There was no serious tradition of cider-making in New Zealand [where the author lived for several years before returning to Dorset]. I pretty much gave up drinking cider there, as it was usually too sweet.
Though I love to drink cider, West Country cider-making is something I knew little about. I probably know more about Basque cider, having a friend whose family live on a caserío making their own cider, and going to the txotx celebrations of the start of the new cider season.
But West Country cider? I just drank it. It was probably the first alcoholic drink I had—and probably not even the proper stuff, but more likely something like Strongbow.
More traditional cider has less sugar content and is dry, often tasting innocuous and then knocking you off your feet. But apart from knowing that it was made from apples and the occasional rat, I didn’t know much about the process.
This year we’ve had a bumper apple harvest in the West Country and I’ve been eating, cooking and preserving as many of my parents’ apples as I can. It was great fun to go along with my Devon-based friends to their neighbours’ to see a traditional cider press making the most of their enormous harvest. My minor contribution to the pressing was to fill up a big bucket with apples, sort out the bad ones and remove as much grass as possible. And test out the cider from last year.
Much younger people were doing the hard work of chopping up the cider apples with a sharp spade and an old pomace mill (or scratter). Someone else turned a big wheel and the roughly chopped apples were chopped up further to create a pulpy mess (pomace), which was then shovelled into the cider press.
The cider press was a marvel of wood and iron. A wooden box was lined with straw and then the apple pomace was put into this. More straw was added and more pomace, in layers (lissoms). This terminology comes from this fantastic post about cider-making, which is where I learned that the straw binds the pomace so that pressure can be put through the whole lissom stack, the cheese.
Finally a big piece of wood is put on top. This was screwed down until the apple juice ran out into a bucket. That’s what gets put in the barrels to ferment. No yeast is added; it all comes from the apple skins and everywhere else. Forget all your shiny, spotlessly clean stainless steel gubbins—this is the real deal. I can only imagine the number of different microbes at work to give each batch of cider its own particular flavour.
We celebrated the pressing with pasties, song (the hostess, not me!) and cider.
Great fun.
(I bet they don’t make Strongbow like that.)
We were delighted when Alex contacted us asking if we’d like to share some of her work with our readers! You can also follow her on her Substack.
