Single varietal

    With the pruning long past and the resulting pile of branches disposed of, there's not much going on in the orchard at the moment. The daffodils are coming through, and like ciderists everywhere I'm left worrying about the rain, the frost, a late spring, and all the myriad other factors that can deprive me of my apple crop this year. A cheery sales email came through from Vigo a few days ago promising that 2013's climate so far would give us a bumper crop. I'd expect the rest in 2012 to have done my trees some good, but I wish I had some of the cider they're drinking!
    The lull in activity does however provide an opportunity to talk about an experimental batch of cider from the 2011 pressing that I mentioned in passing last year. My first attempt at a single varietal.
    Single varietal ciders have attracted some attention in recent years as producers use them for marketing effect, to attach a connoisseur's cachet to their product in the same way as the wine industry has marketed their product by grape varieties rather than by region. Some apples give rather good single varietal pressings, but I can't help at times feeling that they miss the skill of selecting the mix at pressing time to achieve a balance of flavour otherwise unattainable. Cider differs from whisky or wine in this respect, this blending is not done to hide an otherwise cheaper product.
    My single varietal came from an unusual standpoint. I did not want to create a balanced and enjoyable cider, instead I wanted to create the sharpest cider I could, as a drink for mixing with my apple juice. You should try it, it's rather refreshing and the alcohol doesn't go straight to your legs!
    So the apple I chose is not a cider apple at all. Bramley. Great in apple pies, makes surprisingly good juice for drinking, but too sharp for normal cider.
    I happen to think Bramley is an interesting apple. We have several Bramley trees from different sources, when my parents planned the orchard they had a winter's worth of pies in mind. The reason for my interest is that those trees, though all giving classic Bramley shaped apples, all exhibit different characteristics. There is one whose Bramleys are slightly yellow with sometimes a red blush on their skin, are palatable to eat, tart but not too much so and with flesh that's easy to bite into. Another gives much more acid fruit, still unmistakably Bramley but greener and harder. I'm unsure why this is as all the trees are unmistakably the same variety and grow in the same part of the orchard so I'd expect would share the same terroir.
    My Bramley cider used the sharper fruit. I wanted it to be mouth-puckeringly sharp. The fresh juice was very drinkable as even a sharp Bramley has plenty of sugars. I didn't press much, just enough for a one-gallon demijohn. I didn't want much of the stuff.
    It seemed to take longer to ferment than my normal cider, and it kept going slowly after racking. Bottling came in Autumn, giving me sixteen 330ml bottles. I don't expect any of the secondary fermentation that develops with storage in my normal cider, this stuff is far too acid for that.
    So, having opened a bottle and tried it, what's the verdict?
    Success, definitely. Mouth-puckeringly, painfully sharp! But with a decent alcohol content and still with that "pippy" apple taste, after all this is still a craft cider. Mixed with juice, gives it a "kick" without the resulting drink feeling like watered-down cider.
    There it is then. My first single varietal cider. And not one you'd expect. Not one you'd probably drink either, to be honest. But it works for the application I made it for, which is all that matters.

October: pressing

    So it's the big month in a cider maker's year. October, when we press apples to yield juice for fermentation. Fermentation that'll happen slowly over the winter in time for racking and eventual bottling in the spring. Cider making's a waiting game.
    My pressing started in September, though I wasn't pressing then for cider. The first pressing I do is usually for apple juice which I'll pastuerise and decant into plastic milk cartons to be frozen for winter drinking. I usually use cooking apples for that because I like my drinking juice tart; dessert apple juice is too sweet to be refreshing in my view. Besides, the dessert apples can be used for cider and the cookers can't.
    I'll normally spend three of four weekends pressing, but in 2012 due to the poor yields I only managed two.One in September for juice, and one a week ago in mid October for cider. It's a simple enough process, the apples are chopped up in a machine called a scratter before being pressed to release the juice. Our scratter is home made, with a big electric motor driving a spinning stainless steel blade. It produces pomace formed from small chips of apple and sometimes very thin apple slices. Whether it would be better if it crushed the apples as well isn't proven, but it at least allows the juice to come out readily enough.

    Our press is a fairly unexciting Vigo basket press. Not the largest scale set-up, but about right for the size of our harvest and the throughput of our scratter. The juice is collected in a stainless steel bowl before being transferred to the plastic jerry cans I use as fermenters. Our orchard is old so I'll add a bit of yeast nutrient to it as well as some sulphite to kill bacteria. The spent pomace meanwhile goes to the compost heap in a wheelbarrow. One day I'll try steeping it for a second pressing, but I usually just don't have the time.
    Yeast is another matter. Natural yeast or cultured yeast? To be honest I've used both, often side by side on the same pressing of juice. Both seem to produce good cider, but I've had film yeast infestations with the natural yeasts. Your yeast experience may vary.
     So there it is. Cider, busily fermenting. The press carefully cleaned, its wooden bits drying out to stop them going mouldy. And I'm thinking ahead to my next task in a couple of months: pruning the orchard in the January frosts.

Poor yield in 2012

    2012 will not be a bumper year for cider makers. All that cold and rain early in the season following on from a winter drought has given us an awful yield. So in our mixed orchard, which trees were the winners and which the losers?

Coxes shaken down from on high

    In the non-cider space, my mother is vexed by the failure of her cooking apples. Not a single Bramley this year from five trees, that's something of a disaster for me as well as for her because I normally use Bramleys as the bulk of my drinking juice production.
    But as always with a mixed orchard there is another tree that takes the strain. 2012 was a good year for Grenadiers, the early cooker, so our freezer is full of both sliced apple and plastic cartons of pasteurised September juice.

Dabinett

    My cider comes mostly from dessert apples. There are one or two trees that normally produce unspectacular apples in huge quantities, Wagoner, Sturmer Pippin and Rosemary Russet, that give me a decent base of juice that I can blend with sweeter apples and my relatively few Dabinetts. This year though only the Wagoner made the grade, and an ancient Cox sport planted as a pip in the 1940s that is two stories high. I had no chance this year of the trees from which I normally get the small and misshapen fruit, the Ingrid Maries and the Crispins.
    Oddly my Dabinett has done very well this year, but it's still too young to contribute a significant amount.
    So in the end I have about half the cider from 2012 that I'd expect. I have plenty from previous years and 2012 will still provide me with enough for my needs, but I can't rate this year as a good one.
    There is a silver lining though. The trees are healthy, and after a few bumper years the rest will do them no harm. With luck 2013 will be a better year still for that.

All in the bottle

    I've been a little late bottling my cider this year. I guess that's inaccurate, I always end up finishing about now so by my own standards I'm not too late, but I really should have done it all over a month ago.
    Anyway, several hundred bottles later I have a lot of new cider stashed away to mature. Though I sez it myself, it tasted pretty good even in this immature state, with luck the '11 pressing will be a vintage one. I made much more of an effort to balance the different varietal flavours than previous years rather than just throw all the apples in together, so maybe that's paying dividends.
    Traditionally the new cider is first opened around pressing time. So I'll leave this lot until October and see how it's turned out by then. Something to look forward to.

Blossom!

    Spring came later this year than last, but now the blossom's well under way. And the wet weather has kept the frost at bay, so it hasn't been killed. So the orchard is a riot of pink and white, and - touch wood - 2012 looks to have started well. On the ground the pheasants are nesting, so we're staying clear of the apple trees for a few weeks. Here's a picture of some of the first blossom to appear, I think it might be on one of the Bramleys. Not a cider apple at all, but it makes a good picture.

Bottle reckoning

    Not a lot is going on in the world of cider in April. Racking has passed, as has pruning. Bottling won't happen until May or June.

    Ah, bottling. The yearly worry of all small-time ciderists: will I have enough bottles?

    My Easter weekend was partly spent on a bottle-reckoning. All my various stashes of bottles brought together. Have I got the required couple of hundred bottles? Almost, and I have a couple of months to go. Maybe this year I'll avoid a last-minute bottle panic.
    I shared a bottle of the 2010 pressing with my wife at Sunday lunchtime. Very palatable and a lovely colour. And another bottle ready for the 2011 pressing of course.

Belated racking

    I should have been doing this six weeks ago.
    Racking, that is. Syphoning the young cider off the spent yeast into a clean container, ready for a further few months settling. An easy enough job, except for the final moments in which care has to be taken to ensure that yeast isn't sucked up the pipe. There is always a bit of yeasty cider left at the bottom that gets wasted.
    The 2011 pressing is shaping up well, though it tasted as you'd expect from a young cider it was very palatable and showed plenty of promise.
    I ferment my cider in big plastic jerry-cans sold to caravanners to carry drinking water. Not very conducive to photography I'm afraid. I did however ferment one demijohn of a special cider, of which more on this blog in due course. The picture shows the spent yeast immediately after racking, the texture being exactly as it was under the cider. I have no idea what mechanism makes the yeast settle with holes in the upper surface like that.

A Christmas card you can drink

    Office Christmas rituals can be a little tedious at times. Over a long career in the tech industry I've seen them all, the secret Santas, the dull office parties with tinsel round the monitors, and the yearly challenge of getting the right Christmas cards to the right colleagues.
    So a year or two ago I hit on a simple solution: instead of cards I'd give out bottles of cider. Nobody finds that an unwelcome gift, and I've removed in one fell swoop the need for both card and present.
    On Sunday I labelled this year's round of Christmas cider bottles. All from 2010 pressings, I had a comparative tasting session last week to decide which ones my colleagues would receive.
    The labels are standard Avery inkjet labels and were produced using their free DesignPro software. The main panel says "Full juice dry cider" in a large font, with "Real cider from Oxfordshire 2010 pressing" underneath it, and the rest of the label has the following explanatory text and a Happy Christmas message from us. "This cider has one ingredient: apple juice. It's made from eating apples so you'll find it tastes a little different from West Country ciders, and since all the natural sugars are fermented to alcohol it's pretty dry. We like it that way!" Plus an instruction to let it settle before drinking, and a request to return the bottle.
    As every year, my colleagues and friends seem to appreciate the gift. I get nearly all the bottles back, as well as a lot of praise for the cider. Which is very good to hear.

December: Let's start with a glass of cider

    As befits a blog from a ciderist, I'm starting with a glass of cider.
    It's December, and a lull in the cidermaking year. Not much to do except sample last year's pressing. In a few weeks I'll be pruning in the orchard, but having finished my pressing last month there's no cidermaking work on the go. The juice from the 2011 pressing is slowly fermenting in plastic drums, so I've opened a bottle of the 2010 cider and sat down to make a start at this project.
    So why blog about cider? Simple. I make cider, and I like writing. I spend my days behind a desk in Oxford working on the web presence of the Oxford Dictionaries and I sometimes write for the OxfordWords blog, so why not combine the two here?
    I've made cider in various forms since I was a teenager in the 1980s. I grew up on a small farm in North Oxfordshire with a good-sized orchard, so it seemed the natural thing to do. I can't say I'm proud of my early efforts as I was more concerned with illicit teenage inebriation than quality, but over the years my interest has evolved and now I aim to produce a high quality full juice real cider. I don't hold any form of licence so my cider is strictly for private consumption only, but I still manage to turn out several hundred litres a year as well as a freezer full of bottled apple juice.
    My cider is made in the Eastern Counties style, which is to say that the apples used in its production are desert apples rather than cider apples. If you are used to the tannic bite of West Country ciders or you prefer cloudy cider you'll find mine a little different, the 2010 pressing in the glass pictured is clear, dry and slightly acid, and has an ABV of about 6%.
    This blog follows the cidermaking year. If I do something with my cider, I'll write about it here. This means updates will come in fits and starts, as sometimes not a lot happens in the life of a cidermaker. Look forward to pruning tales in January, racking a few weeks later, blossom and bottling in May, young apples in summer, followed by harvest and pressing in Autumn.
    Meanwhile, enjoy good quality real cider wherever you find it, and Wassail!