Apples in the Press

Earlier in the month I was interviewed, photographed, and generally spit-roasted by the features editor of the Northampton Chronicle & Echo. The resulting article, inspired by CAMRA's October Cider & Perry Month campaign, appeared in the October 11th edition of their 'Weekend Life' supplement, but since we were too busy picking apples in Worcestershire that day, I failed to track down a copy.

Today Karen had business in Northampton so I took the opportunity to tag along and pop into the Chronicle & Echo offices, who were happy to sell me a copy. They obviously have an awful lot of this edition left over...

The photographer took dozens of pictures, posing me like a cheap page three girl over mounds of rosy-red apples. Unfortunately, rather too many of these tawdry images made it into the article, and for your own good I've neglected to include the full-page spread which featured on the front page of the supplement!

Pick 'n' Mix

Today was almost certainly the last day of pressing this season. It's been hard work, but gratifyingly we've managed to make more cider than ever before, around 400 gallons in total.

Today's pressing session was quite significant as we were making a new batch of our Welland Valley Special, the cider we make from local apples and which we usually sell at the Welland Valley Beer Festival in June. The picture above gives a good indication of the mix of apples which have gone into this year's batch, around 8 different varieties in all. The dessert apples which make up the bulk of this blend were very full flavoured late varieties, including some small, yellow, and very sweet apples from Rockingham, a sack full of huge russeted pippins from up the road in Cottingham, and the deep purpley red apples in the picture which had a wonderfully rich, slightly bitter, sweetness. These apples came from an old orchard on the Rockingham Castle estate which contains at least eight different varieties of apple and pear alone. If only we know what they were! The specific gravity of the juice is 1047, which should give a reasonable level of alcohol, and I think this blend will produce a very good cider.

We used some of the juice from todays pressing to top up the earlier batches of cider, particularly important where the fermentation had all but finished. In the event I slightly overfilled one of the tubs and had to remove a little so that it wouldn't overflow into the airlock. This gave me an opportunity to sample some of the cider we pressed in September, which was made from a blend of organic dessert apples.

The cider is obviously very young and still quite cloudy. It's quite hard to evaluate the aroma at the moment, as the yeast has not settled sufficiently and it still dominates the nose. Other than that it shows great promise. The flavour is sharp, but pleasantly so, and there's quite a bit of fruitiness despite the cider being quite dry. The first taste is a little bit too full-on to really enjoy, but after a few sips it starts to taste remarkably drinkable. Not bad for a cider made only a month ago, and I'm confident this will mellow nicely for early Summer drinking.

A word about? ...Organic

This year most of our cider, and all of our small batch of perry will be made from the fruit of old unsprayed traditional orchards. The only fertilizers these trees receive are from the livestock which graze the orchard floor during the Summer months or the diverse range of fauna attracted to these largely unmanaged havens for wildlife. We count ourselves very lucky to be given access to these venerable, unspoilt orchards, which we're confident have been free of any agricultural spraying programme for many years, if indeed they've ever been sprayed!

Unfortunately most of the trees and orchards we gather our fruit from are living on borrowed time, of little or no commercial value, merely waiting to be exploited as building land or at the very least for a more profitable agricultural use. Grain seems to be the flavour of the month, apples have been out of favour for decades! By continuing to harvest (and pay for) the fruit from these traditional old orchards, we like to think we're going some way towards supporting their continued existence, even if it's only in a very small way.

The cider we make from the fruit of these old, unsprayed orchards is not necessarily better than that made from more intensively grown fruit, that's all down to the blend of apples and the skills we aim to bring to the cidermaking process. But given the choice we'll always choose to make our cider from apples grown without the use of agri-chemicals, even if that means hand picking the fruit and paying more for the privilege. The more intensively managed the orchard, the more need there seems to be for sprays and chemical fertilizers, and we've found that the fruit from old traditional orchards is often largely free from the sort of diseases which are routinely sprayed for in the more intensive orchard environments. Which brings me rather neatly to the point of this blog entry, the 'O' word.

Organic ciders have to be made from apples grown organically, ie. grown subject to strict guidelines on what can and cannot be added to the soil and the trees themselves, and so reduce the growers impact on the environment in general. The organic system has always made sense to me, I don't want to eat and drink things full of artificial chemicals, and I care enough about the environment to want to support organic growers and to encourage more to think and farm in the same way. So why are things not so rosy in the organic orchard...

The cider we made in September was from a batch of fully certified organic apples, 'cull fruit' not suitable for commercial sale due to blemishes or small size, but perfectly suitable for juicing and cidermaking. We were offered the fruit by the nice people at Windmill Orchards in the Northamptonshire village of Sulgrave, and felt that it was worth making an experimental batch of cider, since not only would it be from 'Organic' apples, but also from relatively 'local' Northamptonshire fruit. Even though we knew we wouldn't be able to call the resulting cider 'Organic', we were reasonably confident that we would be able to label the cider as being made from 'organic apples'. We would therefore be able to comfortably pass on the higher cost of the apples in a slightly increased price for the cider, knowing that customers would be getting the double whammy of a truly local cider made from purely organic apples.

I decided it was time to contact the UK arbiters of all things 'Organic', the Soil Association, to find out where we stood with regard to the labelling of this 'premium' batch of cider, which is where it all started going wrong! Because we are not registered as organic producers with the Soil Association, we cannot use the word 'Organic' anywhere on labelling or publicity, this despite the fact that we have receipts for all the apples which went into this batch of cider from certified organic growers.

I suppose I can understand the need for policing the use of the word 'Organic' throughout the chain of production from growing to selling, but the problem is that very small producers like ourselves are effectively priced out of the whole Organic loop. The minimum cost for registration with the Soil Association is well over £500 per annum, which is small change for large-scale producers, but a significant percentage of our current turnover. It really isn't worth our registering for this cost, any additional value we would realise from our 'cider made from apples grown by a certified organic grower' (even this title may be breaking the law!) would be wiped out by the cost of inspection and registration with the Soil Association. There is a sliding scale for registration, based on the size of the business, but unfortunately the scale doesn't slide anywhere near our (or many other small-scale cidermakers who are also using unsprayed fruit) level.

So, we will continue to make ciders and perry from totally unsullied apples and pears (of a standard which actually exceeds that of organically grown fruit, ie. no Sulphur sprays against scab!), but it's doubtful whether we'll be repeating the experiment of producing a cider from 'Organic' apples next year, since there's little chance that we can realise the value of a cider made from fruit that we can't talk about in public!

Home Grown

Hog Heaven

The tricky business of disposing of around a ton of pressed apple pulp has been made considerably easier this year with the help of the nice people at Keythorpe Rare Breeds.

Smallholding dynamo's Serena & Adam are the driving force behind Keythorpe Rare Breeds, producers of high quality pork and lamb at a smallholding on the Leicestershire/Rutland border. Amongst the menagerie of (mostly!) domesticated animals living happily at Keythorpe are a sizeable stock of rare breed porkers, and as we know, pigs absolutely love apples. So once we've extracted the important bit from the apples, the dry(ish) pulp, or pomace as it's known in ciderland, goes over to Keythorpe to supplement the diet of these pampered porkers.

I was a little worried at first that the pigs wouldn't be able to keep up with the quantity of pomace we've been producing, but it turns out I was way off the mark. Demand is outstripping supply, and the arrival of each fresh batch of pomace causes quite a stir on the smallholding. Here's a message I received from Serena today...

'...One of my fatteners OD’d on the other lot of apples the other day, and spent most of yesterday sleeping and looking very sorry for itself, needless to say Adam and I went out of our way to make as much noise as possible, and to constantly wake it up. Serves it right for spending most of Saturday with its head in the apple bag.'

Appley over-indulgence... Sleeping all day and looking sorry for itself... Serious lack of sympathy from loved ones... Hmm! Sounds rather too familiar to me...