Caves of Steel Chapter 1

Estate Harvest Update

We have been busy picking our first harvest from our home orchard. Above is an image of over 600 pounds of Virginia Hewes, an amazing apple with great flavor and sugars but a very painful one to harvest as we are collecting thousands of small ping pong ball sized fruit. To date we have brought in over a ton of fruit from our orchard and our goal is to get to 6 tons this year which would be enough to distill a barrel from our estate apples. We’ve collected fruit mostly from our crabs and early season apples so far and are starting to get into mid-season apples with Bulmer’s Norman, Redstreak, an apple we call “Not Porters Perfection” and Mettais being the apples of the last week.

Other Pommes

Caves of Steel Chapter 1

One of the most important factors for any craft spirit is ageing. Not just the types of barrels you use but the environment that you age the spirit in. There is a tremendous amount of diversity in aging techniques. For bourbon drafty warehouses that experience dramatic daily and seasonal temperature and humidity shifts are the norm. Other products such as Linie Aquavit require barrels to be loaded on a boat that must then cross the equator twice prior to bottling. Some producers even turn to newer techniques such as playing loud music in the aging room or unique reactors to accelerate the aging process. One thing all of these techniques have in common is a goal of accelerating the aging process by temperature variations or mechanical agitation.

At Ambix Spirits we are making craft brandy which doesn’t require a ship or a drafty warehouse but does require a cave. The goal is low and slow.. we are not trying to speed up the aging but to slow it down so that the product is in balance. We want the fruit to remain vibrant while the subtle chemistry that takes time can be expressed in the spirit. The goal is consistency, traditionally targeting 13 C (55 F) and 80% RH.. the types of conditions you would typically see in a cave. Unfortunately digging a cave was just not in the cards for us. Fortunately one of the many great components of our terroir is an almost perfect condition for aging, Nature gives us everything we need, a moist cool evening breeze blows in from Bodega we just need to use what we are given. Even in summer our 24-hr average temperature is below 65 F, so with a bit of insulation and automation construct an effective cave of steel We started this effort over the last few months. To start we measured the temperature of our aging room over a rather warm day

Not a bad start. No surprise but a well insulated room sees a much lower day-night variation than the environment. However the room is a couple degrees warmer than the outside air averaged over the 24 hrs. We can improve this by developing a controller that draws in cold night air and then closes the vents during the day when its hot outside. This is a very economical that uses only a trivial amount of energy to cool a room. Here is a before and after graph comparing the room temperature before and after we developed the night cooling system.

This is encouraging. By opening the vents at night we lowered the average room temperature by over 3 degrees. However the total temperature range increased a bit. We then looked at how important the 24 hour temperature change in a room is to the contents of barrel.

So even though the room had a 15 F range, the barrel only changed by less than 2 F. This is encouraging and tells us that the average room temperature is more important than 24 hr variations. We have a great deal more work to do on this topic, and we’ve not even spoken about humidity yet. That will be future chapter of a future email. For now we are happy that we can combine the power of our terroir with some good construction and technology to create our own caves of steel.