Pomological Procreation

The MM106 rootstock I ordered in December has finally arrived, neatly bundled and wrapped for safe transit by the nice people at Blackmoor Nurseries.

This was my first order from Blackmoor, and I must say I've been very pleased with the service from start to finish. The price of £1.80/stock seems reasonable to me, and I've received regular e-mails charting the progress of the order. As a bonus, the rootstock has arrived just in time for the grafting course I'm attending at Stowe Landscape Gardens this weekend.

MM106 rootstock, if left to grow on it's own, will eventually produce a medium sized tree bearing a crop of fairly respectable cooking apples. But it's not for cooking apples that I've bought these trees, it's for their roots (hence the rootstock moniker), and perhaps a few inches of slender stem. Future branches, buds, and fruit-bearing are all surplus to requirements.

This might seem cruel, hacking a tree down well before it's had a chance to grow and blossom, but there's a very good reason for this hard pruning. Allowing an apple tree to grow on it's own roots will often lead to a very large 'standard' sized tree, difficult to control in a garden setting, and often just as difficult to harvest the fruit from. By grafting a small piece of wood (the scion) from the variety of apple tree we want to grow, onto the stem of our MM106 rootstock, we can control it's vigour and produce a semi-dwarfing or half-standard tree suitable for most medium-sized gardens.

In addition to the rootstock, we now have a bountiful supply of 'scion' wood ready to graft onto it. The fridge has been temporarily converted into a mini wood store, with all the good prunings from our cider apple trees nestling in the salad tray, waiting to go under the knife. As well as the Tremlett's, Dabinett, Yarlington Mill and Harry Masters', we also have two precious scions of Golden Harvey, a variety I've been keen to acquire since I spotted a tree at Lyveden New Bield orchard last January. Also known as the Brandy apple, and renowned as a good juicing and cider apple, this variety will take pride of place at the bottom of the garden where we hope it will one day provide shade, and a bumper crop of juicy sweet apples. My thanks to Ny of the Marches Cyder Circle for sending me this wood all the way from deepest Herefordshire.

I'll only be using a tiny amount of this collected wood. The surplus will be going to the First National Scion Wood Exchange, an exciting new initiative organised by the Midshires Orchard Group at Buckingham Garden Centre on the 7th & 8th of February.

Perry Good

Today I completed the last bit of racking-off in the ciderhouse. All that remained to be done was a very nice tasting fermenter of Rockingham Forest Cider, and our precious 70 litre tub of Blakeney Red/Moorcroft Perry.

The Perry is still very young but shows great promise. It's clearing very nicely, and has a lovely Med/Dry fruitiness, with perhaps just a hint of a Gin-like note in the finish. There's still a little yeastiness, and the tannins need to soften just a smidgen, but it's everything it should be at this early stage.

Our very first batch of Rockingham Forest Perry is destined to be a bit of a limited edition, there's simply not enough of it to go round. Whatever we don't keep for our own (and friends) pleasure is destined for the Red Lion, Middleton as a special during the Welland Valley Beer Festival in June. It's going to take a huge amount of self-control to leave it gently maturing until then, but with luck it should be well worth the wait.

Our good friend Diana Fegredo came up with this beautiful pear image for our prospective Perry logo. We think it sends out all the right messages about our perry, principally that it's made from pear juice, pure and simple, and that it's definately not a Pear Cider whatever that might be!

Ross Returns To The Red Lion

Now I know what you may be thinking...

Why, when the standard of writing on this blog has already scraped the very bottom of the literary barrel, would I resort to lame, tabloid-esque wordplay in the title of this entry? Why, you may be asking, would I feel the need to reference the current bête noire of the media, the naughty Mr Jonathon Ross of Friday evening television fame, just to draw your attention to this blog entry? Well...

To be honest, there's really no particular reason, other than a slightly desperate desire to chivvy the hit rate along on the blog. I would hasten to add that should the aforementioned Mr Ross ever find himself in the area, I'm certain he would receive a very warm welcome at the Red Lion. The Welland Valley is of course a playground for the rich and famous. Celebrity chef, and award-winning tantrum-thrower John Burton Race is an occasional (once) visitor. If the Red Lion is good enough for 'Racey' (as he's known round here), I'm sure a place in the Wednesday night skittles team could be found for Mr Ross. And should the man be forced into taking another sabbatical from his highly paid BBC position, he could probably be squeezed into the Friday night team too. This would obviously depend on his performance at the table...

Of course the real reason for this blog entry is the welcome return of award-winning cider and perry to the Red Lion from the Ross-on-Wye Cider & Perry Co.

In the absence of our own Rockingham Forest Cider, Fiona & Kevin at the Red Lion, Middleton, are keen to keep the real cider flag flying, and we're more than happy to help out. The Sam's Cider went down very well over the Christmas period, selling out surprisingly quickly considering the chilly weather. There is a widespread belief that traditional ciders like these only sell well during the Summer months, but the cider drinkers at the Red Lion are obviously made of sterner stuff than that.

The cider and perry from Broome Farm proved to be a very popular choice at last year's Welland Valley Beer Festival. The talent behind the operation, Mike Johnson, has won a hat full of awards for his fine Herefordshire ciders (this pic shows Mike with an award for his bottled cider at the 2005 Three Counties Show), and if anything the perry is even more highly regarded. A visit to Broome Farm for a sample in the cider cellar is always a pleasant experience, and you can share a little in that pleasure by visiting the Red Lion, where Ross-on-Wye Cider & Perry should be available from this week onwards for a limited period, so get it while you can.

Pruning

It's pruning time again in the orchard. The trees are all fully dormant now and I've been itching to set-to with the secateurs. In truth I've left the job until now so as to have healthy bundles of freshly cut wood ready for the Grafting Course I'm attending next weekend (more of which later).

The image on the left shows some of the tools of the trade. The vodka is for sterilising the various blades as I 'Hack & Slash' my way through the orchard... certainly not for drinking. For that I would have needed to bring an orange juicer and a tray of ice cubes into the orchard... I was heavily burdened enough as it was.

The Tremlett's we planted last Winter are the most in need of pruning. They are a vigorous variety, and the leaders have shot up over the Summer and now need tipping-back again to encourage more laterals to break. The Tremlett's seem hell-bent on upward growth at the moment, great news for tall and sturdy trees, not so good for the formation of branches bristling with knobbly fruiting spurs.

I'm pleased to say that the older trees need little more than tipping-back and very light thinning of a few badly placed branches. Above all, I'm particularly pleased that there are no signs of disease on any of the trees, and most are showing reasonable growth with a fair number of fruiting spurs forming on the two and three year old wood. A decent bit of Spring weather and we could even expect a few apples on the trees this year...

More Pump Action

A welcome break in the recent freezing weather last weekend meant it was high time for another Racking-off & Topping-up session. By racking-off we aim to remove the young, slowly clearing cider, from the old yeast deposit which should by now have settled at the bottom of the fermenter. The cold conditions won't harm the cider, but this session of racking-off involved the transfer of over 1000 litres of cider, a process likely to take most of the day and therefore not a job to be undertaken in bone-chilling sub-zero temperatures.

The time had come to plumb our shiny new pump into couple of lengths of food-grade tubing, and get down to some serious suction in the ciderhouse. The pump performed very well, sucking up the cider without disturbing the sediment, and squirting it into the fresh tub at a (slightly worryingly) high rate. The Okoflow 3000 pump has a flow rating of 50 litres/minute, which I found to be pretty accurate. One of our 120 litre fermenters was taking no more than 2-3 minutes to transfer, the bulk of the time throughout the day was spent cleaning and sterilising the tubs ready for the next batch of cider to be racked-off. This is considerably quicker than syphoning using gravity alone, a 70 litre fermenter racked-off in this way was taking around 10 minutes last year, and I would have struggled to complete the job in a day without the use of the pump.

The one possible disadvantage of using a pump to rack-off the cider, is the vigour of the transfer. The cider is sucked into the pump chamber clear and relatively un-agitated, but emerges in the other tube fizzing with tiny bubbles. This is the dissolved CO2 being liberated from the cider by the spinning impeller of the pump, a bit like twizzling a straw in a fizzy drink. We aim to keep as much of this dissolved CO2 in the cider at this stage, it helps to protect the cider from oxidisation and the possibility of bacterial infection. But even so, the cider should still have enough dissolved CO2 to protect it, and the warmer months of Spring will inevitably lead to a period of gentle fermentation which will also help.

I'm not the only cidermaker with pumps and racking-off on his mind. The ukcider discussion forum, the essential online destination for anyone with an interest in cider or cidermaking, is currently host to a lively debate on the relative merits of a wide assortment pumps. Perhaps not the most exciting discussion you're likely to find on ukcider, but it could be worse. A discussion on the merits of cider on the ukpumps* forum anyone?

*I made up the ukpumps forum, though I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that one really does exist!