Don Genova's Blog

This week on Island Artisans I told the tale of how one of the most authentic 'perry' ciders came to be made once again on Vancouver Island, at Sea Cider Farm and Ciderhouse.

These days with so much of our fruit imported to BC from all over the world, it’s easy to forget that this province, and especially this part of Vancouver Island, was once a haven of agricultural diversity.  We’ve lost a lot of the heritage species of fruit trees that were brought here by the early settlers, but every so often, a forgotten fruit pops up and once again thrives.

Back in 2007, an abandoned orchard was discovered on the Saanich Peninsula.  In the orchard, about a dozen pear trees.  Not culinary pears, though, perry pears; that is, pears that have to be crushed, with the resulting juice fermented into a pear cider.

The perry pear has so much tannin in it your mouth might pucker shut permanently. Alistair Bell (in the photo at left) was the cidermaker when someone from the BC Fruit Testers Association brought the old perry trees to notice.

When he first tasted them, they were so astringent just a tiny piece completely dried out his mouth.  Of the two varieties they harvested, both were small, about the size of limes.  One was shaped like a lime, the other, a pear in miniature. The only reason to have planted these trees would be to make perry from the fruit.

When the trees were found, the folks from Sea Cider asked the woman who owns the farm if she wanted them, but she had no use for them, so the first harvest took place in 2007, and Alistair started making perry.

It was certainly the first time he’d attempted making perry with authentic perry pears, and there wasn’t a lot to work with. In the photo are samples of the two different perrys that he made from the two different varieties. Then he added some fermented, oak-aged cider from some underripe Bartlett culinary pears that came into the cider house, which did affect the overall end result. 

Sea Cider did another harvest in 2009, and made a new perry, again a blend of perry pears and some culinary pears, but they were only able to make a total of 60 cases, now available at their shop and a few other places, check the website for more details..  Sea Cider co-owner Kristen Jordan explained to me that the trees are biennial, they only produce fruit every other year, so that’s why supplies are limited.

There aren’t a lot of companies making authentic apple or pear ciders in BC, there could be some sort of resurgence going on if Sea Cider and other cideries stick with crafting these unique blends. I think our palates are becoming much more sophisticated now, and more people are looking for different taste experiences.  It’s not going to be a fast process, but if you look at what our BC wine industry used to be like 30 years ago and how much it has improved, that will give the craftsmen on the island here like Sea Cider and Merridale Cider some optimism.  And Alistair Bell says if they continue to make the product, maybe more people will grow the kind of apples and pears they need to make the best tasting stuff.

Today on Island Artisans I talked about Geir Oglend and his family, who own and operate Drum Roaster Coffee in Cobble Hill, in the Valleyview Mall just off the Transcanada Highway in the Cowichan Valley.

More and more coffee shops across the province are roasting green coffee beans into the little brownie/black nuggets we’re used to seeing get ground up for our coffee beverages. Coffee drinkers have a growing awareness of the quality of our ingredients and the realization that there can be so much variation available to us in the flavour of a cup of coffee or espresso depending on where the coffee beans come from, how they are blended AND how they are roasted.

Geir Oglend's coffee shop, the Drum Roaster, is about a five-minute drive away from me in Cobble Hill.  He just installed a brand new Diedrich drum roasting machine and have enclosed it in a special glass-walled room so you can watch all the action, and that’s where we chatted about Geir’s fascination with coffee. He was born and raised in Norway, where coffee culture and appreciation was much more developed at that time than in North America, and Geir admits he loved coffee from the time he was a little kid.

So this love of coffee turned into his career, especially when he traveled around Europe, saw people lining up to get into cafes, and realized there could be an economic upside to this.  He had a small coffee shop in Norway, then when he moved to Victoria in 1988, started a coffee shop and hasn’t looked back since then.

Roasting your own beans is definitely another layer of art added to the raw product. When he started up the first coffee shop, and then went on to found Serious Coffee, which is an expanding chain of shops here on the Island, he realized he just wasn’t getting the quality, flavour and the freshness of roasted coffee he was used to in Europe, so he started roasting for himself. And when he left Serious Coffee behind he still wanted to maintain control of that quality, so even though he has just one coffee shop now, he roasts every bean that gets turned into a cup of coffee in the shop.  Now, I’ve been to other roasters, and many of them use computer programs to control the roaster temperature and timing, but Geir will have none of that, he says the computer can't take into account the variations in individual batches of beans, or the humidity, and it can't listen to the beans.

Part of what Geir listens for when he is roasting is something called the ‘first crack’, when the beans reach a certain temperature and you can hear them start crackling.  He usually stops before the ‘second crack’, at a higher temperature, because he thinks that’s where the flavour starts to break down. But every different type of bean can get a different treatment of time and temperature to get it just right.

Geir has a flavour and aroma wheel for coffee that lists some 600 different aromas and flavours you may get from coffees, and he does bring in green beans from around the world, as much as possible they are organic and fairly traded.  And I just have to mention again that the Drum Roaster is very much a family business.  One of Geir’s sons, Carson, helps him run the place and creates marvellous latte art, and Geir’s wife Pat makes from scratch every morning, wonderful baked goods. The Achilles’ heel of my diet are Pat's orange coconut brioches.  I try to limit myself to one a week…