It's pruning time!

    Well, here we are again, hello January. Standing around in the orchard pruning the trees again. This year we've not had much of the wonderful crunchy frost and bright sunlight, it's either been squelchy mud and rain, or snow. Neither of which are much fun, to be honest.
    I have to admit it, I envy people with traditional cider orchards featuring huge unpruned trees. They can stay indoors at this time of year, or watch over their fermenting juice. Our orchard was laid out for producing fruit to be eaten, so all its trees have been pruned to an artificial shape and need regular maintenance. We cider makers don't care in the same way about the size or visual quality of our fruit, so it's mildly annoying to have to spend so much time in the cold.
    The 2012 fermentation has slowed right down, I'll be thinking about racking it in a few weeks. Meanwhile the 2011 cider has turned out rather well. My unexpectedly cloudy batch I wrote about in the summer is slowly beginning to settle too, I was expecting it to take longer. As an experiment I've put some of it in an outbuilding where it'll be frosted to see whether that helps.

    Meanwhile as usual I gave cider to my colleagues in lieu of Christmas cards. Now the label is adorned with a line drawing of an apple, courtesy of Wikipedia. I suspect I'll have to locate some little stubby bottles for next year if I want to give it out then, so poor was the 2012 harvest.
    Otherwise, everything's quiet until May, blossom time. Here's hoping for a better spring than last year.

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.