Derek Plotkowski (00:02): We're trying to figure out which varieties are best to grow in Ontario, and so then by giving that recommendation, we can give recommendations for future research. That's part of my thesis is saying these particular varieties like GoldRush, Golden Russet, Stoke Red that we've shown to have good properties for growing here in Ontario based on my research. We can say, "Okay, let's study these 10 varieties and look at their aromatic compounds and look at some of these more specific things. Graeme Li (00:34): You're listening to the Why & How podcast produced by the Ontario Agricultural College of the University of Guelph where we look to answer big questions in agriculture, food, and the environment through casual conversations rooted in research. All right. We are live. It's me, Graeme Li, the host of the podcast, and I'm here with Jordan. Jordan, how's it going? Jordan Terpstra (00:54): It's going well today Graeme, how are you doing? Graeme Li (00:56): Good as well. Beautiful day. Jordan Terpstra (00:57): Yeah, it's gorgeous out there- Graeme Li (00:59): [crosstalk 00:00:59] round the corner. Jordan Terpstra (00:59): I'm excited. Graeme Li (00:59): In the studio we also have Derek Plotkowski. That's quite the last name. Derek Plotkowski (01:03): It is. Graeme Li (01:04): Derek, why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself? Derek Plotkowski (01:06): Sure. My name's Derek Plotkowski, I am in my final semester of my PhD here at the University of Guelph. I'm originally from Michigan and I've lived in six different countries. My main work here is on hard cider production, but I also have a background in wine, a background in botany. I'm a general food lover. Yeah, that's where I go. Graeme Li (01:34): What other countries have you lived in? Derek Plotkowski (01:36): I have lived in, well of course the US and Canada, and Spain, Portugal, Hungary, and France. Graeme Li (01:43): Okay, and what were you doing in France? Derek Plotkowski (01:47): My master's program was a two-year program that was sponsored by the European Union through a program called Erasmus Mundus which requires students to study in different countries. Those four European countries that I mentioned were all part of my master's degree which was in viticulture, oenology, wine business, and terroir management. I did my thesis when I was in Spain on cider storage. But in France I was mostly focusing on wine business and terroir management. Graeme Li (02:26): What made you get into the alcohol side of production of food? Derek Plotkowski (02:29): Yeah. I mean, I started off in plants and I'm still in plants. My first job when I was 14 was at a retail greenhouse, carrying out plants to people's cars and pulling weeds and things like that. When I started undergrad, I wanted to take botany horticulture type courses, I was interested in that. In my first semester horticulture class, this was at Cornell University in New York, we had a unit on wine production, on viticulture, and I thought it was interesting. We went to a winery and I was just fascinated by the great production side of things, in general, fruit production. I was working actually a tulip lab at the time and just trying to immerse myself in as much plant-related coursework and activities as I could. Yeah, I was fascinated by this viticulture section. The school had recently started a formal viticulture and analogy major. Viticulture is grape production and oenology is the science of wine making. I decided to start taking classes in it and then I took another and another and here I am. Graeme Li (03:51): Yeah. One thing leads to another, right? Derek Plotkowski (03:52): Yeah. Graeme Li (03:53): How did you switch from grapes to apple cider? Derek Plotkowski (03:57): Yeah. The professor that I had who taught me horticulture in my first year, his name is Ian Merwin. He has since retired, but he was both a cider and a wine specialist. He was reading the signs at the time, this was 2008, 2009, that cider was going to take off soon. He was already a cider researcher. He had been one of the early people in North America to be doing actual cider research. In our wine classes he always made sure to incorporate cider a little bit in there. I was first introduced to it through him and his recommendations about cider and courses about it. The Finger Lakes area in particular was one of the early adopters of modern cider production in North America. It was right circumstances. Derek Plotkowski (05:01): He was the one who suggested that I study in France because France already has a established cider industry, as does Spain, and as does the UK. He suggested that I go there. Again, my master's program was in wine, but I actually did specifically go there to work on cider. Because cider science and wine science are actually very similar. Once you have juice, it's pretty much the same. Post harvest, you're really working on very similar media if you're working in wine or you're working in cider. Graeme Li (05:41): All right. Let's talk a bit about what cider production actually looks like. You talked about juice. Is that where we start? Derek Plotkowski (05:47): No, we should probably start in the orchard itself. The research that I do is specifically on apple cultivars, which are cultivated variety that have been traditionally used for cider production. Essentially what's going on is, in a lot of modern cider production in Ontario, in North America, people use commodity apples. Those are apples that are widely produced mostly for table production. Think your Galas, your Fujis, apples like that, which they're great for eating. Not all of them make the grade for fresh market, some are going to be too small, some are going to be ugly, things like that. Once you turn that into juice, the size of the apple or any blemishes on it really don't matter, you don't see those anymore. Derek Plotkowski (06:39): People use those because there's a lot of excess juice available for them. However, they don't have the flavor characteristics that cider apples do. One of the most common analogies we make is that making cider out of those apples is like taking table grapes that you get at the grocery store and turning them into wine. You'll get something alcoholic, but it's not going to be very interesting. You don't use your Thompson Seedless green grapes to make a fine wine. Graeme Li (07:11): Yeah, the winos are crying right now thinking about that. Derek Plotkowski (07:14): I mean, you'll get something, again, that's alcoholic but it's not going to have much more interest in that. The cultivars that we study, they have more interesting flavor compounds. Some have high polyphenol content which can contribute to bitterness in the juice or astringency. Astringency is that mouth feel that you get when you have an underripe banana or overextracted tea, that kind of drying. You can't show my face doing that, but you got to see it anyway. Graeme Li (07:50): After you press the juice, what happens next? Derek Plotkowski (07:56): I want to back up a little bit before even pressing the juice. Apples are different from grapes. Grapes are pretty soft, they are pretty easy to press. I mean, for research purposes in grapes you can literally do it in a plastic bag, just crush them and you get juice. Whereas apples are a bit harder and so you actually have to grind the apples up before you can even press them. It actually makes processing a little bit more difficult and more involved. We'll usually have some sort of a grinder that has either a drum with teeth on it that you run it through and actually grind the apples into a mash we call pomace. Or we actually, in my research purposes, use a juicer but not the juicing function, but just the grinding function. Derek Plotkowski (08:46): You'll get an apple sauce type thing and then you actually have to put it onto a press. We use, in my research, what's called a rack and cloth press which is, you have a rack made out of wood or stainless steel for... we use stainless steel in our research. You take a piece of cheesecloth and you put all of that apple mash onto the cheesecloth and you wrap it up, then you stack another plate on top of it. Then we have a hydraulic press that we press down and it actually pushes the juice out which we collect. Whereas in grapes you do have to do a crush process and then you can press it in either a basket style press that you might have seen, or you could technically use a similar rack and cloth type press. But yeah, apple pressing is a little bit more involved than grape pressing. Graeme Li (09:37): Are you throwing the entire apple in? You don't decore it or anything? Derek Plotkowski (09:40): Right. We can throw the entire apple in. Again, the cheesecloth is going to collect any bits that are left. You actually are left with a considerable amount of pulp that is dry by the time you finish pressing it, so all of the seeds and skins and pulp are gone. It usually doesn't contribute that much to the flavor to leave those things in. Whereas in grapes, for instance, the stems of the cluster, those you really don't want to be in the actual press when you start extracting the juice. Graeme Li (10:19): When we're picturing these machines, how big are they? Are they huge? Because it's an industrial process. Derek Plotkowski (10:25): Some of them are, yeah. It depends on the scale that you're doing. We have cider producers that do very small production, some that do huge production. My research press, we've got 13 inch by 13 inch plates, they're pretty small. Whereas when I was working in Spain in cider production, the individual presses could have been the size of a small room about the size of this room. What is this? Maybe 10 feet by 12 feet, something like that. You do have presses that are that large. Sometimes they take a long time to do the actual pressing. In Spain in particular, they try to extract every little bit of juice out. Derek Plotkowski (11:12): But there are other types of presses that are used. There are belt presses, or pneumatic presses, or bladder presses. There's all sorts of them. Yeah. Belt presses are becoming more popular. They are a continuous type of press. You put the apple mash onto a conveyor belt and then there's another belt that it runs through and it extracts the juice along the way, and that's much faster. Graeme Li (11:43): Now we have the juice, right? Derek Plotkowski (11:44): Now we have the juice. Graeme Li (11:46): Next step. Derek Plotkowski (11:47): Next step. It really depends on the style that you're going for. Many people will inoculate it with yeast at this point. Some people will add sulfites at this point which are going to sterilize the juice. Sulfites will kill most of the bacteria that are in the juice and perhaps some of the yeast, not always. Usually is enough to save some of the yeast. People will go for natural yeast fermentations, some will use cultured yeast fermentations and the difference is going to be pretty noticeable. Cultured yeasts are going to be ones that you can buy that are freeze dried or in live cultures. Those have defined characteristics that we know that a particular yeast, let's say EC-1118, is going to consume all of the sugar, turn it all into alcohol. It's going to be a pretty fast fermentation. Derek Plotkowski (12:45): Whereas some of the natural yeasts that are already in the juice that came from the orchard or came from the equipment might take a bit longer to establish a population to start fermentation. They might produce different flavor compounds. Some of them can use different nutrient sources than the cultured yeasts can. There are also fermenting bacteria and a variety of different yeasts. At that step, you have a lot of choice. Some people will add nutrition so they'll add yeast nutrients such as Fermaid or Go-Ferm which are usually nitrogen additions in the form of amino acids or ammonium. Diammonium phosphate is are pretty common addition. Derek Plotkowski (13:33): Some people will actually remove some of the nutrition which will make the fermentation last longer. They'll do that sometimes through a process called keeving, which is when these calcium salts get added to the juice and it forms a cap that actually you can remove. It's like a flocculant which collects some of these compounds and solids together and you actually remove that. That can actually cause the fermentation to last a lot longer, which allows for better flavor development. There are actually lots of options at that point. It really depends on what your final style is going to be. Derek Plotkowski (14:14): If you want something that is going to be bone dry, you might use an inoculated yeast that's going to consume everything. Whereas some of the native yeasts can't quite ferment all the sugars that are in the juice, and so you'll get something that is a little bit off dry, dryness being the opposite of sweetness. If we're talking about a dry cider or a dry wine, it means that there's little sugar left. That's one way to do it. Derek Plotkowski (14:44): If you have juice and you're making something like an ice cider, which is common in Quebec and parts of Ontario, you can freeze that juice and thaw it partially and extract the more concentrated thawed juice that is going to be higher in sugar and you'll get something similar to an ice wine. Graeme Li (15:09): Similar in price as well? Derek Plotkowski (15:10): It's a little bit cheaper. Graeme Li (15:11): Okay. That's good. Derek Plotkowski (15:12): It's a little bit cheaper. Yeah. Jordan Terpstra (15:14): I have a silly question. When I think of alcoholic cider, so cider that has alcohol in it, then there's the cider that doesn't have alcohol. What is the difference between those two things? Derek Plotkowski (15:24): Sure. This definition of cider is actually one of the, I think, identity crises that cider has in the world, well in North America anyway. If you go outside of North America, cider is to apples what wine is to grapes and that's just how it is. What you think of as cider, so fresh cider that you get at a apple orchard in the fall, that's fresh-pressed apple juice. What we consider to be apple juice has been filtered, perhaps concentrated. The stuff that you get in a bottle at the grocery store, a shelf-stable thing that's going to have been filtered, a lot of the solids removed and also a lot of the flavor removed. There are some good ones of course but... Derek Plotkowski (16:17): That's what we're talking about now. We're talking about the difference between a fresh cider that's sweet, that you get in the fall, and a alcoholic cider or a hard cider, which we often call it. The difference is that hard cider came from the fresh cider, it's been fermented. You take the fresh pressed juice, you have lots of sugar in there. The sugar can be broken down by the yeast and alcoholic fermentation. What happens is, simple sugars get split up into pyruvic compounds, which are two three carbon molecules that make up sugar when combined together. Then that gets broken up into carbon dioxide and ethanol, which is drinking alcohol. Derek Plotkowski (17:04): Pretty much you take that fresh cider and you add yeast to it or you let the yeast set naturally in it, you let that go and ferment and you get hard cider. That's really all there is to it. Actually, it's just like wine making. It's very easy. It's a natural process. If you just leave that cider it'll turn hard, it will turn into alcoholic cider, granted. If it's been pasteurized, perhaps not, because then all the yeast will have been killed. But if you just, don't take a packet of baker's yeast because that's going to give you harsh flavors. But you could take a packet of baker's yeast, add it to it, and you would get alcoholic cider, absolutely. It probably wouldn't taste very good, but you could do it. Graeme Li (17:49): Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about your work. What exactly are you doing? Derek Plotkowski (17:54): We have five test orchards around Ontario where we have 28 different apple cultivars that were planted in 2015. We have our main test site at the Simcoe Research Station, Norfolk County, which is where I did the majority of my work. Then we also have test orchards at Twin Pines Orchard, which is in Lambton Shores, so kind of close to Sarnia. We have a site at Spirit Tree which is a cidery in Caledon. We have a test site at the County Cider company in Prince Edward County, so Picton, Waupoos. Their main brand is Waupoos Cider. Then we also have a site in Georgian Bay at Appletop Farms, which is incidentally and organic site. It's pretty interesting. They don't produce their own hard cider though, but they do grow our apples. Derek Plotkowski (19:02): We have those five sites around the province where I was collecting data over the last few years. In the Simcoe site in particular, we are paying particularly close attention. If I go through my year of a full season, it would start off in usually April when I would start to see the apple trees come out of dormancy and I would monitor the progress of their blooming. They would come out of dormancy, usually end of April, beginning of May, I would start to see the first flowers on the trees. All of these 28 different varieties, I would go out three, four times a week and look at them and check if the individual block of trees was blooming, almost blooming. Derek Plotkowski (19:54): There's a rating system of eight to nine different stages. It goes from what's called silver tip to green tip. That's actual the buds that are changing color and then you start to see the buds turning floral, and then they'll start turning pink, and then the actual flower will open. I was monitoring that. We are actually able to indicate or express to growers when they can expect any of these varieties to start blooming. Because some will bloom in the end of May, some will bloom at the beginning of May. In apples you actually need to have different varieties blooming at the same time to ensure pollination and fruit set, because apples aren't self-fertile. If you just have an apple tree by itself with no other apple trees in the vicinity, it's fruit will not set because it can't use his own pollen to fertilize itself. You need to have another apple tree blooming at the same time, have a different variety, in order to get fruit set. Graeme Li (21:03): Sounds like a very pretty time in the field. Yeah. Derek Plotkowski (21:05): It is. All of the apple varieties, the flowers look different on all of them. They're somewhat similar, but I have my favorite ones. Muscadet de Dieppe is one of my favorite blossoms, and so is Bramley Seedling. Bramley Seedling, it's a very big flower. Some of them are very small, some of them bloom at different times. Yeah, it's one of my favorite times of year. Derek Plotkowski (21:28): After that we have the fruit set and we have to thin the trees after the fruit set, usually after a period called June drop, which is when a lot of the fruitlets will start to drop. It's a natural process of thinning for the apples. Then we passively monitor the growth of the apple fruit themselves over the course of the growing season. But it's really not until August when we start monitoring for ripeness. When we monitor for ripeness, we will take an Apple and cut it in half and we'll dip it in an iodine solution because what we're looking for is the conversion of starches in the flesh into simple sugars. Because when you dip the apple, you can actually look to see how much black there is on the apple itself, because if it's fully black that means it is all starch. But starches will actually break down into simple sugars as the apple fruit will ripen. Derek Plotkowski (22:27): A fully mature right fruit, you'll dip it into iodine and it won't turn black at all, because it's all simple sugars. We'll monitor that, and then at harvest, then I actually go out into the orchard and I count all the fruit on a tree as they pick it off and I weigh the fruit. We had about 650 trees in that orchard. I was out there picking off all the fruit and counting the individual apples and weighing them. I didn't weigh the individual apples. I weighed all the fruit on an individual tree. I had to count how much fruit was on the tree, how much fruit was on the ground, because different apples will hold on to fruit differently. There are varieties that will drop a lot of their fruit pre-harvest. A lot of that fruit can't be used or is more difficult to use for cider production because a lot of people don't want ground fruit on their presses because of contamination. People here will prefer to processed fruit that hasn't touched the ground. Derek Plotkowski (23:43): I'm looking at things like that. Then after I pick the fruit off all of the trees, then I will go into the lab and juice them. I will run them through the actual juicer through the apple press. I will weigh the fruit that I actually press, and then I will measure the volume of juice that they produce. I get a juicing efficiency, and then I do analysis on the juice itself. I'll measure its sugar concentration, I'll measure its pH, I'll measure it's titratable acidity, which is going to be a general measure of it's sour flavor or acidic flavor. I'll measure the polyphenol concentration as well as the nitrogen concentration in the juice. All of these things are really important things to consider when you're making cider. Graeme Li (24:37): Really just getting a full profile on this apple. Derek Plotkowski (24:39): Trying to. Graeme Li (24:39): Absolutely everything. Derek Plotkowski (24:41): Not quite everything. We were looking at these horticultural and juice attributes on a large scale. Those are the principle components that you look at in the juice for instance. Horticulturally we were looking at, if a particular variety produced a lot of fruit or a little fruit or if it changed from year to year because of biennial bearing or if the trees died or things like that. Derek Plotkowski (25:10): We're looking at large scale things that are important, but we haven't gotten to the point of measuring the, I don't want to say minutiae, but the smaller factors that are also really important for cider production. I didn't get into measuring things like aromatic compounds, or color compounds or anything like that, which those are very important. If you actually look at wine search for instance, you can find papers that are talking about the specific effect of a particular horticulture practice like thinning of the leaves or something like that on the concentration of a specific aromatic compound, I don't know, methoxypyrazines or something like that. Derek Plotkowski (25:55): We're not at that point for cider yet. We want to get there. But what we needed to do first was take these interesting apple varieties that people are interested in growing and decide and recommend which varieties are going to be suitable for production in Ontario. Because not all varieties are going to do well everywhere. Just like in grapes and wines, you have different grapevine varieties that are better for certain regions than others. There's a reason why Merlots are common in Bordeaux and Riesling is common in Alsace. I mean, because they're different climates. We're trying to figure out which varieties are best to grow in Ontario. Derek Plotkowski (26:40): Then by giving that recommendation, we can give recommendations for future research. That's part of my thesis is saying, these particular varieties some like Gold Rush, Golden Russet, Stoke Red, that we've shown to have good properties for growing here in Ontario based on my research, we can say, "Okay, let's study these 10 varieties and look at their aromatic compounds and look at some of these more specific things," rather than looking at all 28. Because some varieties, Kingston Black is a particularly popular variety, is an English variety, that everybody wants to grow because it's really famous for cider production, but it doesn't grow very well here. It doesn't produce a lot of fruit and I just can't recommend it for production here. Derek Plotkowski (27:29): It's not really going to be worthwhile for us to put in the resources for researching its aromatic properties in Ontario because I don't think that people should be growing it here. We're identifying the varieties for people to look at later on in research. By doing that then, a few years down the road or even now, people can say, "Okay, I want to look at Stoke Red and look at its aromatic properties or its color properties," things like that. We did the basic research and now we can move into things that are a bit more complicated. Because you need to start off with the basics before you can go into more complicated things. Graeme Li (28:21): Talk about why we talk a lot about the soil. Is it the same with apples? Derek Plotkowski (28:26): In agriculture in general, soil is one of the most important things. We talk about the nutrient availability in the soil. We talk about the composition of the soils. Some of the things that we do look at are, we look at the effects of rootstocks, which are also really important for grapes. That's going to be the actual part of the plant that comes from a different organism entirely, an apple tree or a grape vine or something like that. But it's, you graft two different parts on top of each other. All of our apple trees in our plots are all on M9 rootstocks. All of the roots in the ground are actually the exact same variety, and then we actually have these different cultivars attached on top. The cultivars are the scion wood whereas the rootstock is actually all the same variety. That allows it to react with the soil in the same way for all of these different varieties. Graeme Li (29:33): How does that work? For a lot of people it sounds like magic. You can just take roots and just stick a tree on [crosstalk 00:29:41]. Derek Plotkowski (29:42): When you do grafting, the scion and the rootstock do have to be compatible, so in apples you have to use an apple rootstock. There are some other species that actually can be interchangeable, so you can grow pears on quince rootstocks for instance, because they're pretty closely related. What you're doing is, plants are physical structures as well. In a woody plant, you can cut off the shoots of one variety and take its roots and cut off the roots of another variety and take its shoots. You can line up the xylem and the phloem by tying them together and it will actually heal because the xylem is actually physically dead tissue that forms these straws that allow water to go up and nutrients to go up into the plant. As long as you have very similar plant tissue, it's completely possible. It's something we've been doing for centuries, maybe even millennia. Graeme Li (31:00): Practically speaking, that's literally just taking two plants and tying them together? Derek Plotkowski (31:05): Yeah. Pretty much. Again, you have to cut off the segments and then actually line up the vascular tissue. Yeah, you have to actually line up the vascular tissue in the plants. But yes, you take the top of... you usually have to use pretty young things like a branch of a tree. I can take a branch of a tree and put it on the roots of the same species of plant or sometimes just slightly different species and yeah, you literally just tie them together. Graeme Li (31:45): That's pretty neat. Is that how we get nectarines too from something? I know one of the- Derek Plotkowski (31:50): I mean, nectarines are grafted, yes. But, I mean, nectarines are of course a fuzzless variety of peach, so nectarines are cultivars of peaches. But they're propagated by grafting. Grafting is how we get the same variety of any type of fruit. Because apples in particular, if you plant an apple seed it's not going to have the same properties as its parents. It's not like a tomato that's self fertile that you can save the seeds and you're going to get the same exact type of tomato the next time you grow it. Apples it's like people. You have two parents and their child is not going to look like exactly either one of the parents. It'll have elements of both. Apples, when you plant a seed is going to get something completely different. If we want all the same type of apples, say it's Golden Delicious, we actually have to start from a vegetative tissue like a branch and propagate it. All of the apples that you get in the grocery store they're clonally propagated. They're all clones of an original variety. Graeme Li (33:07): Okay, so it's similar to cannabis production in that way where you have a mother plant and you keep taking shoots off that and... Derek Plotkowski (33:14): Sounds like it. Yeah. Graeme Li (33:15): Yeah. Okay, so that's literally cloning. Interesting. Derek Plotkowski (33:18): Mm-hmm (affirmative). It is. Graeme Li (33:19): Why do we not make cider out of nectarines and peaches and stuff? Derek Plotkowski (33:24): You can. You absolutely can. However, some of these juices don't quite have the nutrient profiles that are amenable to fermentation. They might be too low in nitrogen, they could be supplemented, or they might have compounds that are processed in such a way that they produce bad flavors in the fermentation process. But you certainly can and a lot of times juices themselves can be added to different ciders or beverages. I've had ciders that they add peach juice in at the end or something like that. Sometimes they'll add it in earlier, but usually the goal is to add a little bit of sweetness as well, so a lot of times fresh juice is added. But you can. Derek Plotkowski (34:26): That being said, the word cider itself does refer to a product of apples and sometimes pears. If you make an alcoholic beverage out of purely peach juice, it's not really a cider. At that point it's a peach alcoholic beverage. The word cider gets thrown around a lot and there is a legal definition of it, but it's something that's been a bit blurred. But you can call it a peach cider, you could call it a peach wine or things like that. But they're actually a little bit different. Graeme Li (35:05): Now, we've seen that craft beer has really taken off. Is it the same with cider right now? Derek Plotkowski (35:11): It is. Craft cider certainly has taken off a lot over the last decade. You have dozens more producers in Ontario than there were 10 years ago. There are some challenges that the craft cider industry faces that are different than something like wine or beer. Cider is usually classified as a wine legally for liquor sales and things like that. But because it's not made from grapes, it doesn't qualify under Vintners Quality Alliance, VQA, wine status. It also is not a beer, so it doesn't qualify under a craft beer status. Derek Plotkowski (36:00): There are challenges through selling a cider that cider producers face where they don't get benefits that craft beer producers do in Ontario or VQA wine producers do. A lot of cider producers find it very difficult to sell their cider through places like the LCBO. A lot of fantastic ciders that are in Ontario are actually difficult to get. They can sell to restaurants, but a lot of them don't even bother selling through the LCBO because they just don't feel like they earn enough money through selling them. A place like Twin Pines, which we have a test orchard there. They make some of, in my opinion, the best ciders in Ontario. But to get their cider, I literally have to drive to Lambton Shores to buy bottles of it and it's a long drive. If I'm in Guelph and I want their cider, well, I'm, for the most part, out of luck unless I want to drive a few hours that way. Graeme Li (37:01): All right. Winding down here, what are your plans for the future? Are you continuing this project for a while? Derek Plotkowski (37:06): No. The project is actually done for my part. Most of this information has already been presented to... it's definitely been presented to the Ontario Craft Cider Association. I have presented it at the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Convention, I did that last year. Right now we're just working on publication of it. My thesis is written and it's under review right now. We're just in that process of getting this data out there. There were other experiments that were part of my thesis, but this project itself, for my part, is done. We are continuing to monitor the production attributes of the apple varieties in our lab but my part of it is done. I am looking for employment and I'm just continuing doing what I do. Graeme Li (38:04): Do you think you're going to start your own cider production facility? Derek Plotkowski (38:08): Maybe a while down the road. I'm primarily a researcher, so I'll help other people do it rather than have it on my own. You need a lot of capital to start one of those. Yeah. Graeme Li (38:19): Is there anything that excites you, that you see coming down the road that's going to be really crazy, really game changing in the cider industry? Derek Plotkowski (38:30): Industries like this moves slowly. It takes a long time for apples to grow. What's most exciting right now is that we're at a point where, in Ontario and in the rest of North America, people were planting cider apples, apples like the ones I've been testing. They've been planting them on their own for five to 10 years now. Now those trees are finally getting to the point where they're producing a lot of fruit. Now we're actually going to be able to start seeing more and more ciders that have been made with cider apples instead of the commodity apples. It's not a knock against those ciders that were made with commodity apples, there are some fantastic examples of those out there. But now we're going to start to be able to see these ciders that these growers have been working on for years where the trees are finally coming to fruition, literally. Now we're going to be able to start seeing those ciders, and that's what excites me most. Graeme Li (39:42): For all the listeners out there that do enjoy partaking in the odd beverage or two, any recommendations from the LCBO, or do we have to drive to the independent cideries of Ontario? Derek Plotkowski (39:56): Driving to the independent cideries is always a good option. There are a lot of recommendations that I have, but a lot of the fruit from our research station is going to Brickworks now. They're doing some research on their own. They're buying some of our fruit, and so they're getting some of these interesting varieties that we have and they're doing some research on it. But if I'm at the LCBO and I want to buy cider, I'll usually buy, I like Pommies Farmhouse, it comes in a dark green can. Then the regular Pommies. Thornbury is usually a good option. There are a lot of decent ones out there, but there's a larger variety of cider out there than you can buy at the LCBO. The LCBO tends to have just one or two different styles. Graeme Li (40:58): Do you frown upon people that buy Somersby? Derek Plotkowski (41:04): Okay. Yes and no. The first rule of cider appreciation and wine appreciation is, don't be a snob. It's important to drink things that you like drinking. That being said, products like Somersby, in my opinion, don't really belong in the category of cider. That's because legally speaking in Canada, and in the UK, and in the US, cider doesn't need to be made from 100% juice pre fermentation. If you go back to my cider making process from earlier, you can take 50% juice and then 50% sugar water, mix those together and ferment it and you're legally allowed to call it cider. You can't do that in other places, so France, Spain, that's not allowed. If you're to think, you can't call those things wine. If I were to take 50% grape juice and 50% sugar water and ferment it and I try to sell it as wine, I would be laughed out of whatever store that I'm in. Derek Plotkowski (42:12): Something like Somersby isn't made from 100% juice. It's more of a cooler than it is a cider. It actually belongs in a different product category. Now, if that's something that you enjoy drinking, go for it. I mean, that's completely fine. People enjoy all sorts of things that I don't care for. But Somersby is very sweet usually, a lot of people like that. It's appealing. But is it cider? Does it belong in the same shelf as something that's made from 100% apples? Probably not. It's a different product category. Do I frown on it? Not on the people who drink it, but do I frown on it being called a cider? Yes. I don't think that it should be. I think that it belongs in its own category. But changing that at this point in the game is going to be very difficult, and so the important thing is to educate people on what cider is. Derek Plotkowski (43:15): Because it's not all sweet. It's not all these simple beverages. A lot of people say to me, "Oh, I don't like cider because it's sweet." That's just simply not true. That's like saying you don't like wine because it's sweet. I mean, there are sweet wines, but then you have wines that aren't sweet at all. There's just as much variation in cider as there is in wine, they're very similar beverages. Yeah, it's hard to find a really dry cider at the LCBO for instance. Yeah, that's something that gets me going on a tangent, but yeah. Graeme Li (43:51): Well that's great. You can see the passion. Thank you very much for being here, we'll wrap it up on that note. Any shout outs you want to give? Derek Plotkowski (43:58): John Cline and the members of the Cline Lab, and especially those who have helped me on my research journey. To Austin and to Aurora and a few other friends of mine who've just been always eager to taste things that I make or eat my apples. Yeah. Graeme Li (44:27): Awesome. Thank you very much, Derek. That's a wrap. Derek Plotkowski (44:30): Yeah, appreciate it. Graeme Li (44:36): The Why & How Podcast is published by the Ontario Agricultural College of the University of Guelph. It is produced by Stephanie Craig and Jordan Terpstra. Recording and editing by Jakub Hyzyk and Kyle Ritchie. The host is me, Graeme Li. If you liked what you heard, be sure to leave us a review and subscribe. Thanks for listening.