514: Doing More With Lees | Ryan Monkman

Ria: [00:00:00] If you never worked with cider as a cider maker, you might not know that it’s both tactile, it’s a visual experience, it’s definitely about taste, and it’s most definitely about smell.

Ryan Monkman: The best way to tell a good one is if it smells nice. So if it smells nice, definitely keep it.

Ria: That’s working with cider.

If it smells nice, definitely keep it. But in this case, we’re not just talking about the liquid, we’re talking about something that is kind of a solid that comes about in the process of cider making, and that solid kind of glutinous mass is called lees. And just to be clear, it doesn’t have gluten in it.

Uh, there’s no gluten at all in cider. It’s just that it is kind of like a glutinous mass, which is kind of sticky and sediment-like, if you will. And we’re hearing from Ryan Monkman, a cider maker who was speaking on the techniques for working with lees at CiderCon [00:01:00] 2026, which was held in Providence, Rhode Island.

It is hosted by the American Cider Association. It’s at their annual trade conference. Now, I’ve known Ryan for a long time now, and he was one of those people who stepped up to me in the early days of Cider Chat with so much vibrancy and so much depth of knowledge that I immediately thought, “Holy cow, who is this person?”

Since then, Ryan has become one of Cider Chat’s go-to technical voices. We created the Ask Ryan series, where we’ve dug into everything from barrels and bâtonnage to gross lees, film yeast, bottle conditioning, yeast slurry, kind of that glutinous mass again, oxygen management, and how to avoid those dreaded bottle bombs.

And what we mean by that is where the bottle essentially explodes. It is a danger. There’s a whole episode on it. Basically, any chance I get to record Ryan, I do, because he has [00:02:00] one of the best skills of all. He can take something that feels really complex and make it simple, and that is worth its weight in gold.

So for this here episode, we’re heading back to CiderCon 2026 in Providence, Rhode Island, for Ryan’s presentation, Doing More With Lees. Yeah, it’s kind of a pun on there, you know, doing more with less. Lees, by the way, is spelled L-E-E-S. You’ll hear the full presentation right here on Cider Chat, and for those of you who want the visual side too, I’ll be syncing Ryan’s presentation with his PowerPoint for the Cider Chat YouTube channel.

But before we get there, I’ve got some news from out and about in Ciderville. Over at eCiderNews, cider just did something it has never done before. It led the August Beer Purchasers Index, coming in ahead of imports. Is that a sign of some momentum for cider in the US? We’re watching it. We also checked in on [00:03:00] Michigan as it heads into its own important fall cider season, where people are showing up, but they’re also watching what they spend.

And there’s an update to my remembrance of Ben Watson. Annie Card, a longtime friend of Ben’s, expanded on that story with her own remembrance, bringing another perspective to the life and legacy of someone who meant so much to the Apple community. You’ll find all those stories at eCiderNews, and if you subscribe to the newsletter, you’ll receive a recap of the latest cider news so you don’t have to go looking for it.

Also coming up, October 3rd, is Cider Feast in Brooklyn. If you’re in the New York area, I’ll have the ticket information in the show notes. And as for me, I’m counting up to the days until I head to France. You know, there really isn’t much that I, I need. Give me some cider, a baguette, and some cheese by an orchard in the autumn, and I am pretty much there.

There’s something about that moment that [00:04:00] absolutely resets my core. It’s tactile, it’s visual, it’s taste, and it is smell, smell, smell. Smell the orchard, the ground, the cider, the cheese. Oh, ooh, la la. And maybe that’s why cider continues to pull me back into these places, and why I love sharing them with other people.

I’ll be doing exactly that with this year’s Totally Cider tour in France, and I’ll be bringing some of those stories back to you. But now, let’s head to CiderCon 2026 in Providence, Rhode Island, and Ryan Monkman’s presentation, Doing More With Lees.

Ryan Monkman: I’m gonna talk to you a little bit about lees. We’ll also talk about how to get lees using stuff within your own cellar, or, you know, you can buy some products if you need to.

We’ll talk about how lees can get used in different cider making tasks within the cellar. Uh, that’s probably gonna be the bulk of what we talk about today. And then, uh, just a little bit of a, an [00:05:00] exercise at the end about how lees can be used to make, uh, three different styles of cider at different stages So I’m Ryan, um, coming down from Ontario.

I have an orchard and cidery called FieldBird in Prince Edward County. I work across Ontario and a little bit outside of that, mostly as a production consultant for cidery, um, wine, and spirit production with a focus on lees and oak and some avenues like that. What I’m gonna talk about is fine lees. When I just say the word lees, this is almost always what I’m talking about.

This is a byproduct of fermentation, mostly yeast, but there’s gonna be some bacteria and other things in there as well. And today we’re gonna talk about fresh, old, and cracked. Sometimes we’ll use the word tired instead of old, um, but those are kinda the three zones of fine lees we’re talking about: fresh, old, and cracked, and we’ll talk about each of those in stage.

There are other [00:06:00] kinds of lees, uh, gross lees. Gross lees are predominantly from the juice stage. So when you first get juice into the cellar and you settle it out, the, the stuff at the bottom, we tend to call those gross lees. Not a lot of yeast in there, a lot of stuff from the fruit itself. You’ll find that it kind of stratifies itself.

It starts from clear and ends up in, like, solid gunk at the bottom, and we’ll use the terms for those different zones as clear, wisp, cloud, and gunk. And there’s garbage lees. Garbage lees are like- Bentonite that you’ve thrown into a tank, uh, you know, anything with lots of copper in it, anything you, you wanna get rid of no matter what.

A couple more minor terms. We’re gonna talk about autolysis, which is when yeast self-destruct themselves on a timeline that, that seems to start happening after about nine months and continues from there. Lysis, which is when we destroy the yeast cells. We can do that [00:07:00] with enzyme, we can do that with some heat treatments, things like that.

Especially when dealing with lees, lees themselves are, are very reductive. They’ll absorb a lot of oxygen. So we talk about oxygen management, about how we use that at different stages. Sometimes we’re actively introducing oxygen. And then, um, my background is, is in wine, and the cider I mostly work with is bottled, so I probably use the word bottling a lot, but that, that includes cans too.

And then just thinking about how we use lees within our cellars, that everyone kinda has different comfort areas of, of where they’re at on their production. Um, some people take a very hands-off approach to production. Some people take a very hands-on approach to production. Some people kinda go guttural, let the fruit lead.

Other people say, “I’m gonna sculpt this into something I want.” And we talk about using lees or really any intervention in the cellar on a, a scale from [00:08:00] passive to active. So some examples when using lees, and, and we’ll get into each of these, is a passive approach is, you know, sur lie aging or just not filtering your cider as you get to the end.

So there are some lees involved in that, but you’re not doing anything to introduce them. The next step up would be something like bâtonnage, where you’re s- actively stirring the lees that are there to keep them in suspension to try to extract more out of them. Or bottle conditioning, so when you bottle, you add a little primer, a little bit of sugar, a little bit of juice to create bubbles within the bottle.

You’re actively using the yeast in the cider to produce those bubbles. Next, as we move up more active, we talk about recycling lees, which is where you take lees from one ferment and use it to do something in a different ferment. Um, or traditional sparkling, where we’re using aging on lees as an active component of it.

And then, uh, kinda on the far side of active [00:09:00] would be something like fault reduction. So maybe someone, uh, added a little more copper than they should have. We can use lees to strip that out or to remove some harsh tannin. Uh, or something called cracking, which is what we’ll get into at one point, which is a way to take lees, um, and essentially rupture the cell walls fairly quickly so that we can use them for things like aromatic components and nutrient in other ferments. Where do we get lees?

I work a lot with barrels. Getting the lees out really isn’t that difficult. Barrels are super easy ’cause they’re all small volume. Um, by the time you rack out the cider from them, there’s usually only about 10 liters, maybe 15 liters of, like, wet lees in there, and it’s very easy just to roll the barrel right over top of a container and then dump that into a bucket.

Uh, tanks get a little more tricky, especially as you’re [00:10:00] dealing with larger volumes because now you’re starting to scrape out the tank, and it’s really helpful to have a dig out door for that. But if you’re trying to siphon it through a, a bottom valve, I’d just recommend taking the valve off or using ball valves.

That way it doesn’t get clumped up so much. And having a dedicated squeegee. You wanna make sure that the squeegee you’re using to scrape out your tank for lees isn’t the same one that someone’s using in caustic soda. Um, when you get them, they’re gonna be pretty wet still. So an advantage of, of retaining your lees and resettling them, and it depends on your volume, maybe it’s a bunch of buckets, maybe it’s some smaller tanks, but kinda for the first few days, just let them resettle and you’ll find that they stratify again.

So you’ll get more dense lees at the bottom, and the top tends to be mostly clear cider, and you can retain that and put it back in the original batch. Um, there’s two great benefits [00:11:00] for that. One is you’re increasing your volume, but the second one is you’re condensing the lees you’re keeping, um, which makes them easier to store.

It also makes them a little more stable. So the more concentrated we get the lees, the, the more stable they’ll be, especially from oxygen, um, component and from less risk of spoiling. And once you’ve got them pretty dense, they’re, they’re very stable. Most of the time we just leave them with the lid on in a bucket in the cellar for a couple months until we use them for something else.

Um- Lees themselves can be very reductive when they come out of a ferment. So you only wanna keep the good ones, and the best way to tell a good one is if it smells nice. So if it smells nice, definitely keep it. If it’s kinda reductive, it’s on the fence, um, after you’ve, you’ve settled them, you can aerate them, whether that’s whipping them with a whisk for a while or actually injecting O2.

Either one of those is gonna be okay. The [00:12:00] yeast are gonna absorb it. It’s o- They’ll, um, they’ll go back to a reductive state later. But you might be able to blow off maybe some H2S and things like that, and if you can, great, keep ’em. If you’ve done a few things like adding oxygen or whipping them, and they’re still smelling gross, just get rid of them.

They’re not worth keeping. Um, and then when you take them, you wanna label them from the stage. This is, you know, Northern Spy primary ferment, um, or Northern Spy, uh, after malo (malo lactic fermentation), just so we know kinda where they’re at on the timeline of lees. And then as we talked earlier, we talked about kinda fresh lees or active lees and, you know, old lees.

Um, it’s a really quick way if you’re on the fence, you’re like, “This is a middle zone. It’s been like five, six months. I don’t know if they’re active or not,” just make some sugar water solution, throw a couple tablespoons in, and if it ferments overnight, they’re still active. If it doesn’t ferment, they’re not active anymore [00:13:00] You can do that with microscopes and stuff like that, but that’s a lot more boring.

The sugar test is pretty quick, reliable enough, and it’s kind of fun. So that’s how we can, like, get, um, these out of our cellar. I’m gonna touch on cracking a bit, um, which is a way to Break down the yeast walls of the cell so that it stops being a mechanism for fermentation. Essentially, the, you’ve, you’ve destroyed the yeast cell, but you’ve kept the qualities of it.

So what are the qualities we’re looking for? One is a lot of aromatic precursors that a subsequent ferment can use. Uh, another one is yeast themselves are cannibals. So if we dump in a bunch of dead yeast, we’ll get a bunch of food for future yeast Um, there’s a couple ways [00:14:00] to do this. The simplest is a freeze-thaw cycle.

So we have the buckets, putting them in a deep freezer till they freeze solid, taking them out and letting them thaw. Repeating that process a few times. What’s gonna happen is ice crystals form within the cell walls. As it thaws, they break open. You repeat that process, and it starts to denature them pretty quick.

There’s also a way to do this with thermovinification, um, which requires some fairly large equipment. What is thermovinification? Thermovinification is we’re taking, uh, must typically, and we’re heating it up. Can I– I can’t convert to Fahrenheit in my head. I’m sorry. We’re, we’re heating it up to about eighty-five, eighty-eight degrees Celsius, which is, uh, probably one eighty, somewhere in that ballpark, one eighty-five, something like that.

Um, heating it up very quickly and then putting it into a vacuum chamber. [00:15:00] So- Yeah, this is, this is like, you know, far on the, uh, active participation zone. So when you put it into the vacuum chamber, um, when it comes to, say, juice or, or pulp, you extract a lot of flavor out of the, the fruit itself. You also evaporate off any VA that might be present, and you kill any, like Botrytis and other spoilers, organisms that might be present.

So from a, a baseline production, why its thermovinification is very helpful is that you can make a fairly clean product from fairly unclean fruit. That’s one use case for it. There are other use cases. Um, but in the case of passing lees through it, that heat vacuum rupture process cracks the lees very, very quickly, so they’re ready to use right away.

Um, it’s something you would [00:16:00] do if you had access to the equipment, but I wouldn’t, like, drive across town to do it. So you can also do a similar thing with, with a pasteurizer, where you’re heating and cooling. Can you go a little bit higher in temp? You need to go above boiling, yeah. Yeah. Freezing and thawing, is that safe to say it probably does that with all of the organisms that are alive in the- Um, it does it with a lot.

I’ve, I’ve never plated for other organisms out of, uh, like a freeze-thaw. Uh, it would depend on the temperature you freeze to. The colder you freeze, the more that’s gonna get ruptured. Um, but there are definitely some bacteria that would be able to survive in kinda whatever freezer technology we have access to.

That, that would be impervious to this. So- Anything that people say is like, “Oh, it’s– if you’re freezing something with quality, you wanna do this,” don’t do that. You’re, you’re looking to destroy it, break it down. Um, we, yeah, we do this with [00:17:00] during harvest, early ferments we’ll take some lees from, freeze the lees, thaw ’em, freeze the lees, thaw ’em.

And it’s basically you go in one day, you chuck it in the freezer, you go the next day, you take it out. The next day you put it back in. We do that for like a week or so. Yeah. Uh, I noticed you specifically didn’t mention IBC lee harvest joys associated with that. I- IBCs are cage tanks, right? Yeah. Like the, like, uh, 250 gallon- Huge.

Yeah, yeah, everyone… We’re using those a lot, right? Oh, yeah. And you guys know the rock technique to get stuff out of it? Little, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hoping for the best. Um, if you have forklifts with a rotator, you can do that. If you don’t have that, um, by the time you get to the lees, the tanks themselves aren’t that heavy anymore.

We’ve taken most of it out. So we can do the rock, or if you can elevate with some beams, and couple people literally just roll the cage on top of it so you have the lid at the bottom, [00:18:00] open the lid into a bucket. We’ve done that before. That, that works a lot smoother. You can add water, it just takes a long time to resettle and get out, and you wanna make sure if you’re trying to keep them as active lees, you’re not using hot water, you’re using cool water.

But yeah, we can add water, resettle. Um, I find that if you get the volume low enough, if you roll it up onto, you know, some pallets just to elevate the corners, you can get under there with a bucket. That was a really good question, ’cause, like, those things are an absolute nightmare. Yeah. Yeah, and like I’ve slapped one on my toe doing the rock thing before, and yeah, those are not fun Again, let me pitch barrels on you.

Barrels are always fun and, like, only kind of ridiculously expensive.

Um, the, the reason you’d wanna crack is, um, we, we look at [00:19:00] lees… Again, everything’s a spectrum. There’s really active lees, which we’re talking tons of yeast culture. I- if they get introduced to any sort of sugar, they’re gonna ferment like crazy, you know, a massive sourdough starter essentially, right? And we talk about lees that aren’t active anymore.

So we did the sugar test, they’re not fermenting anything. But those can often be fairly tired, fairly reduced. They’ve sat in a tank or a cage or a barrel for, for months and months and months, um, and there’s nothing really that interesting going on with them anymore. We’ve taken everything cool out of them.

So the benefit of cracking is we take an active yeast and we make it not active anymore, but it’s still fresh, it’s still aromatic, um, and it hasn’t had time to, to get dull yet. So this is very helpful during the harvest process or during early stage ferments because we can add them in, [00:20:00] um, as a bit of a nutrient base.

Uh, we gotta be careful because they will at the same time increase reduction, so you may start smelling some reduction, which isn’t necessarily a nutrient fault. But they’re also full of aromatic precursors, which can make it pretty delicious and will increase your level of mannoprotein later, which we’ll get into a bit.

Anyone know who that is? I think according to Google Yeah. There you go. Uh, don’t keep sh- stuff that’s awful. You gotta know when to, to run away essentially. Um, and there’s different use for different y- uh, different lees, which is why we’re labeling them. So cracked during fermentation, um, fresh for, you know, ferments, culture.

Their fresh yeast or r- lees are really good for fault reduction. Uh, old lees, especially if they’re past that nine-month mark where autolysis [00:21:00] is really starting to go, are great for mouthfeel additions It’s like cooking. If you have disgusting lees, though, they’re gonna make the food worse. If something’s gross or you don’t like the smell of it, just dump it in the, in the orchard somewhere.

Um, there’s also products you can buy. I’m not really gonna touch on them much today, but basically every supplier sells stuff made from dead yeast cells or denatured yeast cells. Products with juice detox, uh, non-DAP nutrients, which are really great for trying to push things like esters. Um, enzymes to break down the yeast that you have, and you can even now just buy straight mannoprotein to dose in.

I’m hoping that’s the end of the boring stuff. Um, keep asking questions. Let’s go into some cider making stages and ways to, to actively use lees. So in fermentation, we’re gonna kinda touch on gross lees here again and then stop [00:22:00] talking about them again. After you’ve settled your juice, we talk with wisp, cloud gunk.

Deciding what of that to take can really impact, uh, especially texture of your ferments. So the further down you go, the more reductive your ferment is likely gonna be, all other things being equal. However, you are able to, um, build a lot more complex chains through the fermentation process and get richer texture and, and some different aromatics.

Um, but it does take active management once you get kind of below the bottom of the cloud. Once you start taking gunk, you gotta really be on top of oxygen, uh, during your fermentation You can also use lees as a culture. There’s, there’s kind of different ways to do this. One is to take fresh lees from another ferment and recycle it.

Um, cider is really good for this because the alcohol levels tend to be pretty low. Um, yeast have this [00:23:00] terrible thing where they kill themselves, and, uh, when you’re, when you’re dealing with wine or spirit production, once your alcoholic volumes get kind of beyond 12%, you start having essentially suicide by yeast go on, and as you get closer up to about 16, 18%, they’re just done.

What’s great about cider is mostly we’re talking under 10%, so we never cross that line. So essentially we can perpetually reuse these cultures for ferments. So, um, there’s even a couple cideries I’ve, I’ve worked with that essentially have a, a house culture. They’re fermenting every two weeks, and they’re just re-pitching about half of whatever lees come out of the ferment.

They re-pitch into the next tank and just keep it going like that, which is kind of a neat way to do it. It maintains some consistency in the ferments, and it’s also just a really neat story to talk to, um, at the farm gate. There’s [00:24:00] also ways we can do pied de cuve, which is especially if you’re sweating apples, pressing out a little bit of it first or harvesting a few apples earlier, fermenting those, and then using that as a starter for the rest of the batch as it comes in.

So one of the advantages of doing that is if you wanna be doing a lot of spontaneous ferments, you can start with, say, six different ones in smaller tanks and then just pick the one you like most to use as the, the starter for the rest of the batch. If during the fermentation juice phase we have a stuck ferment or juice comes in from a farm you’re a little nervous about the spraying practices of, maybe you’re worried there’s maybe, um, sulfur or copper usage that are kinda outside the realms of where you want your yeast to live during the ferment, adding some older lees into it can help strip that stuff out.

Uh, similarly, if you have a stuck ferment, [00:25:00] it’s very helpful to put old lees in it to remove any toxins that might be present before trying to restart. So that can strip out some of the stuff that’s interfering with the fermentation. Yeah? The question is, what mechanism is old lees essentially stripping out things like copper?

The reason the copper’s interfering with the fermentation in the first place is ’cause it’s getting into the yeast cells. We essentially put in sacrificial yeast cells to take up all the, the poison, if you will, for the yeast, and we’re just sacrificing yeast that we know is not going to ferment it, but is just taking the place of the yeast we want to absorb things like copper.

Um, sulfur’s a little trickier, but, um, a lot of other fungicides that would negatively impact your fermentation will target yeast. We throw in our sacrificial lees, they [00:26:00] absorb that out, you rack off of it, and your juice has a lot fewer of it in it Uh, and then also in fermentation, touched on this before, but y- yeast are carnivores, so they’ll eat the bodies of older yeast to produce new yeast.

During, uh, élevage or, um, um, cellaring We talk a lot about, uh, bâtonnage, which is lees that are in suspension, whether that’s from the fermentation or introduced by us, and keeping them in suspension. So actually physically getting in there and stirring them, um, every two weeks, something like that. Uh, your equipment changes how you do this.

Barrels, there’s a special tool called baton you can scrape them with. Uh, cage tanks, we’ve worked this before. I find the most efficient way, especially if you have a lot of cage tanks, is, I’m Canadian, I’m sorry, using a canoe paddle works pretty well [00:27:00] just to get in there and mix things up. As we increase our tank size, that’s when you start to rely more on nitrogen bubbling, um, or, or circulation pumping.

But I like to do nitrogen bubbling ’cause it’s just easier, and you don’t have to clean as much equipment. The taller your, your column compared to your, your surface area, the more frequently to, to have proper bâtonnage you need to be stirring to keep everything in suspension. So a very tall, narrow tank, you’re probably doing it every five days versus, uh, the reason I put this picture is in the back there’s a milk tank, which is like a horizontal tank.

It’s actually quite shallow, but a very large surface area on the bottom, and they’re only doing that every two weeks ’cause it’s about the same dimensions as a horizontal barrel. And the reason for bâtonnage is just increasing surface area of cider on lees. There is a mechanism where you can just leave it, [00:28:00] let it settle and age it, and you’ll still get some mannoprotein, um, which is, like, a key component in mouthfeel, and you’ll still get some autolysis characteristics into the cider, but it’ll be very slow, and it’ll be very minimal.

Um, if we’re constantly increasing the surface area, that process is just a lot smoother, and you extract more. Um, the way I think about it is, like, if you’re making tea, if you leave the tea bag in at the bottom, it just takes longer. But if you move it up and down, you can get a cup of tea pretty quick. Uh, and, and another real good reason to keep lees on hand is for faults.

I mean, each, each of these faults, uh, does have different ways you can deal with them. The benefit of using lees is it, it’s already something from your cellar. It’s already something you’ve created. You’re not necessarily, um, taking something off the shelf, introducing something you may feel uncomfortable with or spending money on something you don’t wanna spend money on.[00:29:00]

So right off the bat, a very easy fault to correct with lees is oxidation. Um, the earlier we catch it, the better But adding lees, especially fresh lees, because them-themselves are such a reductive state, they’ll pull some of that oxygen out of the bonds and reduce oxidation. If oxidation’s gone very far, this isn’t gonna be curative, but it does take the edge off.

If it’s only mild oxidation, this can work very well and really freshen things up. Harsh tannin, especially under-ripe tannin, gets balanced out by, uh, mannoprotein especially, but other things that the yeast themselves are releasing can really form, like, the spiderweb, uh, perception that people are tasting.

So green tannin can get balanced out by further lees additions, especially with bâtonnage. A solution that works very well if there’s copper or heavy metal, whether that’s from the juice stage or from [00:30:00] cellar interaction, and that could be anything from, “It was a very reductive ferment, and I needed to add a lot of copper,” to the, “Someone messed up the calculation on the copper add, and now we have a lot of copper in here,” to, you know, copper is used in agriculture, and sometimes the juice coming in, especially if it’s a farm that’s habitually been using copper, can be quite high.

Like we talked about before, lees will be sacrificial and jump in the way, absorb it, and fall out. It’s very important, if you’re using lees for this, as soon as they settle out, you rack off and you get rid of those because the copper will form new, uh, copper sulfide bonds and re-release into the cider. So as soon as it’s, it’s kinda done, get rid of those lees and, and dump ’em.

And then, like we talked earlier, whether stuck fermentation is a fault or not, I don’t really know, but it can be very helpful in the process of stuck fermentation, both from the, the stripping aspect of it, and then [00:31:00] if you’re using fresh lees as an inoculum for it because you have a, a yeast culture that is, uh, already built up for some alcohol tolerance And, uh, bottling, canning, kegging.

It gets a little tricky ’cause once something’s sealed, you can’t undo it. So it’s really important to know your numbers, especially on malolactic fermentation, whether something’s gone through or not, and residual sugar. If we just introduce lees into something that has some sugar in it, it’ll definitely ferment in bottle, and that might not turn out the way you want it to.

Um, if you’re planning to go that route, say from bottle condition or traditional method, great. Just make sure you’re going in with a plan and you know what the actual numbers are. I’m sure a lot of people in the room have experience, but for MLF, we can use chromatography pretty inexpensively in the, the cellar to figure out if we’re through or not.

For residual sugar, [00:32:00] there’s a product that used to be called Clinitab, now it’s called Fermintest. It’s like 10 times the price, but still pretty cheap. If you want to be adding lees, and you don’t want it to go through malolactic, uh, or secondary fermentation, there are ways we can do that. Uh, you know, check your local rules, especially around lysozyme.

But there’s enzymes that can be added to stop malolactic fermentation. We can use pasteurization or just leave it untouched if that’s what we wanna do. But the real goal here is make sure you’re going in with a plan, especially if you’re doing bottle conditioning, that you have a nutrition plan so that it doesn’t go too reductive in bottle.

If we’re bottling with lees, uh, and this has more to do with the consumer aspect of it, we wanna make sure we’re making active choices about how we’re storing it, if we’re storing them vertical or storing them horizontal, and what glass we’re using. So if you’re storing them horizontal, just right off the bat, I’m gonna recommend you use dark glass, um, because when someone goes to stand it [00:33:00] up later, it’s got like a skid mark on it which can be unappealing.

If storing vertical, which is really great, especially for bottle condition and still, ’cause we’ll get kind of a more concentrated bottom, so we get more cider itself, you gotta be careful of what closure you’re using. If you’re using screw cap or crown cap, it’s not an issue. If you’re using cork, you wanna make sure you’re using a cork that can store vertically without liquid contact, something like a, a DM.

Um, a lot of corks have to be stored horizontal to stay sealed

There’s a question back there? Just really quick. Uh, when you say reductive, I’m guessing you’re referring to, like, sulfur production, like H2S and stuff? Sulfur, H2S. Um, we get issues where we think it’s getting better, right? Oh, I just left it alone and the H2S is going away, but, like, behind our back it’s switching to things like mercaptans.

Right. Yeah. And then that’s really hard to get rid of. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So we wanna make sure we’re on top of that. When you’re bottling with lees, where you’re hoping this [00:34:00] product is gonna taste good three months from now, you’re also hoping it’s gonna taste good when someone finds it in their cupboard three years from now.

That reduction’s really important, because people can forgive a little bit of, like, rotting egg that blows off quickly in their glass, but they don’t wanna open something and it to taste like onion and rubber. And then what was a really good cider three years ago, now it’s, that’s how they think of your cidery.

So that’s why we wanna make sure we’re avoiding that. I really like bottle-conditioned ciders But I think one of the things that we do kind of as, as cider makers is say, “I’m gonna keep all of the lees in it. I’m gonna take my tank, I’m gonna stir it right before I bottle so there’s tons of culture in there.”

And what ends up happening is with even a little bit of pressure, you get bombs, which is fine if you’re going into it knowing that. But if you’re not used to that or you open it on your kitchen counter, it just becomes a mess and a headache for consumers. So one thing to think about is [00:35:00] the more lees you’re including, the lower pressure to target.

Once you start getting close to, like, one and a half bar, you wanna really have smaller cultures. It’s gonna take longer for that bottle conditioning to happen, uh, ’cause you’re going into there with less bioload. But the end result is fewer bottle bombs. If you’re dosing for, like, an ancestral or traditional cider, how do you figure out how much lees to dose it?

You can bench trial. Um, if, if you’re in a position where, you know, you’re a month or two away from bottling or even just a month, you can take a couple bottles and essentially dose in, this is with half the lees content or three quarters or full. Put them in a warm spot, and if they’re in a warm spot, within two weeks, they’ve probably consumed any of the sugar that’s in there.

And you’ll get a good feel for kinda what their eruptions are like. And then also just O2 is really [00:36:00] important with ancestral method. Um, ancestral bottles very often are reduced. Often when we’re doing ancestral, we’re also not adding nutrients at the time of bottling for, for various reasons. One of them is it’s not that much to ferment, so you don’t wanna add extra nutrient.

Um, often there’s a big overlap between ancestral and not adding nutrients at all. So we just wanna make sure that we’re giving enough oxygen into the cider going into bottle, that there’s space for it to work its way through. Uh, oxygen makes happy yeast babies. Remember I said if you’re gonna age it on the side, use, uh, dark bottles?

Mm. Yeah, I speak from experience. So, uh, traditional, there’s different ways to, to use the lees. The question is to build a new culture or not. Um, that’s kind of an in-house decision. The benefits of building up a culture is you can make something very robust, very clean. The benefit of keeping a culture from your cellar [00:37:00] is that it, it kinda keeps that characteristic that you’ve already created in it.

Questions are, are time surly, so about nine months of aging horizontally, we’re gonna start to get the bready character, and we’ll start to get some of the better mouthfeel and things like that. And that will continue for up to ten years. It’ll continue increasing. So you get to decide when you pull the trigger on disgorging the batch.

If you’re looking for something very fruity, maybe it’s just under the nine months. In, in Canada, there’s a rule it has to be nine months to be called traditional method. I don’t know if that’s a rule in America. Um, but kinda deciding when to pull the trigger on disgorging has a lot to do with what cider you’re trying to make.

The benefit of traditional method is that when you do do disgorging, you can add a, a bit of a correction in dosage if you need to. So you have to be a little less worried about, say, oxygen, ’cause if you need to, you can do a small copper addition at the dosage phase. And then glass choice. [00:38:00] If you’re hand-riddling, clear is a little tricky.

If you’re using a machine to riddle, dark glass is great. Okay. Things to be mindful of when using lees in the cellar. Again, oxygen management, especially if you’re increasing the dose. So if you’re taking lees from other ferments and adding them into a ferment, you’re significantly increasing, um, how reduced that’s gonna be, and you need to make sure you’re on top of oxygen management.

During active fermentation, um, you know, yeast are gonna take a bunch of oxygen. You can do pump overs. You can pump in oxygen most of the time, and the yeast will just stop producing alcohol for a little bit, produce a bunch more happy babies, and then keep going. And it’ll keep the reduction a little bit lower.

Like we touched on earlier, H2S switches to things like mercaptans, which are kinda more revolting, uh, and significantly harder to deal with. So we wanna make sure we’re catching things early. [00:39:00] When we’re adding lees, we are increasing the nitrogen in the cider. This is especially something to be mindful of if there’s acetobacter or other bacteria that you’re worried about in the cider.

Um, you’re essentially giving the bad stuff food too And then, like we touched on earlier, if you’re using this to remove heavy metals or especially copper, um, with time, the copper that’s absorbed by yeast will reform copper sulfide compounds and re-release into the cider. So just make sure you get rid of it.

Same thing if you do a copper add into a tank, get rid of those lees within a few weeks. Any questions on that before I jump in? Yeah. Just curious about, uh, the effectiveness of bâtonnage in the timeline of autolysis. Like, if you’re doing bâtonnage really, really early, is that really doing much, or is it more- So the question is, um, when, when doing bâtonnage, when is it most effective?

In the first few [00:40:00] months before the autolysis is really kicked on, or after those nine months or so, after a few months once autolysis is in full swing? Um, kind of both. Um, we’re getting some other compounds released from the yeast earlier on, especially aromatics from fermentation, like the yeast hold in some of that as trapped gas that gets released.

So some bâtonnage early on does increase the aromatics within the cider. When it comes to especially mannoprotein, which is that, like, nice creaminess, um, that you get from lees aging, that’s far more effective after nine months. So-

They’re kind of both effective. Um, if you’re looking for mouthfeel, it is more effective later. If you’re looking for, uh, aromatics, like secondary aromatics, it’s more effective earlier. It also doesn’t take very long, so I would just do it, do it a bunch. Uh- We haven’t tested other ways, but, [00:41:00] uh, in barrels at least for– We also do wines, so maybe this isn’t as…

But, uh, we bâtonnage, uh, every other week for the first two months, and then once a quarter for the next until it’s 18 months of age. So that was like they’re saying they do it basically every second week for the first few months, and then every three months, once every three months or so after that. Ish, yeah.

Yeah. It’s on the calendar- As- But then it gets bumped. Yeah. The, the longer you’re aging something, like the more time you have to work with this. And, and again, that’s where we talk about the actual shape of the, the vessel matters a lot. We’re trying to keep things in suspension. If the tank is more horizontal, you don’t necessarily need to do it as frequently ’cause there’s more surface area touching at any given point.

If it’s a very tall tank, very narrow, uh, you don’t have a lot of surface area, so you need to be more active with it. There was a question back here as well. Yeah. Yeah. So the, the question essentially [00:42:00] is, “If we’re constantly opening things up to stir them, we’re introducing a lot of oxygen. If we’re worried about oxidation in the storage process, then are we kinda working against ourselves there?”

Is that, is that fair? Um- Yes and, and no. So one thing is we’re introducing small amounts of oxygen over time, which can really help, uh, especially if it’s a tannic cider, with tannin development and tannin chains and smoothing out those corners. It can also create, um, different kinds of aromatic compounds, uh, that link together that produce a, a different aromatic profile in the cider without necessarily oxidizing out aromatics if we’re doing it slowly.

When we’re doing bâtonnage, there’s a lot of trapped CO2 within the cider. Uh, when we’re, when we’re mixing it, it’s not necessarily air that’s right above it, it’s, it’s CO2 being released from the cider, and essentially it’s blanketing itself as we’re going through the [00:43:00] process. There is, of course, mixing of oxygen within that, but at the same time we’re bringing into suspension something that’s very reductive and will bond to some free oxygen, fall back out of suspension.

Um, I don’t have the exact numbers, but, but lees can absorb a tremendous amount of oxygen and stay on the reductive side. Yeah. What… If you, if you crack your yeast and, and you bâtonnage with that, how much does that reduce the time that you need to be in storage? So the question is, if you cracked lees and then used those for bâtonnage, could you reduce the storage time?

Yeah, but you’re introducing a huge amount of nitrogen without a bioload to absorb it, and that’s gonna feed things like Acetobacter. So I would use cracked lees on the, the fermentation side as opposed to on the cellaring side. If your goal is to try to decrease the, the autolysis time, and you’re looking into [00:44:00] that vein a little more, there are enzymes you can get like beta-glucosminase and things like that that will break down the cell walls of the l- yeast and make that autolysis happen within about two, three weeks as opposed to nine months.

So essentially it’s, it’s the same mechanism that the yeasts do it themselves, it’s just you’re doing it faster in the same way that, um, pectinase can settle juice faster. I wanna do a fun little… I hope it’s fun. For me, it’s fun. Uh, looking at kind of like three different wines. I didn’t know what to call the last wine.

I don’t think cool’s the right name. But if we’re looking at let’s produce three different ciders, one of them we wanna just drive fresh aromatics, one of them we wanna create like a real texture bomb where someone thinks, “Hey, is this, you know, a milkshake?” And the third one is just do weird stuff. So Weird stuff probably isn’t the phrase that should be used Then innovative.

Innovative. There you go. That’s his favorite word. Yeah, [00:45:00] yeah. Uh, so when… And then I’m gonna go through kinda different stages, and we’ll do this quickly. Um, in the fermentation side, in the juice fermentation side, from the fresh one, you’re probably looking at keeping the cloud, which will help with a little bit of reductive, uh, fermentation, but not keeping any of the gunk, which would create kind of a lot of texture.

And then using cracked lees to increase the reduction during the fermentation. Um, you know, this is one of those oxygen is our, our frenemy. Sometimes we wanna reduce oxygen, sometimes we wanna increase it, but a reductive ferment can lead to very, uh, interesting s- positive sulfur compounds. So maybe we’re using cracked lees, not only for nutrient, but also to increase the reductiveness of the ferment.

Um, but we’re not gonna keep it that way for a long time. From the texture side, we’re gonna keep some of the gunk. We know that when, when we start introducing [00:46:00] gunk, that’s gonna absorb all of the oxygen that we want in our fermentation. So we’re gonna be proactive, and we’re gonna macro ox it. We’re gonna actively try to oxidate the juice as much as we can, whether that’s pumping in straight O2, or just mixing it like crazy for a couple days.

The basic premise there is anything we oxidize before fermentation won’t oxidize after fermentation. And we’re not looking for fresh aromatics, we’re looking for texture, and this is a great way to build texture. And, uh, we’ll do a spontaneous ferment because we have all of this stuff from the orchard that’s gonna be in suspension.

Nothing we do is gonna stop that train, so we’ll just encourage it. But because it’s gonna be so, uh, reductive from absorbing all the oxygen, maybe we’re gonna introduce another round of oxygen halfway through the ferment to, um, help the yeast breed a little bit smoother. From the cool side, either inoculating with fresh lees or doing the pied de cuve, where you, you know, do a few spontaneous ferments from a [00:47:00] smaller batch, pick the one you like, and introduce it.

On the élevage stage, to keep something fresh, we’re gonna rack, uh, pretty quick after harvest. We’re gonna save those lees, ’cause they’re gonna be really fresh, active lees to use in our other programs. Um, what we may do at this point as well is use some enzymes to help release any stuck aromatics of suspended yeast On the texture cider, we’re gonna certainly rack off the heavy gunk at this stage.

So any bits of seeds or skin that’s in there, we wanna get rid of that. You know, mice, whatever. Um, we’ll check the lees. So we’ll rack off the fine lees. We’ll check them to make sure that they’re clean and we wanna keep them, and if we wanna keep them, we’ll introduce them. Maybe they just need a bit of oxygen.

We can do that and keep them. And then to keep the texture train running, we’re doing frequent bâtonnage. And then on the cool side, um, rack, similar process. Maybe [00:48:00] the lees need a bit of oxygen. Reintroduce and hold in tank, but not necessarily stir. We’re looking for kind of a slow process there. So we’re, at this stage, we’re getting one thing ready to bottle, one we’re gonna pack away till next year, and one we have no idea what we’re gonna do with On the bottling side, to keep things fresh, maybe we’re doing a traditional sparkling fermentation with adding a new culture, and we’re gonna do a very short sur lie period, kind of whatever the minimum our government will allow us to do.

I don’t know if there is a minimum here. Someone can shout it out if there is one. No. All right, cool. Re- like, I can put something for, like, two weeks and call it traditional method? I think so, yeah. Cool. That’s very helpful. Six months is a great time. Um, on the texture side, um, let’s do this as a still, and we’re gonna keep a bunch of the lees.

Um, so we’re gonna, we’re gonna rack and reintroduce the lees. We can bench trial this to figure out kind of what our ideal amount is. Maybe we’ll even put on the label to mix the [00:49:00] bottle before you serve it. Uh, and we’re gonna keep the unused lees. We can use those as old lees for future projects. And the cool one, of course we’re gonna bottle condition it.

Um, depending on the status, uh, how long we’ve aged that in tank, if it’s kind of tired, old lees, we’ll introduce new ones. If they’re still fresh, we’ll use them using the sugar test, and we’ll bottle condition it, um, after dosing out the right amount of lees for our pressure. And we still have some time if anyone’s got questions.

Yeah, at the back here. Yeah. Um, I was curious when you were using the lees, have you found any, um- Yeah, so the question’s around, like, terroir. Um, if you introduce lees from somewhere else, are you carrying over the terroir and characteristics? Absolutely, 100%. We’ve, we’ve intentionally done that on some ciders as well.

Um, within Prince Edward County especially, there’s a lot of linkage to specific vineyards. People really wanna say, “This is from this vineyard,” but they don’t grow apples and they want a cider. So there’s been [00:50:00] a couple clients we’ve worked with where we take the lees from one of their white ferments and use that to inoculate a cider, and then we have essentially a cider that’s from their vineyard’s yeast and with their vineyard’s characteristic.

For primary. For primary? Yeah. We’ve, we’ve done similar things with, like, using old lees to age. That has less of a, a contribution. We find that the primary really pumps it up. If your cellar is, like, cool, just, just keeping them around. This is where that siphoning off any cider that kind of rises to the top is important.

The more of that we can get rid of, the less risk we’re gonna have of, like, acetobacter growing. The more condensed we can get it, the more stable it is. But generally, um, keeping them cool is, is fine, and checking them. If you have a cold room, keep them in there. But if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world.

Okay. Thank you, everybody. I really appreciate you coming out.

Ria: And that was Ryan Monkman with Doing More with Lees, recorded at CiderCon [00:51:00] 2026 in Providence, Rhode Island. A nod here to the Cider Institute, which works with the American Cider Association to help develop the production education offered at CiderCon. Technical cider education has always been important to Cider Chat, and it’s one of the reasons why Ryan has appeared so many times on this program.

If you want to keep going down that rabbit hole, head to the Cider Chat archives and look for the Ask Ryan series. Just use the search box and put in Ask Ryan to find over 10 episodes from the cider whiz. And a quick update on Ryan. Field Bird Cider is closing this fall. This is based in Ontario in Prince Edward County.

But Ryan Monkman is certainly not going away. He’s continuing his work in fermentation and expanding his consulting work, so I don’t expect this to be the last time you hear his voice here on Cider Chat. And if you’re in Canada and have a chance to pick up some Field Bird Cider [00:52:00] as the cidery winds down, you’re one lucky duck.

Cider Chat is independently produced and listener supported. If you got value from today’s episode and want to keep conversations and cider education like this freely available, please consider hitting the donate button at ciderchat.com and becoming a patron through the Cider Going Up campaign. Patrons will be getting early access to the video version of Ryan’s presentation synced with his slide presentation before it goes public on the Cider Chat YouTube channel, making it another reason to become a patron today.

And I’d like to give a nod to the commercial makers who are already helping keep Cider Chat going, including Locust Grove Cider & Brewery in Milton, New York. The Kent family’s multi-generational farm grows the fruit for its own cider with both a cidery and brewery on site. You can learn more about Locust Grove and see all the businesses and individuals supporting [00:53:00] Cider Chat at the ciderchat.com website.

Look for Cider Going Up. And with that, I leave you here. This is Ria Windcaller signing off for now, looking forward to seeing you in Ciderville.

drink it like this. There is a reason why we do it like this. There is a reason. There is a reason why we do it like this. We like cider. There is a reason why we do it like this. We like hops. There is a reason why we drink it like this. There is a reason why we do it like this. We like orchards. There is a reason why we do it like this.

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