Back in the day, most people made their own alcoholic beverage, and every farm, no matter
what they grew, they would grow apples so they could make cider.
They wouldn't buy cider, they wouldn't even sell cider, they'd just make cider for their
own consumption.
And it's got a very long history, and Europe, and a pretty long history in the U.S. too.
We're going to bring that back here at Ritchie Cider.
So we are a craft cider maker.
We take apples from local farmers, and we press them into apple juice that we then ferment
in really the Old World European style, then we age them in wood, and then we release it.
The history of cider in the U.S. really started with the pioneers.
As people moved west off the East Coast, everybody brought the same three things.
Everybody had a hatchet, everybody had a rifle, and everybody had an apple tree.
They made cider because, number one, they wanted something to enjoy at the end of a
hard day's work, but also they needed something safe to drink.
In the 20th century, as commercial brewing got bigger, cider making became less important
at the home because you could go buy your beer, buy your whiskey or wine.
Fenville, Michigan has got a long history of being part of what they used to call the
fruit belt because they grew so much fruit here, and a lot of that fruit was grown for
the Chicago market.
The Southwest of Michigan, because it's right off the coast of Lake Michigan, it really has
a climate very similar to Southwest England.
It's right on the coast, gets a lot of rain, and the apple trees will love it.
People want to know where their food comes from.
Now there are cider makers making cider with local fruit in at least 20 states, and that's
pretty cool.
We're big fans of Carlo Petrini and Slow Food and his design of a food system that's
good, clean, and fair.
We like focusing on a product that's very clean to make.
The apple is so easy to grow and is so drought resistant.
You don't need to water it, you don't need to plant it year after year.
It cleans the air, it holds the soil tight, it's great harbor for beneficial insects.
Fair has to do with the farmer.
We want to support local farmers.
We're going to grow some apples here, but we're always going to buy most of our apples
from local family farmers, guys who have been in this for three, four, five generations
growing fruit.
40 years ago there were 4,000 farms growing apples in the state of Michigan.
Now we're down to about 1,100.
We want to keep it over 1,000, and to do that they have to have a crop that they can sell
and make money and take care of their family.
We want to come in and buy apples, not at market price, but above market price.
We also want them to grow apples outside the range of nine or 10 varieties that are sold
at the grocery stores.
We want to promote crop diversity so that when we have years like 2012 and there's a very
early spring and when that frost comes in April, guess what, you don't have apples.
Usually the Michigan apple crops about 800 to 900 million pounds of apples a year.
This year they lost anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of the crop.
We're in this for the long haul.
Anyone who is going to be planting trees is not in it for the short term, and I think
the farmers that we're dealing with understand that.
Well, when we built this cider house, we wanted to make as clean a building as we could.
All the wood that we use throughout is FSC certified wood.
We don't heat the building.
We basically let the natural evolution of the seasons keep the cider cold in the winter.
By the time we get to spring and summer, it's often kegs, and we're selling it.
That's the way they've always made cider, so that's the way we're going to continue
to do it here.
When we get apples, they come in in apple crates that farmers use for 10 to 20 years.
The stems and the skins, those go to animal feed, so nothing's wasted in the process.
We're not really creating garbage here.
We're creating cider.
When you're making cider, you're looking for all different aspects of the fruit.
What it looks like doesn't matter at all.
What you're looking for is how it smells, how it tastes, and then beyond that, you're
looking for the sugar content of the apple.
You're looking at the acidity of the apple.
We like high acid varieties, and then we're also looking for a lot of tannin from the
apple.
That's what's going to give it some structure and some body and give it a nice finish.
There's no one apple that has all those components, so we look for all those components from a
blend of apples.
When apples come from our local farms, get dropped off on our dock, take those apples,
we run them sort of across a conveyor and up an elevator.
That drops down into the mill, creating the pumice.
We take the pumice and we pump it across into the press.
At that point, we press those apples and the juice drops out.
We pump that juice over into the tanks.
Once the juice is in the tank, we let it settle and we'll pitch yeast.
We use all kinds of different yeast here.
It's one of the things that makes Virtue and the ciders that we're producing unique.
Sometimes the fermentation is going to be completed in stainless, but we actually have
some stuff we're working on right now that we put directly into barrels after pressing,
and we're going to let those spontaneously ferment.
In five years, what I'd love to see from Virtue Cider is a new standard.
We want to bring cider to the table, to the tavern, like craft brewers have with craft
beer.
We want to see apple growers putting in more trees because they know they're going to
make money off their fruit, and we want people making choices when they choose who to support
with their dollars and support the local farmer, support the local brewer, support the local
cider maker.
And then we want to help the community here in Fenville by being a successful business
that brings people to the region.
We can turn Southwest Michigan.
We can turn the fruit belt into the Napa Valley of the cider world.
All right, how's my, how's my scarf, is it?
I'm Ryan Burke, was that good?
Well, thank you guys.
Thank you.
Bye.
