association, judge-educator for the Great Lakes International Cider and Perry Competition, contributor to the BJCP Cider Style Guidelines and presenting at cider seminars in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In 2009, AEppelTreow branched into the world of nano-distilling.

 The UW-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems and Department of Food Science and have teamed up to bring you this workshop.