The cider fruit are then washed down in trays using a hose pipe, and piled into the hopper of the scratter or apple grinding machine which turns the apples into mash ready to be pressed.

The big cider press squashes the cheeses filled with the apple mash and the juice is squeezed out, dripping through the cloth and racks into the collecting container.

You can see  the freshly pressed apple juice later starting to ferment and being stored in large oak barrels.

Let’s just all act like grown ups as if there isn’t a Llama in the room shall we?

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.

The 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.

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.

This latest one is all about summer pruning.

Summer pruning is a discretionary activity for orchard keepers, so you have to decide if it’s needed or not. Where a tree puts on a lot of new growth, then it’s worth thinning it out a bit but this will vary from season to season and from tree to tree. The best time is July or August, before the apples ripen to reduce apple scab  damage and increase the light levels.

Only the smaller manageable trees can be pruned in this way, not the giants.

What to do with a neglected old fruit tree? Do you want maximum fruit or a big tree to sit underneath?

Here’s one to restore. Is the tree vigourous and in the right place.

Pruning a neglected apple tree is not difficult. A few simple principles and a sharp saw will see it all right. the main thing is to use the saw to remove whole branch systems that are diseased, too low, too crowded or crossing, and mostly leave the rest of the tree alone-at least for the first year.

There is a very good section in the RHS book ‘The Fruit Garden Displayed’ on pruning neglected trees, but sadly it’s out of print.

Pruning the bramley apple tree, the famous cooking apple. The Bramley apple has a red flush, and it’s a good quality cooking apple which ripens to a yellow sweetness if kept long enough. But  the tree can be challenging. You need plenty of space between the trees. The one in the video was planted 10 years ago. The bramley is a big tree. In an ordinary garden you may want to put it on a small rootstock, to restrict the growth and eventual size.

Each year we want the tree to do three thing. Production of new growth, formation of new buds , and fruit on old buds. Bramley is a tip bearing tree so don’t go round snipping off all the tips, that’s the wrong way to prune it. Take out downward growing branches. Or any that are too high. We don’t go up trees with ladders any more.