Archive for October, 2009

Top Five Places for Cider

Published at October 27, 2009 in cider making, three counties and welsh cider. Closed

A California-based travel Website called VirtualTourist.com chose Spain’s Asturias region to top its list of the world’s “Top Five Places for Cider.

5topcider countries

  1. Cider makers in Asturias embrace showmanship in its pouring rituals, allowing the public to watch as the cider and its destined glass are kept two to three feet apart during pouring to aerate the beverage.
  2. La Route du Cidre, a 25-mile stretch of road in France’s Normandy region, was picked as No. 2 on the list for the massive number of cider producers lining the road.
  3. New York was third on the list for the farms, apple orchards and cider mills that work in tandem to create the freshest cider for visitors.
  4. Fourth was the Frankfurt region of Germany, which boasts several pubs serving Ebbelwoi, a traditional alcoholic cider variant popular with locals and visitors alike.
  5. Fifth was Somerset, England, which has embraced cider as part of its local tradition since the 1600s, with frequent festivals, tastings and educational lectures devoted to the drink.

Here at UKCider we decided to make up our own top five cider and perry regions, to see how they would compare.

1) The Three Counties of Herefordshire, Worcester and Gloucester for having the largest diversity of cider and perry makers and producing the largest volume of real cider and perry.

2) The Basque region of Spain and France for the greatest revival in traditional cider making and for producing the most delicious natural ciders.

3) Wales for reintroducing  perry making and for celebrating Welsh cider in new areas.

4) Kent for keeping the Eastern counties style of cider going and for growing huge numbers of apple trees.

5) Devon for maintaining traditional farmhouse cider methods against all advice to adopt modern scientific techniques.

Just for fun, I wonder which would be your choices for the top 5 cider regions?

Cider workshop – speaker needed, Manchester

Published at October 15, 2009 in Workshop and cider workshop. 1 Comment

Cider Workshop

Agnes from Abundance is holding a Cider Workshop on Monday 26th October in Manchester and is looking for someone from this group to do a short talk about making cider.

Abundance is a group which works to harvest and redistribute surplus apples and other fruit and veg in the city of Manchester, similar to other urban scrumping schemes, and the forthcoming cider workshop will be in association with the Manchester Permaculture Network.

There will be an apple crusher and press available for the cider workshop, so it was thought that people could bring along 2/3litre clean containers with them together with juicing apples to the workshop, for a practical demonstration as well as a short talk, provided that somebody knowlegeable can make themselves available in the area on that night please.

Cider Workshop - A mill and press could be available

Cider Workshop - A mill and press could be available

Cider Workshop Contact

If anybody is available and would like to help out at the Manchester Cider Workshop, please get in contact with Agnes via the Ukcider group

Manchester Cider Workshop

The Manchester Permaculture event on Monday 26th Oct, 6:30pm – 9:30pm, is billed as a cider making workshop.

We’ve got a home brewer coming from near Manchester to talk a bit about cider brewing, and we are also going to juice some apples using a crusher and apple press.

Other Cider Workshop Events

Cider workshop events take place from time to time whenever a group of people from one area with an interest in making cider on an individual or collective basis can get organised to learn more about the craft. Sometimes UKcider members organise these through the group but there are occasionally cider workshop events taking place which we don’t even know about, centred around orchard groups or city farms. The only pre-requisites are a willingness to cooperate and the availability of some apples of one sort or another to press. The freshly pressed apple juice can either be split up amongst the cider workshop attendees or else carefully watched over collectively  and then distributed the next year as cider.

What happens at a Cider Workshop?

Plenty of notice ensures a well attended evening with loads of apples brought along by attendees and demonstrators alike.
It doesn’t mattter if not all of them get pressed. It’s best if there are some cider apples to show but no worries if the apple varieties represented are hugely biased in favour of culinary and desert apples from people’s gardens. After a short talk, no longer than 45 minutes, it should be possible to get through twenty litres or so of juice in a couple of hours, using a small basket press. Measure the specific gravity and the acidity of the juice before distribution in bottles for home fermentation.

Devon Cider Brandy

Published at October 12, 2009 in cider brandy. Closed

Cider Brandy

An award-winning Devon cider maker has started making a new cider brandy. After five years of patient waiting for the potent drink to mature in barrels, Yarde Real Drink has now come out with its own brandy.

Yarde Real Devon Cider Brandy

Yarde Real Devon Cider Brandy is understood to be the first apple cider brandy to be produced in Devon. Husband and wife cider makers, Paul Gadd and Rebecca Jack, said the brandy had been a long time coming but had been worth the wait. Mrs Jack said distilling cider into Calvados-like brandy had been a natural extension of their cider and juice business.

Every year we set aside one barrel of our cider to distill into brandy. The first year we sent our cider to the distillers, they sent us back a sample. It was like fire water. But after five years of slowly maturing in oak barrels it has become quite smooth. It’s very nice and is best drunk after dinner like any good brandy.

Devon Cider Brandy ciderbrandystillsThe cider brandy, made from the aromatic juice of Devon cider apples, is first fermented into cider and then double distilled through old Calvados stills.

The couple produce only 800 bottles of brandy and 1,500 gallons of cider every year which is the cider company’s legal duty limit.

This year’s Cider Apple crop

We are extremely excited about this. As far as we are aware it’s the only Devon cider brandy on the market. It’s been a long time in the making, lots of people have been very patient but it’s definitely been worth the wait. It’s generating a great deal of interest.

Just looking at the orchard across the road, there are already small apples on the trees. We’ve been lucky with the blossoms. We avoided any frost and strong wind. It’s looking pretty good. The rain will have helped. We had some sunshine in June, rain in July now we’d be happy with some more sunshine to concentrate the sugar in the fruits. Last year we had a good crop. We should have another good one this year.

Cider Brandy Online

Yarde RealDrink was among the first producers to introduce ‘provenance’ or place of origin to their range of products, naming orchards of origin on their labels. They
also offer a wide range of premium juices, cordials and ciders, all made with fresh local fruit and flowers grown and harvested in traditional orchards and hedgerows around the South Hams and Torbay areas of Devon.

The very first bottles of the limited five-year-old 40 per cent ABV cider brandy were available to buy at the Yarde RealDrink stand in the Food Hall at this year’s Totnes Show, back in July, and a small quantity of cider brandy is planned to be made available to buy online.

Licences to make Cider Brandy in the UK are severely limited, with The Cider Museum at Hereford being granted a licence in 1984.

The first written records of Cider Brandy in the UK go back to 1678.

Devon Cider Brandy somersetciderbrandy 213x300

The Somerset Cider Brandy Company at Burrow Hill also claims to have the first full cider distilling licence in recorded history, granted in 1989, so Yarde Real Drink is now either the proud holder of only the third such licence to distill cider brandy in the UK, or else they are making use of one of the other two licensed distillers to get their own cider made into cider brandy and then matured on their own premises.