Orchards Live - Cider Pressing

Washing Apples

I have about 125 gallons of cider gestating in three large barrels in the barn. Every evening, I wander out to check on its progress. There is nothing to see. I just listen to the metronome glop of the carbon dioxide bubbles as they pass up through the airlock and scent the vinegary tang in the air. Cider-making is both ridiculously easy – you simply crush a pile of apples and let them ferment for a few weeks – and extremely hard, since the final product can, for no particular reason, end up being foul. The bonus, of course, is that it is an almost free source of destructively strong alcohol and I intend to produce well over a thousand pints of it. There is also the feral satisfaction of the “hunter gatherer”, bringing in the fruit of the land and transforming it into something ancient, narcotic and sublime.

Making cider here is both natural and fortuitous. When we first inspected Sharland we found a huge, dusty cider press abutting one end of the barn. It stands about 25 feet high, surmounted by a vast counterbalance of English oak. Well over a century old, it is a rare survivor of the many hundreds once found on farms throughout the West Country. I had no idea how it worked, but was captivated by the great iron screw and the odd mechanism that brought the press down. At that moment, I knew I wanted to buy the house. The press was a thing of great beauty and I vowed to awaken it from its slumber and put it to work again. A few weeks later, with the aid of some axle grease and a lump hammer, I found the engineering was rusty but in perfect working order.

We also inherited a small and youthful orchard, just a dozen apple trees, a few diseased pears and a large tree that is supposed to be a plum but produces nothing but abundant leaves. I have had a passion for orchards from way back in my childhood. My grandparents in West Sussex owned a small orchard behind their house and my brother and I spent hours roaming among the twisted branches. We perfected a game of cricket involving fallen apples, with full tosses being battered into neigbouring gardens and apple fragments exploding over the hedges. I remember another favourite game, pitching apples at Southern region trains that passed behind the garden, until a man from British Railways came to investigate and, in abject cowardice, we blamed the boys next door. I remember a large branch falling on my grandfather’s bald head when he was pruning with my Dad and I remember him being stung by a swarm of his own bees.

Most of all, I remember the spring blossom and summer picnics beneath the trees, the smell of fruit and lime cordial, sunlight shimmering through the branches and the long evening shadows. Now I can relive this again.

Our orchard is a fragment, a survivor of the great expanse of orchards that surrounded farmsteads all over the West Country. An old map I have found in our house shows countless acres of apples trees a hundred years ago. Almost all of them have been grubbed up, but not so long ago, apples and their by-products were a staple of the rural community. Their economic importance was quite literal, since labourers were part-paid with vast allowances of strong cider - the “cider truck”– men were entitled to 2 quarts a day and boys to 1, with vast quantities drunk at harvest time. This practice continued until after the last war and it helping to moderate the harsh and tedious nature of life on the land. A large proportion of the rural population spent their waking hours in constant and complete inebriation helping to explain the impenetrable accents, frequent loss of life or limb in threshing machines, the chronic inter-breeding and the stranger’s inability to secure accurate directions. Two centuries ago, the navy was fuelled by rum, the army marched on anything it could loot and drink, the urban poor wallowed in gin palaces and the port-drinking ruling class was riddled with gout and syphilis. The modern British obsession with binge-drinking and its effects suggests nothing less than an endemic, even chemical, addiction. Look in the mirror.

The orchards around Sharland once supplied the legendary Inch’s’ Cider Factory at Winkleigh. Gordon Dockings at Southcott remembers that his apple crop paid the rent for his new farm in the 1950s, enabling him to save and then buy it outright. There is one old tree from this time left in our orchard, a bony umbrella covered in ivy which yields a small and bitter green cider apple in large quantities. It has survived the axe and the storms that razed the surviving trees in the early nineties. It now hosts a vocal community of blackbirds, a twisted bin-bag that is too high to remove and the children’s swing. There are scrapes around its base where badgers forage for worms. It is a relic, a link to a past life that is lost forever and it deserves to contribute in a small way to our own cider production.

The rest of our orchard is very productive. The trees are wassailed in midwinter to chase away the evil spirits, are heavy with blossom in the spring and laden with fruit by the summer. The children gorge on sweet crunchy apples on a whim and lakes of apple jelly and chutney, mountainous pies and crumbles emerge from our kitchen. The freezers are crammed with diced apples and bottles of juice. We thrust bags of apples into the hands of strangers. We exhaust recipe books for apple-based menu items. We dry apples. We throw them at each other then throw them at sheep. And still we have great piles of apples left, gently rotting in baskets and trays. The entire orchard comprises of early varieties that hardly keep beyond September. And none of the trees are cider varieties, except the big old tree. To get the press going, we will need at least two tons of cider apples.

However, contemporary Devon is defined by revivals. Earnest bands of enthusiasts, many of them “incomers”, have revived cob wall construction, bee-keeping, uncovering green lanes, folk dancing breeding rare farm animals, producing unpasteurised cheese, pub sports, bell-ringing and bear baiting.. Many of these things had almost died out– replaced by the essential skills of a modern rural community – like golf course management, camp site administration and quad biking . But orchards have become very popular again and like-minded souls have found ways to gather and share wit and wisdom. For over a year I have been part of the benignly-bearded North Devon group, Orchards Live, voraciously absorbing information for the princely sum of £5 per year (including four newsletters). We have visited nurseries, learned how to plant and then prune trees and most precious of all, a wise be-jowled man from Somerset showed us home juice and cider production. O have even developed sufficient confidence to share my views on the apple world at the Eggesford Apple Day, where well over a hundred local apples are displayed on a long table. Armed with my newly acquired expertise, I whipped up support among some Morchard locals, some who are experts, some who are curious and some who may just be drunks. A date was set in late October and preparations were underway.

A number of key ingredients were needed. First and foremost, we needed apples of the right sort and in large quantities. My chief cider-making partner, Bob, has an orchard, but it is in the first flush of youth and would not yet produce a large crop. Fortunately, at neighbouring Southcott Farm, the Dockings family gave me free access to over fifty trees. The mild spring had resulted in a massive yield of perfect cider varieties, the very ones sold to Sam Inch decades earlier. A wet August had boosted the bumper crop, although the fruit was a little short on sugar, meaning that the alcohol content of our 2004 vintage was going to be lower than hooligan strength. For a week before the pressing, the family battled through the obligatory sea of mud and picked sack after sack of apples. The most efficient method is to pick from the ground where they have fallen or simply shake the tree branches. Either technique threatens severe concussion from bending below low slung branches or from heavy showers of rock hard fruit. It is also important not to be fussy as almost any apple will do; only the black ones do not go into the cider, though we would later make the concession of washing sheep dung from them before the pressing. Isobel, my four year-old daughter, serenely picked single apples and inspected them, occasionally walking over and asking me if it was “a nice apple or not, Daddy, and could we use it?” Muriel and I were shoveling as many as we could into the sacks each containing about a hundredweight of apples. I hauled almost forty bags through the mire, into a trailer and unloaded them into the barn. I was in need of traction.

Other equipment was required, some of which I bought from a specialist company called Vigo which inhabits an abandoned airfield at Dunkeswell. I obtained three 50 gallon fruit juice barrels, air locks, yeast, steriliser and a small book called “Cider with Derek” by Derrick V. Rugg, bearing a grizzled portrait on the cover. A mill to crush the apples was hired for just 20 quid, but this required a 100 mile round trip to a remote farm near Modbury in South Devon. Every farm would once have had its own mill, a Heath Robinson contraption powered by human sweat, horses, donkeys, steam or tractor engines, but these were heavy and if they had survived only found in situ in cider barns, so a small electric mill would have to do the trick.

From Mole Avon in Crediton, a superstore for farmers, we procured buckets, funnels and a plastic trough used, I think, to bathe dogs, but adapted with a Stanley knife for collecting the juice.

Finally, we needed to source the medium through which the cider would be pressed. Traditionally, crushed apples would be layered on the press between clean straw (ideally oat straw) and thatching reed, building what is called a “cheese”. This seemed the most appropriate and economical method. Reed was sourced from the thatchers’ wholesale store at Winkleigh at dawn one day and on a windswept morning; I was able to buy fresh bales of straw for 50 pence each from a team combing a field on the way to Black Dog. In return, I helped to tie tarpaulins over the ricks in a gale. However, at the last minute, Bob, the brains behind the operation, was able to get hold of large metre square polypropylene sacks which would form envelopes of crushed apples. This was eventually found to be a superior method, since as novices in the traditional ways, we risked the catastrophe of a collapsed cheese – and that, I can tell you, is really what you do not want.

There was considerable interest in the project from all my suppliers, some cider-makers themselves. I described the project and most gave me encouragement along with the impression that I was somewhat eccentric and even slightly mad to undertake this venture. I was advised to add lamb bones and even dead rats to the brew. However, in general, there was more concern about the consumption than the production side of the operation. Many suddenly swore a vow of temperance when I offered them some of the end product and this did not instill confidence. The reason was not, however, a slur on the likely quality; this was of academic concern to the hardened cider drinker. Instead, the old cider economy still bears scars for older members of the community who no doubt remember lives blighted by cider drinking. Roy Howard, my log supplier related the story of a Lapford farmer, long-since pickled then buried who took particular delight in feeding young farm boys cider disguised in tea cups before sending them home. They would be found hours later, comatose in hedgerow or slumped in a hay barn. I sold the excess reed to Frost the local thatcher, who descended from a roof to tell me that lager was his choice of an evening, because “you can’t manage to get home after 8 pints of cider”. Judging from his profession, this seemed sound advice. Clearly, we would need to handle the product with great care.

The workforce, intent on their share of the spoils, gathered for the pressing day on the last Saturday in October. It was the wettest and coldest day in living memory, soaking us to the skin in minutes. Bob, a Somerset man with some experience of cider-making and an acquaintance with the late cider poet, Adge Cutler, was in charge, but had the grace to let me masquerade in the role. We were joined by Ken, a Yorkshireman and folk singer who forgot the words to songs after a couple of bars, my neighbour, John, sporting his new and radical goatee and adding weight and height to the press. Bob’s neighbour Will was an expert miller. Ceri, a man who enjoys running vast distances in howling gales, added demonic force. A small army of helpers including the children, helping to swill barrels, wash the apples in an old tin bath and ferry them to the mill. Large buckets of crushed apples were then taken to the press by the crack team and steadily a magnificent cheese almost seven feet in height, was constructed then completed by lunch.

A steady stream of sweet, thick juice was flowing into the trough. We warned the kids not to drink too much for if cider apple juice is consumed neat in too large a quantity, several days on the toilet are guaranteed. Juice was ladled in plastic buckets through funnels and then finally into the barrels.

Shortly after lunch and fortified by pumpkin soup and local ale, the crushing began. A large stave was pushed through the boss fixed to the screw and six of us wound down the press, resting to quaff beer at periodic intervals. As pressure was exerted, the great lump of oak above us was almost lifted from the stays. Gradually, after a couple of hours, the seven feet of apple pulp had been reduced to just over three and we had filled two and a half barrels with over 125 gallons of juice. Yeast was added and within a few hours, a violent fermentation was taking place, froth spewing from the tops of the barrels. Then airlocks were added and we wait started for Mother Nature to take her course.

Trudging through the mud with torches in hand, deep in bleak mid-winter, a small group gathered in the barn to witness a miracle. The juice has been entombed in the barrels for three months, occasionally belching, through the airlocks but now, in frozen January, the fermentation has stopped. It was now time to discover whether nature’s alchemy has given us sweet cider or sour vinegar. The small group, already parched with thirst for it is 8pm on a Friday evening, is trembling with anticipation. I have watched these barrels almost every day, waiting for this moment. To avoid disappointment, I have set my sights low; if the cider does not smell of extreme flatulence, induce vomiting and nausea and sudden blackouts, I will be claiming a moderate success.

Bob has arrived with 200 one litre plastic milk bottles with red sealable lids, about 2 metres of clear tube and a long plastic strip. This is all the equipment we shall need to start production. The tube is tied to the plastic strip, the airlock lifted from the barrel and the tube lowered in. There are anxious sniffs; the fumes are alcoholic but not noxious. My neighbour John takes on the dangerous role of providing the suction to siphon off the first draft. Will he be poisoned or perhaps drown? A steady stream races down the tube and glasses catch the liquid. Looking not unlike a urine sample, the cider is actually quite clear. There is nothing floating in it. Now to taste ……

I am stunned. The drink is clean, refreshing and a little dry. There is not a trace of vinegar, but some effervescence. It is really very good, comparing favourably with anything I have tasted commercially. This is something one would be proud to serve to someone you wanted to see again and not furtively sneak onto a trestle table at a student party. It is recognisably scrumpy, but not rough. We have made several hundred litres of a rather fine alcoholic beverage from nothing more than two tonnes of apples and a three month wait; the euphoria is palpable.

The euphoria steadily increases as the strength of the cider also becomes clear. Although I cannot find my hydrometer, we are guessing at about 7%, but these are statistics do not tell the story.

After two glasses, I have an irresistible urge to laugh out loud and my head is spinning slightly. Almost everything around me is funny. I realise that this is the closest thing in liquid form I have ever had to a good quality spliff. I can only describe is as a burst of sunshine in the dark, golden drops of summer percolating into my brain in the dead of night. Devon absinthe.

The bottling is a steady process. John sucks and maneuvers the tubing, I pass the bottles Bob fills them and Ceri places the airtight cap on each one. Tom and Isobel, staying up well beyond their bed time, and having an occasional nip, arrange the bottles in boxes. However, as more cider is sampled, even this simple choreography goes awry. Bottles are dropped and cider is poured over boots. The barrel is raised as it nears the dregs and John requires a monumental suck to conjure the last few litres from the bottom. He is close to collapse. Nevertheless, after just an hour or so, 140 litres are neatly stacked away. There is another 400 litres left in the remaining two barrels. We retire to the fire-side for cheese and further sampling. At this time, I rashly decide to conduct an experiment by drinking a bottle of the last cider to emerge, as this is the most likely to cause adverse side-effects. Instead, once the guests have gone, I discover long-forgotten depths in a recording of The Dark Side of the Moon and lapse into a deep slumber. Apart from routine bladder relief in the night, there are no medical emergencies. El Gordo is born and I am not sure life will be quite the same again.