Making Cider, Mead and Fruit Wines in Blended

Blended is ideal for production tracking of grape winemaking, but it’s so powerful and flexible that it’s also a great choice for those making cider, mead, and fruit wines. Many of our customers do both, and appreciate Blended’s ability to make the different processes easy to manage in a way that keeps the software simple and consistent while respecting the difference in how those wines are produced.

Blended’s handling of non-grape wines centers around its concept of Production Protocols, which encapsulate how you think about a wine’s production process from start to finish, including any operations you do, ingredients you add, and measurements you take. For more detail on what production protocols are and how they’re used for grape winemaking see https://www.blendedtech.com/blog/production-protocols-in-blended. Here we’ll see how to apply production protocols to these different products.

Most winemakers would say that grape wines are never made according to a recipe – wines are made in the vineyard, and when the fruit is picked and arrives at the facility, it’s the winemaker’s job to guide the grapes through the production process so they can make a wine that expresses their own unique terroir. Though you might have procedures and additions you often do, it’s your job to adapt to each vintage’s needs, rather than just completing a step because a recipe tells you to. Production protocols acknowledge those common procedures and additions without being prescriptive.

Having said that, fruit wine, cider, and mead-making often does proceed according to something closer to a formula. The inputs can be scaled to whatever batch size is required, and even though you’re working with agricultural products that vary from harvest to harvest, there’s less need to adapt to circumstances than with grape winemaking. What’s more, there’s often a greater desire for a result that’s more consistent from batch to batch and year to year, which can mean hitting key alcohol, sugar, and acidity targets. Let’s see how Blended’s production protocols can accomplish this.

Creating and Using Recipe-Based Protocols

To work with your production protocols, choose the “Production Protocols” option from the menu in the upper-right corner of the screen that’s linked to your cidery/meadery/winery name. 

That brings up a list of all your protocols and lets you edit and create them. When you’re creating or editing a protocol, you’ll see a checkbox for “is recipe”. Checking this checkbox causes Blended to treat these protocols a little differently.

We’ll describe how to build a recipe-based protocol in the next section. If your account has one or more recipe-based protocols, you’ll see a “Create from Recipe” option in the orange “Create” menu in the upper-right corner of the screen if you’re in the production part of the application (which you get to by clicking on the drop icon in the left-hand navigation bar).

When you create a lot from a recipe, it brings up a dialog letting you choose the recipe-based protocol, and after you enter the lot size you want to make it will estimate how much you need of your main inputs (which allows you to check to make sure you have enough of everything):

Once your lot is created, you can work with it just the same as any other lot in Blended.

Designing Cider, Mead, and Fruit Wine Protocols

Let’s work with an example mead recipe. This example is simplified and doesn’t have any additions for yeast nutrients, preservatives, clarifying agents, etc., and the protocol is missing a lot of the steps you’d need, but it should illustrate the main concepts:

Off-dry mead (100-gallon batch)

• Mix:

• 75 gallons water

• 300 lb honey

• Measure standard gravity and adjust water or honey to reach a target SG of 1.100

• Measure pH and add citric acid to reach a target pH of 3.50

• Fermentation:

• Innoculate with 1.0 g/gal yeast

• Ferment to dryness

• Post-fermentation:

• Sterile filter with 0.45 micron media

• Backsweeten with table sugar to reach SG of 1.010

For our inputs to this recipe, we specify them as concentrations, either percentages of total target lot volume for liquids, or weight/volume ratio for dry ingredients (e.g. g/L or lb/gal). When you go through the workflow to record the addition, Blended will scale the addition to the size of the lot, so for example if you’re making a 500-gallon batch, it will tell you to add 375 gallons of water and 1500 pounds of honey.

To do this, in the production protocol’s water addition step, specify a concentration of 75% (75 gallons/100 gallons), and for honey, specify 3 lb/gal (300 lb/100 gal):

If you want to get a really consistent result from batch to batch, it’s good practice to measure your gravity after the ingredients are well-mixed to see if you’re at the target gravity for the recipe and make adjustments if necessary. Honey can vary in its moisture content and won’t always give you quite the same sugar concentration.

In this example, we want the SG to hit a target of 1.100, and we’ll add more honey if it’s too low and more water if it’s too high. Similarly, we want to measure pH and add citric acid to bring it to a target of 3.50. Here’s where Blended’s addition calculators can come into play. Add a protocol step to take those measurements, both to remind you to do that, and to ensure you’ve collected the numbers and entered them in the software. Follow that up with a pair of addition steps, “Add water to adjust gravity” and “Add honey to adjust gravity”, and you can do whichever step is appropriate for your situation and ignore the one that’s not. (Don’t forget that carrying out any production protocol step in Blended is always optional, and you can always do anything you like outside the protocol). For both those addition steps, Give it a measurement addition type, specify SG as the measurement, and enter the target value of 1.1:

Let’s see what the honey adjustment looks like in practice. Let’s suppose you’ve mixed up a 100-gallon batch, measured SG, and it came in low at 1.097. If you click on the button for the honey adjustment, it will bring up the dialog in measurement mode with the last measured SG and target SG filled out. Make sure you’ve chosen a unit for the calculated value – we’ll use pounds since we want to measure the honey in pounds, and it does the calculation for us to tell us we need 12.8 pounds of extra honey. 

Note that it assumes the honey itself has an SG of 1.368, which is a little less than 73 brix. In the future we’ll let you specify the brix of your honey if you know it so you can really dial the calculation in.

Similarly for the citric acid calculation, if you’ve entered in a pH measurement, it can look that up and tell you how much you need to add to reach your target pH of 3.50.

After that, the protocol proceeds much the same as any other protocol. We’ve omitted most of the steps in the middle so we can show an example of a final post-filtration addition of sugar to give the mead a touch of sweetness. That backsweetening works with our final SG measurement at the end of fermentation to ensure we hit our bottling target gravity of 1.010.

Protocol name: Off-dry mead

Protocol type: Mead

Is recipe: Yes

• Mixing

• Add water
  Addition: Water 75.0 %

• Add honey
  Addition: Honey 3.0 lb/gal

• Measure gravity, pH
  Measurement: SG, pH

• Add water to adjust gravity
  Addition: Water to reach SG of 1.100

• Add honey to adjust gravity
  Addition: Honey to reach SG of 1.100

• Citric acid
  Addition: Citric acid to reach pH of 3.50

• Fermentation

• Yeast
  Addition :Yeast 1.0 g/gal

• Post-fermentation measurements
  Measurement: SG, pH, TA, Alcohol

• Post Fermentation

• Sterile filtration
  Action: Filter 0.45 microns

• Sugar to backsweeten
  Addition :Sugar to reach SG of 1.010

Working with Materials

Cider and mead makers don’t deal with vineyards the way grape winemakers do, and don’t have the same grape intake and processing workflows, but they can use Blended’s material inventory features to track their raw ingredients alongside the additives, packaging, and other goods that everyone uses. While using material inventory is optional, if you keep good track of what’s on hand you can make sure you have enough fermentables and other ingredients available before you start a new lot. What’s more, when it comes time to file your TTB 5120 report, Blended can track those materials in Parts III and IV of the report, making it easy to put together your filings.

When creating materials, you can give your fermentables a Type of Non-Grape Fermentables to help keep organized:

It works best if you keep the Product category underneath the type as something a little general, like “Honey” or “Apples”, and for a product name you can be more specific, like the flower source for the honey or variety of apple. When you receive individual batches, you could code them with the supplier and lot code information. This is a suggestion, and if you’d like to use category/product/batch names in a different way, that’s fine.

To have Blended pick them up and categorize them properly in your TTB 5120 report, you need to take another step and edit your newly created materials so you can specify some extra information that’s not in the initial creation form:

If you assign a Tax class to the material, Blended will include it in the proper place in parts III and IV of your TTB 5120 report. There are classifications for your dry and liquid sugars, and other fermentables such as fruit and honey fall under “Materials Other Than Grape”. If you’re using spirits to make fortified products, then choose a tax class of “Spirits” (the “Spirits Containing Aldehydes” is a different category that pertains to distillates largely not intended to be added to wine), and enter the proof of the spirits you’re using in the Proof field so Blended can do the proper proof gallon calculation for the report. If you’re using different types of spirits with different proof values, then create different materials for each.

Other Production Tips

There are a couple more things you can do to streamline Blended’s user interface a bit if you’re not making grape wines. If you never need to deal with vineyards, you can uncheck “Enable vineyard tab” in the account settings accessible from the menu in the upper-right corner of the screen:

Also, in your production screens, you can disable the intake section, which is primarily intended for receiving grapes. If you’re not doing long-term barrel aging, you can disable the topping section, which is part of a workflow for recording the replacement of evaporative losses. If you click on the small pencil icon to the right of the tab names, it will bring up a tab editor:

This tab editor will be improved in the future to make it much easier to use, but in the meantime you can use it to hide those features by unchecking the boxes in the “Intake” and “Topping” columns:

That’s about it! No matter if you’re a winery, cidery, or meadery, or if you’re doing even more interesting things, Blended’s flexibility can adapt to your workflow and help you stay organized and compliant.