Much To Do With Apples

Dec 15, 2011
Francis Beswick

Apples for the press - JanUFotO

British brewing tradition has long experience in brewing with apples and pears

My mother's ancestors moved to Manchester from Scotland, Ireland and the West of England, and I reckon that I inherited my taste for cider from the latter, where it is made and drunk with gusto. It was not originally a Saxon drink, as the Anglo-Saxons were great ale quaffers, but it had a long tradition among the Celtic peoples of the West of the country. The people of Western England are substantially of Celtic [ancient British] descent, and their traditions remained

True cider, sometimes known as cyder or scrumpy, is to be distinguished from ciderkin, which is what most of us call cider. Scrumpy is made with the crushed pulp and is quite strong, whereas ciderkin is made from the pressed juice. My own small, domestic press produces juice, but across western England you can still find traditional presses which crushed the pulped apples on a large scale. They were often powered by machinery or horses. An old tradition was to drop some raw steak or a dead rabbit in the mixture to give "body" to the scrumpy. It would dissolve without trace in the acidic medium.

The cider apple is an enormous productive tree that flourishes in the ideal climate of Western England. There used to be many cider apple orchards, but many were grubbed up in the twentieth century. They are, however, returning, as enthiusiasts plant their trees. In fact, there seem to be orchard enthusiasts springing up in England at the moment, all keen on having a small plantation. This pleases me, as my son works in an organic fruit tree nursery in Worcestershire, Western England, and the more trees for him to produce, the happier he and I get.

Farm hands used to be paid partly in cider, which they expected to be a regular contribution to their diet provided by the farmer. In fact, most west country and west midlands farms had their own orchard and cider press. There were, however, travelling cider makers who moved from farm to farm with their own presses, horses and engines, who were hired by the smaller farms who had no press of their own.

Eventually temperance activists in the Victorian age had the practice of giving workers cider stopped and tea replaced it, despite the fact that tea is less nutritious than cider is. Cider is strong in vitamin C, and the apple pulp is rich in minerals, especially if the orchard that produced it was organically farmed.

There were intermediate brews using apples and other substances. Common among monks before the dissolution of the monasteries was cyser. This mixed cider apple juice with honey. It is possible that they sometimes used pear juice instead of apple juice, but there is no record of this being done. Cyser has the advantage that it can be made without specialist cider apples, so in areas where cider apples did not grow, you could still make cyser.

Of course, many ciders use a variety of apple types. Cider apples, which are very bitter, are the heart of the brew, but other varieties can be blended in as the brewer requires. I have had some good results with bramleys, but I only brew for domestic consumption.

What is little known is that ginger beer was once alcoholic and was brewed from apples, among other ingredients. Yeast and root ginger were added to the must, the technical term for the liquid from which the brew is made. Again, Victorian temperance activists gave us the non-alcoholic variety, which has almost squeezed out the true original recipe.

We have to thank the Normans for perry. The pear is not native to England, as it evolved in Western Asia and slowly moved over. They liked the drink and imported trees from Normandy, where the pear was already established. It is not as easy to grow as the apple is. You can generally grow some apples in many places, but pear will not fruit in the far north of Britain.In mediaeval England there was much pear growing, especially in the monasteries. The famous warden pear was bred by cistercian monks in the fifteenth century.

Well, the Christmas holiday is almost on us. I have apples from my tree, ginger root in the cupboard and a small cider press standing idle and demanding work. My son is home from the nursery and wanting guidance in making home brewing. The tradition continues.

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