Proper English Cider - Cider Made Simple: All About Your New Favorite Drink(2015)

Cider Made Simple: All About Your New Favorite Drink (2015)

CHAPTER 3 PROPER ENGLISH CIDER

The county of Herefordshire is one of England’s most sparsely populated—a boon if one happens to be steering a Vauxhall Astra along its spacious roads. Herefordshire borders Wales, a country through which one briefly passes on the way up from Bristol, as I was one uncharacteristically sparkling day in January. Other parts of the country are more compact, the roads narrower and tangled, but in that corner of southwestern England, an American can feel a bit more comfortable behind a right-side steering wheel.

Google Maps is a confident guide, and sends one on a crisp, straight line—right up until the end. I was trying to find Mike Johnson at his Ross-on-Wye Cidery, with an address as typical for England as it was mystifying to the programmers in Mountain View: Broome Farm, Peterstow, Ross-on-Wye. No street, no number. The GPS wasn’t far off, though. It sent me down a single-car lane that looked more like a miniature gorge, bordered on either side by towering hedgerows, and delivered me to the neighboring farm. An enormous white work horse was in the driveway to welcome me, and I took from his placid expression the message that Mike could be found farther down the lane.

Broome Farm is where the Johnson family has been growing apples and pears for generations. Apple trees and sheep start to appear on the downhill side of the farm, and up the drive a ways is a small herd of alpaca. The eighteenth-century farmhouse doubles as a guesthouse and, as I was soon to learn, triples as the cidery’s visitor’s center/cider cellar. Suitcase in tow, I found Mike there, pottering about underneath the house next to a row of wooden barrels, each containing a different type of cider. We introduced ourselves and he gestured to the casks.

“Do you fancy a tot?”

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When connoisseurs rhapsodize about English farmhouse cider, they usually invoke Somerset, farther south, as the mystical center of English cider making, but Herefordshire probably has more claim. This is the home of the famous cider pioneer, Bulmers, a name now generally spat out as an insult. It wasn’t always the case, though, that the world’s first industrial cider-maker was associated with lowbrow stuff. And it’s not incidental that the Bulmers got their start in Herefordshire: this is where the apples are.

Apples have been a part of this landscape since at least the fifteenth century and, in 1664, English intellectual and diarist John Evelyn described it as “one entire orchard.” Apples were grown elsewhere in England, but more sparsely; in the east, they were grown chiefly for eating. It was in the west where cider apples were grown—in the three counties of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire, and farther south in Devon and Somerset. But of all of these, Herefordshire was king. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was producing the most cider in England—a distinction it has maintained since.

Despite the long history, cider was insensitive to industrialization. Whereas brewing had become a specialized profession more than a thousand years earlier, cider making was still done piecemeal, on the farm. It integrated perfectly into the farm life, and keeping orchards accomplished something akin to what we would now call “sustainable agriculture.” Orchards gave farmers a place to graze their sheep, and the sheep kept the grassy orchard floor trim and well-fertilized. Making cider gave farmers a way to preserve their crop—and sometimes, gave them currency to pay their workers. This also meant, however, that cider making remained fragmented, seasonal, and very small scale. There were a few commercial producers, but they were dependent on the amount of fruit their orchards produced. As is still the case, farmers were not solely orchardists—apple and pear trees were just a part of the farm’s ecosystem.

Traditional English Cider

There is no particular guideline within the English tradition about whether a cider should be sweet or dry, effervescent or still. You’ll find all kinds, and most cideries make a range. What does make an English cider “proper” is the fruit, which should be composed of a preponderance of tannic varieties. In Herefordshire, bittersweets make up as much as 90 percent of the blend, while Somerset will allow the use of a few more tart apples. In either case, the flavor of a traditional English cider leans heavily on lip-smacking tannins. These are exhibited best in still, dry ciders (for which most cider-makers admit a preference), which have a drying quality on the palate and a lingering bitterness. They are balanced by a subtle tartness, fruity flavors, and often just a hint of wildness that comes from natural fermentation.

Small-scale cider making has never vanished in Herefordshire, but it was mightily tested by the rise of the commercial giants like Bulmers in the 1960s. Indeed, Herefordshire can be read as a metaphor for English cider making. In the span of less than a hundred years, from the late nineteenth century through the 1980s, commercial cider overwhelmed and largely displaced farmhouse stock, and the very definition of cider changed. Even today, Bulmers is the dominant force in the county—Mike Johnson, for example, still sells the bulk of his apples to them. People now expect a different product when they order “cider” in a pub. The farmhouse products—strong, still, and full of character—are almost forgotten. Yet in the shadow of Bulmers and Weston’s, small cider-makers continue to make those farmhouse products. The very existence of large cider-makers producing indifferent products seems to feed the passion of small producers and their fans. Like craft brewers of a generation ago, they exist partly as a rebuttal to commercial cider, a reminder of the true heritage of Herefordshire.

The Industrialization of Cider Making

No country is more identified with cider than England, and for good reason. The English consume more cider than any other country—about half the world’s total—and of course that means they make the most, as well. Nevertheless, the state of Britain’s traditional cider is dismal (though improving), largely because of the decisions made by the very industrial cider-makers who helped make England number one. Beginning in the late 1800s, a few far-sighted businessmen saw the potential of cider and harnessed technology to move it from the farm to the factory floor. A few names can take most of the dubious credit for this—Weston and Gaymer are two biggies—but none more than Fred and Percy Bulmer. They were the true kings of cider.

Although the Bulmers hailed from Herefordshire, they weren’t farmers. Percy, the younger brother, was so sickly that the family didn’t allow him to follow Fred off to Cambridge. Percy decided to go into business instead, and in 1887 tried his hand at cider making. Perhaps because he wasn’t a farmer, Percy didn’t think like a typical cider-maker. Instead, he built his business on a series of unorthodox decisions. Following two years of modest production, and now with the help of his brother, Percy took out a series of expensive loans in order to dig out a large cellar capable of holding two hundred thousand gallons of cider. The Bulmers had already experienced one of the common vagaries of cider making—a bad year for apples—and they wanted to build in aging capacity to tide them over during hard times.

The Bulmers wanted to begin using technology as soon as they had the capital to do so. They weren’t the first to use steam power and hydraulic presses—that distinction goes to William Gaymer Jr., who had done it back in 1870—but they were adding steam and hydraulics by the early 1890s.

Rather than planting acres and acres of orchards for his new venture, Percy planned to buy apples rather than grow them. This was the Bulmers’ great innovation. Within a few years, the brothers hit upon the revolutionary idea of contracting with farmers for their apples. It was far easier to add capacity by contracting with farmers who already had mature trees than planting new trees themselves. To this innovation they added another: In 1898, they planted a large orchard as a nursery for varieties they favored. From it they could supply scion wood to their contract farmers.

Hereford ciders of the day came in two general classes: a rough, raw grade and finer wine-like cider sold to the wealthy. The Bulmers were committed to selling only the good stuff. There may have been an element of pride-in-craft in that decision, but mostly it was shrewd business. Fine cider competed with wine (and sold for wine prices), while the rough stuff went to local pubs on the cheap. Percy Bulmer was so committed to quality that he went to France to learn how to make Champagne, techniques he brought back to Herefordshire for a cider made in the méthode champenoise. Bulmers later called it “Pomagne” to drive the point home (Pom for pomona, or apple, and agne to signal the bubbly).

For decades, Bulmers was synonymous with quality. The company received a royal warrant in 1911 (allowing them to supply the royals and advertise the fact), and cultivated the image of a luxury brand. Eventually, though, they began to reach for a wider market. In 1919, Bulmers was the first cidery to release an artificially carbonated product, though soon others followed their lead. Then, in the 1920s, as breweries were trying to recover from war rationing, cider-makers made a fateful decision. They decided to partner with breweries to increase their pub trade. Breweries, particularly in the West Country, were happy to add a popular product, and cideries thought it was a good way to expand their market.

The choice probably just seemed like a smart business decision at the time, not an existential change of course. And for a while, nothing much did change. The marriage with breweries accomplished what Bulmers hoped: selling a lot more cider. They found national distribution and saw their volumes soar. The problem was that, sold on draft in the pubs, cider started to seem more like beer than wine. Percy’s old Pomagne had been slotted to compete against Bordeaux. But by the 1960s, products like Strongbow were alternatives to pints of mild and bitter ale. In the course of a few decades, the way cider was made and sold changed its nature from a product that could compete with wine on quality to one that could compete with beer on price.

To lower prices, the product was no longer slowly aged in oak and naturally fermented in corked bottles. It was made with concentrate, sugar, and colorings. For the better part of a century, Bulmers had been relying on local growers for the bulk of their juice. As production spiked, they had to be ever more concerned about supply. Until the 1970s, smaller farmhouse producers still flourished in the countryside, but Bulmers soon started aggressively purchasing them. Cider-maker Tom Oliver, whose family watched it occur, explained what happened next. “So we got to 1970, and they were the only cider-makers. They were the only ones taking fruit. Everybody was growing and selling to Bulmers and relying on Bulmers—as they still do—and the only cider you could get when you went out was Bulmers.”

Once it had conquered the English market, Bulmers had to look abroad for growth. For twenty years, beginning in the early 1990s, it went on an acquisition spree—one that ultimately left the company overextended and overleveraged. In 2003, the family was forced to sell, and the suitor was, appropriately, a brewing conglomerate. By that time, cider had become fully integrated as a pub drink. Its absorption into the firmament of beer was complete.

Led by Bulmers, big makers had turned England into the world’s biggest cider market. In the process, however, they transformed the product into something that only vaguely resembled the ciders Fred and Percy started out making. In beer, whisky, and wine, the pendulum has swung back from mass-market products to more flavorful, traditional beverages, and there’s some evidence the trend may be visiting cider, too. But the long legacy of the Bulmers will make the transition a slow and difficult one.

Small Farms Make Great Cider

The image in people’s minds of the English cider-maker involves a small farm of rolling hills, sheep under the trees, and a wooden press in the barn. Indeed, even as they were making this tableau a rarity, large cider-makers were cultivating that very image. And yet, despite being out-of-date, the fact is that good English cider—and good English cider may be the best in the world—is still made on small farms, not in factories. You have only to visit the Broome Farm to verify it. The reason is because it takes good fruit and a lot of patience to make good cider—qualities found in abundance on a farm.

Mike took me out behind his barn and gestured to a perry pear tree planted around 1828. He pivoted and swept his hand across a portion of the farm. “This orchard here, for example, my grandfather put some of those cider apples in in the 1930s, so we’ve always had cider fruit here.” Mike and his father began selling cider to the public in 1984, and, in the more than thirty years since, he’s learned how to work with the seasons, the orchards (each apple variety grows differently), the harvest, and the pace of the yeast that turn his crop to sparkling liquid.

The entire farm is self-contained. Throughout the spring and summer, Mike lets his sheep roam the orchards. He harvests the fruit in the fall and begins pressing it. The juice goes into fermenters in the barn and, when it has become cider in a few months, he bottles it in a building connected to the house. When people come to stay at the farmhouse, they’re invited to wander the orchards and even enjoy a picnic while roaming around. Mike has made the farm a bit of a destination; in the summer, he schedules bands to play in the barn, and people come and enjoy music and Ross-on-Wye cider. It’s just about exactly the romantic image people have of a cider farm.

By the standards of industrial farming, Mike’s ten thousand trees amount to a “tiny” parcel, but they’re more than enough to keep a small cider-maker in fruit. He has around a hundred different varieties planted, though many of those are just a tree or three. “It’s just for fun,” he says. “I like new varieties and trying new things out.” His soil is a red sediment known as Hereford sandstone, and it’s great for drainage. That can be a problem in hot summers, but lately England has been drenched by rain. Although 2012 received a deluge, it was exceeded by the winter of 2014, the wettest winter on record. When I visited, the ground was sodden and the little stream by the farm was leaving pools in the road. (In Somerset, the flat farmland was flooded, and it stretched out like an immense lake.)

Like the old seventeenth-century English cider-makers, Mike maintains a natural farm—little or no pesticides or fertilizer. The key is livestock. Keeping sheep means he lets his trees grow larger than modern orchards that are low and bushy. Pushing the canopy up allows more air flow, which he believes gives it less disease, and makes it easier to prune. The Johnsons even keep a particular breed for this purpose. “The problem is that most sheep, when they’re bored, start to nibble at the bark,” he explains. “But Shropshire sheep don’t.” For a farmer, there’s a lot of upside to this system. Not only does Mike keep down pesticide and fertilizer costs (he may or may not spray minimally or use fertilizer, depending on the circumstances), but he saves on the cost of diesel a mower would use. And for all that, he has a second crop with his sheep.

Soon we would walk into the barn and I would learn how Mike made cider, but as we stood and talked at the edge of his orchard, I was already beginning to get a sense of his underlying philosophy. I was asking him something about orchard maintenance, but his answer was typical (I heard it at least three other times), “I know people worry about all these things. Of course, I’ve been doing it thirty years and you get an instinct.” If you do things simply, the message was, problems take care of themselves.

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The county of Herefordshire promotes the local industry by directing tourists along the Cider Route (“the real cider country,” they boast), guiding them to sixteen cideries from Ross-on-Wye in the south to Wigmore in the north. About halfway up and a bit to the east is number five on the route, Oliver’s Cider and Perry. The address I asked Google to decipher again included no street or address, but one interesting detail: Old Hop Kilns, Moorhouse Farm, Ocle Pychard, Herefordshire. Did you see it? Hop kilns. Until 1999, Oliver grew Fuggle, Northdown, and Target hops that were processed on the farm, in buildings now devoted to maturing cider.

Among some American cider-makers, Tom Oliver is regarded with a level of respect that borders on awe. Even though he produces only a bit more than Mike Johnson, his ciders and perries find their way to the United States, where they are snapped up with glee. He’s won just about every award there is to win, and the Champion Cidermaker Cup was situated prominently in the tasting room when I visited—one of the few that had evaded him until that year. But this is what separates cider-makers from practitioners of more glamorous arts: when I pulled up in Ocle Pychard, I found a still farm veiled in mist, and a farmer in jeans and a down vest. He may be a rock star among cider-makers, but he still puts his wellies on one foot at a time.

It turns out that hops were actually not the ancient family trade—those were installed by Tom’s grandfather between the wars. His great-grandfather was an orchardist. When hops became unprofitable, Tom decided to return to his roots. He began planting trees—both apple and pear—but unlike Mike Johnson, he gets most of his fruit from neighboring farms. For now, he grazes cattle and sheep on his 133 hectares [330 acres]. “I am variety fussy,” he told me when I asked whether he felt at risk having to buy fruit from other growers. “It’s almost more the varieties I don’t want too much of. So ’round here there’s stacks of Bulmers Norman, stacks of Michelin. I don’t mind either, just not all of it. They’re just boring and not great cider.” Many apple varieties are biennial, and some years they don’t produce much of a crop. But when you’re buying apples, you don’t have to worry about that. Getting the varieties he likes? So far it hasn’t been a problem, though he watches the market closely for changes in availability.

The Oliver cidery is mainly a two-man operation. As we were stamping our feet in the damp air discussing apples (or anyway I was), Tom’s collaborator arrived with the offer of warm tea. Jarek Kuzelka appeared in Ocle Pychard in 2007. He started working part-time for Tom, but was soon learning about apple varieties and fermentation. As his palate sharpened and his knowledge deepened, he became more and more valuable and now works as Tom’s assistant. Soon he returned with an enormous mug of milky tea, and Tom periodically conferred with him in answering my questions. Steaming tea in hand, we began touring the cidery.

English Cider and Perry

These are good examples of the range of English ciders available in the United States.

BURROW HILL is an intensely aromatic cider redolent of apple blossoms and orchard floor. The tannins have a rough edge, but the rich flavors of cinnamon, marmalade, and plum, plus some residual sugars, offer balance.

HENNEY’S VINTAGE is a lovely, well-balanced cider with bright, slightly tropical fruit flavors and very soft tannins. Together they create an almost Earl Grey quality. Although listed as dry, it is actually medium-dry to medium.

HOGAN’S VINTAGE PERRY is silky and soft, with a fair dose of tannins and a touch of lime acidity.

OLIVER’S CLASSIC PERRY, a world classic, greets you with a light, wildflower aroma. Those floral notes resolve into rosewater and jasmine on the palate, along with an herbal undertone, mineral, and tropical fruit.

ROSS-ON-WYE MEDIUM (carbonated) is Herefordshire in a bottle: vividly aromatic, with apple blossom and orchard floor and a hint of natural yeast. The tannins are pronounced but very soft and earthy.

The Harvest

What is a good English cider? This isn’t an easy question to answer, even for cider-makers. When I was in Somerset, I put it to Chris Hecks, who (along with his brother Andrew) is the sixth generation of Hecks family makers. “It should be dry,” he allowed. After a pause, he elaborated. “Rounded flavor.” Okay, well, Chris is an extremely laconic cider-maker.

What about Mike Johnson, who loves to talk cider? The question gives him pause, too. After considering the Kingston Black single variety he was drinking, he gave this slightly oblique response, “You must make really nice, soft ciders. My opinion is, if you’re aiming to make real cider, you should be making bone-dry ciders anybody can drink.” That description begins to sidle up to an answer, but remains frustratingly oblique.

Surely Tom Oliver, who is an eloquent explainer of cider, could clarify. It’s “a tannin-heavy bittersweet cider,” he said. “There’s a nice complexity to it, and then you’re going to throw in all those quirky little characteristics that can give you everything from orchard floor, appleyness, to barnyard to blue cheese.” That hints at what you should expect, but as is evident from all three responses, the nature of good cider still remains a bit elusive.

Let’s back up and start with the apples. In England, bittersweets are king. Whatever else you say about English cider, it must have at least a streak of bitter tannin—this is true even of many mass-market ciders. They are the mark of traditional ciders, and the most characterful examples have a huge tannic backbone. Orchards in the cider-producing west are filled with bittersweet varieties.

English Apples

As more and more American orchardists plant English cider apples, consumers are getting to know some of the more famous varieties: Kingston Black, Dabinett, Yarlington Mill, and Redstreak. But there are scores of apples out there, and some of them have absolutely fantastic names. Here’s a sampling: Brown Snout, Duchess of Oldenburg, Foxwhelp, Golden Harvey, Greasy, Hangy Down, Harry Masters Jersey, Port Wine of Glastonbury, Slack Ma Girdle, Sops in Red Wine, and Tom Putt. These are not necessarily the most common, but they are certainly some of the most entertaining.

The apples start coming down from the trees in late September, and the cideries do three phases of pressing—the first in September, another in November, and a final one in December. As the apples come in, cider-makers begin a rough blend, making sure to get some sharps in with the bittersweets. They do this partly because the final blends will need to include a mixture of different types of apple for balance, but having acidic apples is also important for a healthy fermentation. Low pH juice is susceptible to pathogens, so sharps help raise it to protect against off-flavors. Tom adds 5 to 15 percent, depending on the variety, and Mike says, “We work on a system of two to three, sometimes four bittersweet to one part sharp.” In Somerset, they use more sharps than Herefordshire. Chris Hecks uses roughly half and half sharps to bittersweets and was surprised to hear the ratio I’d found farther north. This difference is borne out in the flavor—Somerset cider does seem a bit more tart—but there may also be some terroir involved here, too, with sharps and bittersweets expressing different character depending on where they’re grown.

I was fascinated to learn that cider-makers pick the fruit up off the ground. Sometimes they shake the tree first, sometimes they just let the apples drop. In the old days, cider-makers left the apples in piles for two or three weeks so that the juice would concentrate. Tannins act as preservatives, so they didn’t worry about the apples rotting. Twenty-first-century makers don’t do that anymore, but they are concerned about getting fruit that’s fully ripe. “Overripe is not such a problem,” Mike says, “but if it’s underripe, you’ve got the wrong sugars to ferment.” This is not just an issue about maximizing fermentable sugars. The flavor of the finished cider will be sharper with underripe apples. The tannins seem to soften with age, as well.

The Press

In every book and article you find about English cider making, there is inevitably a photo of an old wooden press. Stacks of crushed apples wrapped in fabric mesh (charmingly named “cheeses”) bleed juice as they’re clamped underneath a heavy wooden beam. Those photos, always gorgeous, are nevertheless misleading. Old presses exist—Tom Oliver uses one as a backup—but they are a piece of technology that cider-makers have been happy to abandon. More modern presses are quicker, easier to use, and far more efficient. Many parts of the traditional cideries look more or less like they did a century ago, but the presses gleam with modernity.

Even though it was very late in the season, I got to see a press in action at Hecks in the town of Street, Somerset. The family was finishing up the last of their pear crop, and even before I understood what they were doing, my nose told me which fruit it involved. The chilly air was filled with the pears’ sweet scent, like a memory of late summer. The Hecks use a belt press, which seems typical for smaller makers. It’s a slick device that grinds and presses in one continuous motion. The pears (or apples) went into a hopper above the press, and were crushed into pulp the texture of oatmeal. I was surprised to see that the pears were unloaded from a truck in a pile beside the press while the elder Hecks, bundled against the cold, shoveled them into the hopper. The pulp came out onto a belt and was conveyed through a series of rollers, squeezing juice out as it progressed. All the family had to do was move the pears from the truck to the press via wheelbarrow, and take the exhausted, dry pulp to a nearby bay.

Wassail

If you have occasion to be in the West Country in January, you might investigate the ancient tradition of wassailing. (And who wouldn’t go to England in January?) The word is actually a toast that comes from the Norse via Middle English, wæs hæil, meaning “be well and healthy.” It is a pre-Christian rite that has certain animistic elements. This is one of those mysterious rites that Americans have a hard time understanding. Fortunately, the Hecks have been hosting a wassail in their orchards for several years, and Chris was happy to describe what happened in 2013.

“Well, there is a wassail song and all the children brought along pots and pans, which they bang together. That frightens the evil spirits away. A couple of chaps brought their shotguns down and we fire those up in the air; again, that’s to ward the evil spirits away. They pour cider around the roots of the tree.” (I gather this is to wake up the tree in spring.) “And to welcome the good spirits, you put toast up in the trees for the robin. I suppose he looks after the orchard.”

Of course, celebrants do plenty of toasting, and they have ample supplies of cider to keep them merry.

In a traditional press, the pulp is placed inside trays lined with a thick piece of fabric. The fabric encloses the pulp, and the whole tray is placed on the press. There are fifteen or more of those trays in a stack, and each one has to be prepared by hand. Once the maker loads the press, he slowly compresses the stack. And of course, after the pressing, each tray has to be emptied of pulp and reloaded for the next press—a laborious and slow process. There are several modern designs, but they all speed the work, and if a cidery has the money, they seem to invest it first in a modern press.

Fermentation

One of the most indelible images from my cider travels came when I wandered into Mike Johnson’s second barn, the one he uses for fermentation. It has a few windows near the roofline, but the gray English day didn’t have the wattage to cut through the gloom. I was immediately greeted by slender, cylindrical, thousand-liter fermenters, and beyond them were rows of wooden barrels. But back in the darkest corner were short drums turned on end, and from their caps waved ghostly white surgical gloves, placed there to indicate the level of active fermentation. Where cider was bubbling along actively, the gloves stood at attention (giving the disturbing appearance of someone inside the drum trying to escape), and where it was tailing off, they sagged. On one glove, a joker had tied three fingers together so just one stood tall. Guess which one?

Fermentation is the most important phase of cider making, the moment when national traditions diverge and philosophies conflict. What happens while the yeasts munch on the juice’s sugar goes a long way toward shaping the way a cider will taste. Yet so little is known about the process that opinions about how to ferment a cider vary sharply. Among traditional cider-makers, though, there is broad agreement: it should be natural.

None of the cider-makers I visited pitched yeast (that is to say, added domesticated yeast strains), and all were pretty adamant about the benefits of avoiding pure cultures. They believe slow, natural fermentation is critical to developing flavor compounds that give cider complexity—and cite two reasons for this belief. The first is that natural fermentation involves a mélange of yeasts and bacteria, and each contributes a little something on its own. Mike Johnson said, “The natural yeasts ferment and you know that you’ve got different yeasts taking over through different stages through the natural fermentation.”

Researchers looking into wild fermentation agree. They’ve found four species resident in and on the apple that contribute to fermentation. Interestingly, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast used in making beer and bread, is not generally found on the apples themselves; it comes from ambient sources of the air or equipment. Those apple-borne yeasts are the first to act, and that’s when they produce their range of esters and other compounds. After a few days, they’ve produced enough alcohol (2 to 4 percent) to send them into dormancy, and that’s when the Saccharomyces becomes active and takes the cider through the rest of the fermentation. With the action of multiple strains, natural cider contains a more complex blend of compounds.

The second reason is time. When yeasts poke along for months, they produce more compounds than if they go on a binge and gobble up all the sugars in a matter of days. “We love it if it lasts six months,” Tom Oliver says. If the yeast works slowly, “you get added complexity.” The mid- and late-harvest apples take longer because the ambient temperature is lower. Those batches may start fermenting when it’s 40 to 45°F [5 to 7°C] outside. That produces very sluggish activity, and the yeast may actually stop completely during cold snaps. They stir themselves when the temperature rises and continue along very slowly. The gravity (see page 89) may drop only 0.001 point a week during the cold months. As the temperature starts to warm in the spring, the last of the cider will ferment out.

Not that natural fermentation isn’t without risk and trade-offs. Wild yeast is wild—and can behave accordingly, with unpredictable results. These include off-flavors like the dreaded “mouse” character that smells like the inside of a rodent cage. Many of the positive compounds that come from wild yeast can become objectionable if they are too abundant. And in some cases, certain yeasts and wild bacteria will produce acids—agreeable in small amounts—that can overwhelm a cider. Indeed, that’s how you end up with apple vinegar. Depending on the type of apples and conditions, Mike will add small amounts of sulfites during fermentation to retard the growth of dangerous bacteria, but in no case more than 100 parts per million.

One of the challenges is that when the first apples begin coming in, it’s still quite warm outside. That means the more aggressive wild yeasts and bacteria have a greater chance to take hold, and also all fermentation happens much more quickly. “We really pay the price for that,” says Tom Oliver, who would love to have artificial cooling to adjust temperatures. The earliest harvest, in late September and early October, comes as daily highs are around 60°F [16°C] and lows are still over 50°F [10°C]. By the last harvest, lows are dipping to 40°F [4°C], which keeps the cider at a much safer temperature. The result of warmer fermentation is a less complex cider—it has fewer of the compounds that give layered flavors, and less time to mellow and harmonize.

This is a special problem for Tom, who likes to keeve (a method of fermentation described in detail in the next chapter) some of his ciders and perries. The key mechanism for keeving is a cap made up of brown material that traps CO2. The removal of CO2 inhibits the yeast. But warmth rouses the yeast, which will create enough bubbly commotion to break up the cap, ruining the process. If the juice is warmer than about 46°F [8°C], keeving won’t work well.

Scrumpy

Few names can evoke so many different associations as “scrumpy,” a word that points generally to old-fashioned English cider. To some, the word conjures a substance so wholesome and good it couldn’t possibly exist in this fallen world. To others, it’s a foul reminder of a drink that was rough and crude and essentially undrinkable. In a way, both associations—and everything in between—may be pointing to something similar.

Tom Oliver did a pretty good job of squaring that circle for me. “I’ll suggest that scrumpy is something, traditionally in the West Country, that was slightly acetic [vinegary], a robust and full-bodied cider. But I think now acetic is getting tougher for people to appreciate. The old boys, as in seventy-plus years old, they love a bit of something that burns on the way down. Nowadays most people don’t.” A strong, acetic cider that burned on the way down. Whether that evokes ambrosia or swill depends on the person doing the remembering.

Incidentally, the word still persists and it tends to mean “traditional,” though whether the scrumpy in question was actually made traditionally is a different matter. Scrumpy Jack, made by Bulmers, has a touch of acid but is otherwise a standard mainstream English cider.

Cider-makers mainly ferment in steel or plastic, but they also do some barrel fermentation. Chris and Andrew Hecks had the largest selection of casks I saw, and about half their production ferments in wood. The cidery is right in the strangely named town of Street, which must be flourishing; not so long ago, the cidery was outside of town. Visitors are greeted by a cheery farm store with displays of produce, jams, honey, and vinegar. A steady stream of people arrives with large plastic jugs with the Hecks label on them. They might pick up an item or two from the shelves, but it’s the shadowy area behind the racks that constitutes the principle draw.

There, a narrow passageway is filled with an array of barrels with blocky capital letters reading “perry,” “Kingston Black,” “Vintage Dry.” One had an obscure label written in chalk—“Port Wine of Glastonbury.” It turned out to be a particular type of Somerset apple. The first three casks in the line were wine-barrel size, but the next two were enormous. “They’re hundred-gallons,” Chris explained. “Pumpkins, they’re called.” He pointed to an even larger one. “These are 110, they’re called pipes.” In the half hour I stood with Chris in that little passageway, he filled up eight jugs of cider. On two occasions, men showed up and not a word passed between cider-maker and customer. “He always gets the Kingston Black,” Chris said, smiling. If you proceed down the hallway, it opens up into a chilly chamber in the back where many more casks sit, their bellies full of fermenting cider. Some are a hundred years old.

When Chris and I were sampling his ciders, I asked if he could detect the difference between cider aged on wood or in plastic. “There is a slightly different taste. The wood does give it a nice taste, an extra flavor. The longer you leave it, the more integrated, rounder flavor [it gets]. It’s a lot more work, but it’s worth it.”

If you want to get the most undiluted sense of English cider, a fully dry, still cider made from natural fermentation in wood is the way to go. This is cider that tastes like it did in old diarist John Evelyn’s time back in the seventeenth century. This is not where the market is at the moment, but having tried these ciders, I think it’s where it’s headed. In the way that whisky drinkers rediscovered single malts and wine drinkers rediscovered single varietals, cider drinkers may rediscover the full flavors of barrel-aged cider. “It is a bit funkier,” Tom told me, when we visited the erstwhile hophouse he now uses as a barrel room. “The apple and wild yeasts and the microflora in the barrel—when it works, it works wonderfully well.” When Tom gets excited, his sentences come out in bursts, like gunfire. “There is a perception of oakiness. There’s the classic bittersweet phenolics that are enhanced in this; so blue cheese, earthy. It’s smoother.” Chris Hecks doesn’t seem to get excited, but as we sipped his Vintage Dry, I observed what looked like an expression of pleased satisfaction come across his face.

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I had spoken with a number of American cider-makers before I arrived in England. As a rule, they are very fussy about managing their fermentation. A lot can go wrong. It was surprising to find the English cider-makers so sanguine about this phase, especially when the kind of fermentation they were practicing had so many more dangerous variables. But to a person, they found my questions amusing. They don’t worry about wild yeasts; they don’t worry about fermentation temperatures; they don’t worry about (or even test) pH.

Of the three, Mike Johnson had the most Zen-like calm. One evening, we were sitting in his second barn—the one he uses to store bottled ciders, not the fermentation barn—gathered around a small wood stove. He again expressed amusement that anyone should spend so much time worrying about things that will take care of themselves. “I have so many visitors, so many new cider-makers, and they’ve done the course with [a professional instructor] and he teaches them to up the sulfites, throw in the sugar, ferment it to high alcohol, keep interfering with it and worrying about it—well, it’s just not necessary.” I believe we were drinking one of the whisky-barrel ciders at that point, Mike’s favorites. They are limned with the flavor of Scotch or Irish whiskies and have a port-like finish. “It’s fine, but they’re getting more like wines than ciders.” Don’t tell the vintners in Bordeaux, but that wasn’t a favorable comparison.

Perry

If it sometimes seems like traditional apple-based ciders are an endangered species in England, traditional pear-based perries can seem like almost mythical beasts. If you look closely at the official names of cider companies, you often see “and Perry” dangling at the end (for example, “Ross-on-Wye Cider and Perry”)—but they are definitely the minority partner. Even someone as committed to perry as Tom Oliver can only manage to find enough pears to make it a quarter of his total production. The market is growing rapidly, and customers would buy much more perry if the makers could produce it. That they can’t, hints at the challenges and joys that are good traditional perry.

Well-made perries are spectacular, easily the equal of cider, and sometimes its superior. (Tom Oliver recently won best in show for a perry at a national contest where they were outnumbered by ciders three to one.) Oliver’s perries are elegant and finely wrought little creatures, characteristic as much for their pillowy softness as their flavor. I noticed it immediately in his bottle-conditioned Dry Perry. The word that sprang to mind was “meringue”—both for the bright flavors and mousse-like texture. Red Pear Cocktail perry has a poached-pear flavor and light delicacy. (Both completely conceal their alcohol spines.) But perries can also be made of sterner stuff. Oliver’s bottle-conditioned Medium has tons of tannin, a bit of herb in the nose, and a touch of blue cheese. It’s more like Mike Johnson’s perries; Mike’s have a sturdier farmhouse quality, with burnished tannins (they seem softer in pears than apples), more alcohol warmth, and a hint of wild yeast. Those who love smacking tannins found in English ciders would approve of them. Whether delicate and soft or big and burly, they’re great perries.

To produce these excellent tipples, though, is no easy task. Perry pear trees are much larger than cider trees and take fifteen to twenty years before they begin producing regular crops. (Thus do cider-makers say, “pears for your heirs.”) In the three-counties region—Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire—farmers have been trying new dwarf stock to see if those will fruit more quickly. “The smaller trees?” says Oliver. “There’s a few people putting in quite a decent amount. Well, they’ve got to five years and there’s not much sign of fruit yet.” Beyond that, trees are prone to pests and disease and, due to their size, are harder to harvest.

Once the trees do begin to fruit, the problems are far from done. Perry pears have a small window of ripeness; and when they come in, apples have to wait. And of course, the different varieties don’t mature at the same moment, complicating pressing schedules. Pears have their own yeasts, like apples, but they are more prone to bacteriological contamination and the fermentation takes longer. On the tree or off, pears are just more bother than apples.

The pears are slightly different than apples, too. They have more sugar, so the juice has more potential alcohol strength. They also have more tannin and acid. Chris Hecks, making a face as he spoke, described them as “horrible.” He continued, “You bite into one and it just dries your mouth out.” Pears have a kind of sugar called sorbitol that doesn’t ferment, so even dry perries have residual sweetness and fuller bodies. The tannins are somewhat different in kind, and there is more citric acid than in apples—and in some pears, there’s more citric acid than malic acid. That also adds to the complications; the citric acid is more prone to converting to harsh acetic acid (the acid in vinegar) given the right circumstances. When all these different elements come together, you end up with a drink that is simultaneously luxurious yet delicate and complex yet approachable. Trouble is, they don’t always come together.

Despite the complications, it’s no wonder that orchardists and cider-makers are betting on perry’s future. Pear trees may be slow and harder to grow, and perries slow and harder to make. You can’t argue with the results, though. “There’s a huge market for perry,” Tom Oliver believes—“but it’s a market that will just have to be patient.”

Finished Cider

Most of the cider in England, even most of the traditional cider, is sparkling. Of Tom Oliver’s nine ciders, only two are still. Ross-on-Wye bottles flocks of different ciders and perries, and I doubt even Mike knows the ratio of still to sparkling—but sparkling definitely holds its own. Commercial ciders are artificially carbonated, but traditional cider-makers prefer—at this point you’re not going to be shocked at this word—natural carbonation. There is a perceptible difference, if you know what to look for. Artificial carbonation produces a rockier bead that springs more easily out of the liquid solution. Natural carbonation tends to stay more integrated into the liquid and the bubbles that do come out are smaller, giving the cider a silkier sensation in the mouth.

There are two ways to carbonate a cider naturally. The easiest is to bottle before the cider has completely finished fermenting. In that process, it will continue to ferment in the bottle, and the yeasts will produce carbon dioxide. The second method is bottle fermentation, and although it is more time consuming, it has certain advantages. In this method, the cider is allowed to ferment out completely to dry. The cider-maker then adds a bit of sugar right before bottling, and the yeasts wake up and start fermenting again. Ciders often get better with a little aging, so allowing them to go fully dry first means cider-makers can bide their time until the cider has reached the moment of perfect balance. When pressed, cider-makers are reluctant to voice a preference between still and bottle fermented (it’s like choosing favorites among your children), but Mike Johnson admitted, “you can hardly beat it [bottle-conditioned] because conditioning gives it life.”

Ciders are bottled dry to sweet, an effect usually achieved by adding sugar back into dry cider at bottling, followed by pasteurization. The pasteurization kills the yeast, though it also subtly affects the cider’s flavor by adding a note of apple pie. The trade-off is minimal, though, and the market, even among traditional ciders, is for medium and sweet ciders. Cider-makers may even pasteurize dry ciders in case they have a little bit of sugar left for yeast to munch on—and occasionally, you’ll find a tiny gasp from a bottle of dry cider that wasn’t pasteurized.

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On the day I arrived at Ross-on-Wye, I went to the local pub in Peterstow for lunch. It is less than two kilometers away from Mike Johnson’s cidery as the Vauxhall drives, and I went with my mouth watering for the taste of draft cider. I have traveled through much of the island of Great Britain, but I had never been to the West Country before. In places like London and Suffolk and Yorkshire, a tap pouring cider is a fixture at the pubs—but always one of the national brands like Strongbow. For once, I was going to be able to find a proper cider to accompany my meal.

The Red Lion is a classic country pub, with a fire crackling merrily in the bar, exposed wood beams, and gardens outside. It was Sunday and they were serving a special farm-fresh lunch; your choice of meat plus a side of vegetables, all locally produced. But the cider? Stowford Press, a brand of Weston’s, and the official cider of England Cricket—a roiling, artificially carbonated, low-alcohol product. It is a cut above Strongbow (and is a venerable Hereford institution), but just two minutes away was one of the best cider-makers in the world.

I was shocked by this. “Most pubs won’t have it,” Mike told me. “They’ll have Weston’s and Bulmers—they may even have Stella.” Again, when I was farther north at Tom Oliver’s, near the town of Hereford, I failed to find local cider in the pubs. “We haven’t had a [cider] pub for years in Hereford. The epicenter of—well, the biggest bittersweet-apple-producing county in the world, and we haven’t got ciders [at the pubs],” Tom said.

The situation is better in Somerset, which has been given a boost by the annual Glastonbury Festival, an outdoor music festival that runs for several days in June. Respected cider-maker Julian Temperley has been bringing his Cider Bus since the first show in 1970. Somerset has since become the most famous county for cider, and even in the sodden winter months one is apt to come across traditional cider at the pub. As a consequence, people have begun to associate traditional cider—like Temperley’s Burrow Hill products—with Somerset. One of the county’s biggest draws is a visit to Mudgley to see Roger Wilkins’s farm and have a glass of his scrumpy-style cider.

But this is just the thing: For now, traditional English cider-makers are depending on the palates of Londoners or tourists to sustain their trade. There are not enough locals around who still like the robust, vivid flavors of real cider to keep their small operations afloat. This is absolutely not the case in the cider-making regions of France and Spain, where it’s locals who sustain the craft. In the biggest irony of all, there are certain regions of the United States where you now find more ciders in pubs and restaurants than in England. Many of the most well-respected of the new American cider-makers have taken their cues directly from England, and they can’t plant enough of the thick, lip-smacking bittersweet apples that most English cider-makers now conceal behind sugar water and additives.

The trends in beer, wine, and spirits favor the traditional makers, though, and this may be why I found a buoyant sense of promise among the cider-makers I visited. People are starting to look for flavor again. This sustains the folks like Mike Johnson, Chris Hecks, and Tom Oliver, and when you visit them they infect you with their sense of joy in traditional cider making.

Tom left me with a coda that he lives by. “I know that if people are exposed to well-made ciders, they will drink them in preference. They prefer the taste of good cider and it is more suitable for drinking with food. Our real problem is being so small, our distribution is limited. We’ve got to get our ciders in front of people so that when they think they want one, it’s there for them to buy.”

And to that end, the traditional cider-makers of England continue to make their more expensive, slow cider the way their grandfathers did, spreading the gospel one mouth at a time.