Over on the ukcider cider community discussion group the same old topics keep coming around again, but each time with a seasonal variation and a new mixture of personalities. I thought I’d do a quick round up of current threads.
Low gravities of early juice
The poor levels of sunshine in the UK summer are blamed for low sugar levels in this year’s apples. The juice is predicted to be low in gravity and flavour, but this may only apply to ‘earlies’ because later fruit continues to ripen in the autumn, and in case it’s the yeast which accounts for a large amount of the flavour in finished matured cider.
Cider Field Research
Dave Reedy joins us from Hawaii. He’s doing a degree in Ethnobotany at University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has managed to specialise in the ethnobotany of cider and cider apples, even though there isn’t a single apple tree on the entire island! He’s also visiting the UK next month so perhaps we’ll have a meetup somewhere.
Still waiting
Ribbing camra for their failure to fulfil a promise to change the anomolous definition of real cider on the website.
French cider online
A new mail order service for bottled Normandy cider.
White labs cider yeast
Re-ordering soon. Dick doesn’t use it any more, but it could be the altitude. Andrew would like to know exactly which strain it is.
Ross on Wye cider festival
Reports from ukcider members who attended and had a thoroughly good time by all accounts.
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Published at June 21, 2007
in tech.
I was stunned in some ways, to hear of this use of a web service to search for small scale land characteristics. Apparently Google Earth is accuarate enough to spot specific land usages from the armchair, which may not be visible from the road. Cidermakers are always on the lookout for old orchards, either with a view to buying an established cider orchard at agricultural land prices, or to scrounge the unused fruit. I think it’s the way in which the old standard trees were planted in rows which makes them visible by sattelite.
Found some at Cheddington (near Dunstable) and Clophill (Beds). Have had no luck tracing owners - the Cheddington orchards appear sadly derilict. Part of it is up for sale for a staggering £100k for 3 acres.
Sheephill Orchard in Clophill has, in the past at least, had a farm shop. A casual drive past shows it to be well maintained. Does anyone know who owns it and what they do with their apples!?
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Published at May 13, 2007
in tech and wiki.
Richard Fairhust came up with a way to get the Cider Pub Guide extracted from off the ukcider wiki, and into a format which can be read into an iPod. Now I thought iPods were for just for listening to music, but fundamentally it’s just a portable data storage device and if it has a screen then you can read, scroll and navigate your way around any textual documents.
I’ve compiled an iPod version of the wiki Cider Pub Guide. This means you can have the full 880-pub listing in a handy format to take around with you.
The guide is stored as ‘Notes’ pages on the iPod, organised by county (just like on the website) for easy access.
Details and download here:
http://ukcider.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Cider_Pub_Guide_on_iPod
Richard Fairhurst
This is a great service Richard, because when you’re out and about it isn’t always convenient to be forsightful enough to have printed off the right pages for whichever area you might end up visiting. I suppose a final development would be to have it automatically synched onto your portable device, whether it’s an mp3 player, phone or PDA and then be able to report any updates from the remote location back onto the website on the fly, but the iPod is a neat solution because you don’t have to pay any call charges to look it up.
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