I have written a bit here about Normandy and her orchards and cider, plus a few pictures from a weekend and a cycle tour from Cherbourg to St Malo, great apple and cider country.

The sad thing is, most of the stuff sold as cider in this country, especially the foul filth they call "white" cider (the alcoholic's favourite) is pretty dull factory cider which is made from imported apple concentrate and white sugar for the most part. Better ciders can be found, but not so easliy.

The Magners phenomenon was quite interesting. There was much discussion on the ukcider group (see below) about whether the £millions that Magners spent on advertising -didn't they go to town!-and the resulting consumption of their drink would lead people on to real cider or just take sales from other alco-pops. What was not in dispute was that Magners is highly denatured chaptalised factory cider selling at about twice the price of the real thing. I was told by a Hampshire cidermaker who buys in all his fruit that the price of apples had increased due to Magners buying all the apples they could. Sales of real cider have apparently risen, and the other factory cidermakers (Bulmers etc)have re-packaged some of their products to make it look more like Magners. It's drinkable, but dull stuff-rather like Yankee Budweiser beer (which should never be confused with geniuine Czech Budweiser Pilsner). This sort of cider is made from imported apple juice concentrate (mostly Chinese, I hear), white sugar, synthetic apple flavouring, water, wine yeast and a bit of real apple juice so that they can legally say 'Made WITH real apple juice from Irish/West Country/wherever orchards'. It is carbonated and best served cold to mask the lack of flavour.

What we want to see more of is the high quality pure vintage apple ciders made not WITH but FROM 100% apple juice, preferably at least 50% from west Country bitter apples like Yarlington Mill, Dabinett and Harry Masters Jersey etc, perhaps with some oak aging and bottle fermenting to get it up to the same quality as the lovely Normandy ciders at their best.

So come on you English wine growers, I respect your enthusiasm, but isn't it weird that we are struggling hard to do what we have not got the climate to do well, at the same time as LOSING OUR CIDER ORCHARDS when we can actually produce really good cider!

I grew a few grapes in our orchard. In 2002 they cropped, their best result so far, about 10 pounds of grapes from 10 vines. I pressed them to make half a gallon of juice. The specific gravity of the juice which indicated its alcohol potential was 50-exactly the same as my dessert and Bramley apple juice and less than my cider apple juice which averaged 55 (can be up to 70 in a good year from some varieties, which will give a cider something like 9% abv). This gave a thin, sharp, acid wine (after one sour unappetising mouthful, I threw the above rubbish quality grape wine away. OK, professional growers can do better)

A gravity of 50, will give an alcohol level of about 6%, fine for cider but inadequate for wine, so you have to add white sugar to get a realistic alcohol level, which all English wine makers do (this is called Chaptalisation). whereas a well-blended cider made from pure apple juice of original gravity 50-60 (quite achievable most years) will be a full flavoured, well bodied drink which can be drunk as a lighter home-produced wine particularly at lunchtime to accompany bread and cheese, oily fish like mackerel, herring or sprats.

HOW TO MAKE CIDER

Put simply, crush ripe apples, extract their juice under pressure, and ferment the juice-exactly the same as making grape wine except that its harder to get the juice out of an apple than it is out of a grape. Obviously there's a bit more to it than that, but I don't intend to go into very great detail, especially since Andrew Lea has done such a good job of it on his Wittenham Hill orchard and cider site (see below). For those who wish to find out more and perhaps have a go, several books which give specific instructions are reviewed in the  page of this
 

There are 3 types of apple, dessert (sweet or "eating" apples) such as Cox, Braeburn, Ellison's Orange etc, culinary or cooking apples such as Bramley, and proper "vintage" cider apples such as Kingston Black, Harry Master's Jersey, Tremlett's Bitter, Yarlington Mill etc. Each of the three types has different characteristics from the point of view of cider production. Cider can be made from the juice of any apple, but the best sorts are made from blends. The four types of apples for cider are describes as sweets, sharps, bittersweets and bittersharps. Sweet and sharp are easy enough to understand (eg Cox and Bramley) but the bitter types are apples grown specifically for cider and are not used for eating or cooking. The specific thing about these fruits is that they have high levels of tannins, flavour compounds which set your teeth on edge if you bite into the apple, but which ferment out to give a richer, aromatic flavour with good mouth feel in the finished cider. We very deliberately planted bitter types of West Country cider apples like Tremlet's Bitter to blend with our unsold sweet and cooking apples from the main orchard, and so far this has worked out OK.

We use an electric powered centrifugal apple crusher and a 40kg rack and cloth press from Vigo of Devon. This outfit turns 3 boxes of apples into 6 gallons of juice in about 90 minutes. The cost was around £1,000 all told, but it works well and should last. 


CIDER LINKS

for friends, fun, info and cider chat on the web, join the uk cider group on Google groups. There is a considerable and growing archive of useful cider growing, making and tasting information and (mostly)friendly banter (we do disagree occasionally, especially about politics, we're real people with opinions). There are some instructions for producing economical cider-making equipment at home from timber and car jacks etc, so it would be worth your while visiting if you a biy handy and wanted to make a modest start without a big outlay. A great place to enter the world of English (and a bit of Welsh) cider.

Andrew Lea worked at the famous Long Ashton Cider, Apple and Pear research centre near Bristol, sadly closed down by parsimonious funding cuts. If you read my commnets about Magners above, you can judge for yourself how well the philosophy of 'The Industry can take care of research and Development' has served English cider.

We were privileged to meet (and taste the cider of) Andy and several other ukcider surfers, and even a few friends from over the Atlantic at the May Queen festival at Rose's place in Winterbourne Houghton in deepest Dorset last spring, a great pleasure. We took the last of the rum barrel Fruitwise finest and it was well received. Real cider brings people together! His
Wittenham Hill cider site is outstanding in itself but is also a first rate portal into the world of cider, probably the only link you need. Andrew's site is THE place to go for hard cider science.

The Real Cider and Perry site is worth visiting. For fun and scrumpy and of course even more links, visit the Scrumpy user site

return