Cider with Grumpy

It always seemed such a big waste to me, we had six cider apple trees and most years they would produce a bumper crop of bright apples that simply fell to earth and rotted in the corner of some foreign field. The local Bretons made cider, it couldn’t be that difficult could it? Along the edge of the field was a gigantic rotting beam with its now-detached rusty wheel and turnscrew, the skeleton of an old cider press. They’d obviously made a lot round here in the past. Surely it wasn’t going to be that difficult?

So, last autumn I took a leaf out of an olive farmer’s book and spread out some tarpaulins underneath two of the most laden cider apple trees and resolved to come back to Brittany a month later and collect them. Brimming with enthusiasm, I came back a month later not to find a cornucopia of glistening, bright golden apples nestling in little piles in the dewy haze of an autumn morning. No.

The local farmer, Norbert, (pronounced ‘gnaw bear’) to whom I lend the field – had turned his cows loose in the field. My imagined glistening piles of beautiful golden apples had been trodden into a pulp, the tarpaulins churned over, what’s more I now had a large quantity of ‘special ingredient’ not normally found in most good cider recipes – or when enjoying a Magners moment.

But the dream of cider didn’t die there. How could it? I’d already bought the plastic bin from Wilkinsons along with an airlock and a syphon and you simply can’t walk away from big capital expenditure projects of over £12.

Back to Surbiton this autumn and our house has two substantial apple trees. One produces a great crop of cooking apples – and by way of contrast, the other produces a great crop of branches and leaves, and is living on borrowed time. If it was an eggless laying hen, then it would have been slooshing around in some coq au vin a long time ago. As any gardener will know, this year has produced early crops of everything under the sun and looking at the productive tree, groaning under the weight of so many cooking apples that not even my mother-in-law, ‘Hyacinth’, could tuck away in her freezer compartment, the TIME had arrived.

Summoning the Spirit of Adge Cutler but not actually donning a red neckchief, I set about the task. The harvesting was easy, then it was a quick wash, a bit of a chop and straight into the juicer. Then the shock set in. Four reasonably sized apples were pressed down into the high-speed rotating metal discs of the juicer and out came… a dribble. The cloudy juice I’d been expecting sank to the bottom of the jug and then oxidised in front of my eyes, turning from apple white to discoloured brown at the top. What’s more it started developing a frothy, crusty brown head, a bit like brown shaving foam.

If it was light in the juice department it more than excelled in producing mushy, moist warm pulp to block the juicer, the kind of thing you last saw in Heinz Junior Meals, that actually gave your face a nasty expression when you tried it, not unlike a toddler firmly disagreeing with your choice of dessert.

By the end of a steady afternoon of washing, chopping, pressing, emptying, scraping, cleaning, swearing and listening to Dermot O’Leary, my bumper crop of apples, collected in more than two 50-litre barrels had produced a paltry fifteen litres of liquid. I’d like to describe it as ‘juice’ but it was more like sap. I wasn’t so much a cider maker, more like a great big aphid with a juicer.

And the kitchen resembled a room that had been passed through by a teenage party, there was a lot of suspicious looking piles of pulp in buckets and nibbets of half-digested stuff on the table, on the floor and lurking round the edges of the sink.

My advice for the next stage was: “Just bung some yeast in, stick an air lock in and put it in the airing cupboard and forget about it for a couple of months.” My advice to prospective cider makers is… “make sure your fermentation vessel fits in the airing cupboard beforehand…” So, after an intruding shelf had two struts sawn out of it and a copper pipe was persuaded to move a little to the left, my paltry barrel of brown sap was installed at the bottom of the airing cupboard.

Where it has sat, fermentation-less, for the last month. In the television series Game of Thrones there is a saying, “Winter is coming”. For me it’s “Fermentation is coming”. We won’t be rolling out the barrel any time soon, even if I can get it out.

FH