Page 11 - Beverage MasterAprMay 2021

Craft Cider

Town in City Brewery. “When we started, there
were fewer than a dozen breweries in Houston,”
Engle said. “Now there are 80-some. In the begin- FASTRAK
ning, we designed our facility so we could have
add-ons, and when we saw a lot of customers
wanting something other than beer, we decided to Cider Press
add cider.”
3.5 Gallons in 2 to 3 Seconds!
By 2018, the two were splitting production
between beer and cider, but as they saw the Air Comressed
demand for cider growing, they pulled the plug Stainless Steel
on beer. The decision appears to be a good one. Cylinder Foot
Today, the Houston Cider Company services over & Basket
300 accounts in Southeast Texas, including Spec’s
Wine, Spirits & Finer Foods, Total Wine & More, Juicing Cherry,
Whole Foods Market and H-E-B. The cidery has also Grape, Apple &
won multiple national awards for its products. Other Fruits

As an urban cidery, Houston Cider Company can’t FREE
juice on-site, so they rely on suppliers from the
Pacific Northwest to provide high-quality fruit for DELIVERY
on-site fermentation. Their ciders are a blend of
culinary apples for sugar content and cider apples
for flavor. Botanicals, herbs and spices — added 541-741-2706
either during or post-fermentation — are all-natu- fastrakciderpress.com
ral and, as much as possible, sourced locally.

While Macalello works behind the scenes manag-
ing marketing and social media, Engle and assistant
cidermaker and archeologist/geologist Olivia Fry
are on the front lines, actually making the cider.
Their philosophies are similar. “Our ciders are
very traditional,” Engle said. “We make them as
clean and crisp as possible. We take a wine-making
approach. We play with the yeast, but we choose
yeast that doesn’t have the esters and phenols that
some people are looking for.”

Fry agreed. “We want our cider to be flavorful but
all-natural. When we came out with our Houston
75 — based on the classic French 75 — we tried to
do something different by using different yeasts
and adding fresh lemon peel instead of processed
sugars to get the flavors we wanted.”

With their backgrounds, the cidermakers are very
science-driven. “We like data,” Engle said. “We’re
always looking at data and methods of improve-
ment. The more data we can collect, the better
we’re able to predict fermentation timelines based
on pH. We can measure down to the millimeter.
Sometimes one additional peppercorn can make or
break the cider.”

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