Most of my favorite cidery stories start with a disaster.
Rocky Ridge Reserve is one such yarn.
The tale begins in 2013, when our fledgling cidery opened with grand plans to make… three ciders. Every year. That’s it. We greeted the public in April with our first creation, the pleasing Aragon 1904, and people liked it and asked, “What’s next?” That would be the assertive Charred Ordinary in June, and people liked it and asked, “What’s next?” In a burgeoning beer town like Richmond, it felt woefully insufficient to say, “Um… like six months from now, we’ll release a dessert cider.”
We needed new ideas – stat!
And so were born Hopsap Shandy (Virginia’s first dry-hopped cider) and Mill Race Bramble (Virginia’s first berry-infused cider). The release of brandy-fortified monster Harvest Ration in November brought our lineup to a respectable five, but unbeknownst to you fine folks, there was an additional project simmering behind the scenes.
Back in the spring, our overzealous bottling machine kept overfilling the original 750ml bottles of Aragon 1904. When these bottles made it into the pasteurizer prior to labeling, well… our failure rate was about 50 percent. Oh, the chorus of bottles exploding in that boiling metal casket, the makeshift cardboard shields we held over the pasteurizer bins to prevent bottles from blowing up in our faces, the aroma of spilt cider mixing with owner Courtney’s tears…
Little did we know that was only Chapter 1 of the disaster saga. You see, we ultimately decided to stop pasteurizing the Aragon 1904 bottles rather than continue to pile up broken glass. That leaves cider susceptible to secondary fermentation in the bottle, particularly if it has residual sugar (like Aragon 1904) and is stored in a hot, non-climate-controlled environment (like the original Blue Bee Cider location in Manchester).
As spring turned to summer, we started to notice that Aragon 1904 was getting a little more carbonated. Then the caps started to pop off the bottles with increasing ferocity. Then one day – I’ll never forget it – bottles stored in the warehouse behind the tasting room began to spontaneously shatter in their cases.
“I should do something!” I thought. “… what should I do?!”
I’ll tell you what: Don gloves and protective goggles, open those bottles, try to aim the champagne geyser into a 50-gallon apple brandy barrel, age it for five months, then bottle and pasteurize in our smaller 500ml format (no such overfilling/explosion issues) and release our very first barrel-aged cider: Rocky Ridge Reserve.
And that’s how we accidentally made six ciders during our first harvest year.
Bonus fun fact: That barrel was obtained from an out-of-state distillery, with the caveat that we had to drive there in order to pick it up (thanks Mel), AND we had to sign a nondisclosure agreement to never reveal the barrel’s origin. They didn’t want other beverage producers hounding them for barrels. We painted over the distillery’s logo on the wood.
-Brian Ahnmark
