514: Doing More With Lees | Ryan Monkman

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.

The best way to tell a good one is if it smells nice.

So if it smells nice, definitely keep it.

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.

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, 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 2026, which was held in Providence, Rhode Island.

It is hosted by the American Cider Association.

It's 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 batonage 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 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 year 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.