About Cider

The very best way to make good cider is to use the best cider apples, which means you must plant an orchard. Small apples are required because they contain lots of tannin in the skin, acidic apples are needed for bite and you will also need apples with a lot of natural sugar. Cider apples often have all three in abundance especially if grown in perfect conditions, cold winters, hot summers and low rainfall.

The classic English cider apple is the Redstreak and it was said to make cider of a shimmering yellow colour that was full of body. The modern Somerset Redstreak is a distant descendant of its grand forebear and is a small apple with red stripes it flowers early and the fruit is picked mid season. The Redstreak can be teamed up with a popular English cider apple that has been used extensively for commercial cider - Yarlington Mill. The original Yarlington Mill apple tree was found growing out of a wall at a water mill in Yarlington. It is a vigorous tree that produces high yields of small yellow apples, the tree flowers early to mid season and it fruits mid season.

In the warmer parts of Australia, which includes most of the mainland, a few cooking apples should be planted in a cider orchard, these apples will give the cider maker much needed acidity in their cider blends. The Bramley Seedling is the cooking apple par excellence and is superb for apple sauce or blended with Golden Delicious in apple pies. Bramley's are big green apples however they need two other apple trees close by such as the Redstreak and the Yarlington Mill to set fruit. The Bramley must be picked quite early under Australian conditions while the fruit is still green, we pick ours in February.

So where can you buy heritage apple trees? You must consult an expert. In South Australia try Perrys at McLaren Flat 08 8383 0268 and elsewhere in Australia try Clive Winmill, Badgers Keep, Chewton, Victoria 03 5472 3338. Good luck with the orchard and in the meantime, just about the best cider in the world can be had from our farm at Burra, South Australia.

The Ancient Art of Cider Making

The making of alcohol from apples goes back deep into prehistory. The word cider itself has a long lineage. It is derived from the Anglo Saxon word seider, which is derived from the Latin sicera which in turn was derived from the Greek sikera that can be traced to the Hebrew word for a strong drink sheikh'ar.

Originally cider would have been made in a hollowed out log, the apples were dropped into the hollow and pounded with a wooden stave, the pulp was then left to ferment. A Spanish visitor to our cider cellar explained that this very method was in use in Northern Spain when he was a boy. The Spanish had refined the process by the twentieth century and the juice was carefully tipped into oak barrels to ferment.

Cider or sheikh'ar is mentioned in the Bible and references to it crop up in documents throughout history, it is not until the seventeenth century however that detailed accounts of cider making appear. Many seventeenth century instruction books for the Good Housewife still exist and they give a graphic picture of cider making at that time, according to Gervase Markham all the apples were checked for bruising and disease and defective apples were discarded. The apples were then turned into pulp with beetles, the pulp was placed in a hair cloth sack and the sack placed in a cider press until all the juice was run out, the juice was then drained into a vessel that must be "exceeding neate, sweet, and cleane" then after twelve hours it was poured into old wine barrels. Spices were sometimes added and the bung hole was stopped with a mixture of clay and salt.

A large establishment would use a mill to grind up the apples. The mill consisted of a large grinding stone stood on its side, the apples placed in a circular trough were pulverised as the grinding stone was rotated by horse power. This complex cider mill was superseded when in 1670 the "Ingenio" or Scratter Mill was invented. The Ingenio consisted of a wooden chute for the apples with teethed rollers at the bottom, the rollers could be driven by hand or they could be belt driven using horse power, water power or steam. I have used a Scratter Mill and it produces a much coarser pulp than the old horse drawn stone mill however they were cheap, fast and portable and led to the tradition of the travelling cider maker. In the Nineteenth Century the travelling cider maker was equipped with a scratter mill on wheels, a cider press on wheels and a third cart carrying all other necessary equipment and accessories. These three wagons were linked up like a train and hauled around the countryside by a team of shire horses and for the sum of one half penny per gallon the farmer could have his apples crushed ready to ferment.

The Seventeenth century saw the advent of the special cider apple. The Redstreak was the most famous and was said to produce a sparkling yellow cider that was full of body and tasted like canary a popular wine of the sixteenth century. Another apple was the Foxwhelp said to produce a full bodied long lasting wine like cider.

In 1630 an even greater breakthrough occurred with the invention of tough glass. Due to a shortage of timber in England it became illegal to use charcoal for glass manufacture therefore coal was used in its stead and due to the higher temperatures achieved the glass was much stronger. In the 1640's armed with the new strong bottles Lord Scudamore the creator of the Redstreak apple, bottled cider before it had finished fermenting and created a bottle fermented sparkling apple wine long before the French used the English idea to create champagne.

In Thomas Hardy's novel Under the Greenwood Tree the local village male choir crack open a barrel of cider and are busy debating the quality of the oak barrel and the tecniques used to make cider, connoisseurs to a man. The nineteenth century however, also saw the beginning of factory cider made for the new mass markets, the industrial cities. These artificially carbonated factory ciders are the product of mass fermenting of apple concentrate, water and sugar and are nothing like the fine old farmhouse ciders of yesteryear.

Here at Thorogoods we studied the old ways and found that under the conditions in Burra a very superior cider could be made by combining the old methods with a lot of time, a great deal of care and a large dose of lateral thinking. What we have achieved is a totally unique cider, smooth, elegant, medium sweet to dry, naturally spicy and naturally sparkling, the old traditions are not dead yet.

Cider and Health

The drinking of various wines and vinegars and even sea water is often claimed to be good for the health, apple cider vinegar is supposed to have incredible healing powers and like red wine, it is claimed, is good for the heart. So I thought that I would have a look at some of the claims that are made about real cider, not apple cider vinegar, not pub cider but real cider made from apples. Firstly I'd like to make my own claim and that is, if red wine is good for the heart then a naturally fruity cider would be equally good.

The oldest champions of apple cider's health giving properties lived and wrote in Seventeenth Century England, Gervase Markham noted that cider "...is very wholesome for mans body especially at sea and in hot countries for they are cool and purgative and do prevent burning agues, " and cider was in fact used by the Royal Navy for 200 years to prevent scurvy. In 1664 diarist and founding member of the Royal Society, John Evelyn commented that "cider excites the stomach, strengthens digestion and infallibly frees the kidneys and bladder from breeding the gravel stone" An agricultural commentator, John Warlidge prescribed cider "...to abate the tedious cold it being more pure and active part separated from the impure and succulent and without peradventure is the most wholesome drink made in Europe for our common use" Warlidge also recommended cider for scurvy, gall stones and melancholy.

To relieve colds cider was often heated up and spiced with ginger and gin and in fact a special metal shoe was used, the foot of the shoe being pushed into the hot coals of the fire. Cider was often prescribed for rheumatism as the following poem suggests:

Wold Zan sould never goe nur long
Wi'out his jar of virkin
A used the Zider Zame's twur ise
to keep his jirts vrim quirkin.

The French have always been great cider enthusiasts, in 1913 for example they drank three times more cider than beer and only 50% more wine than cider, Calvados, their cider brandy from Normandy, was considered the universal remedy. A little Calvados heated over a burner drove off colds and newborn babes and calves were frequently given a dose. Calvados is still drunk today during a meal as a digestive aid. Whiteways a main player in the English cider industry for much of the 20th Century pushed cider's health giving aspects in much of their advertising. Whiteways recommended cider for gout, rheumatism and as an aid to slimming. They exported cider to India and there they advertised that cider is cooling, refreshing and stimulating. A 1913 advertisement for Whiteways biggest competitor, Bulmers states that "...cider is strongly recommended by medical men as a cure for gout and rheumatism."

The greatest claims of all, however, for cider's health giving aspect came from the vicar of Dilwiyn, Hertfordshire in 1667. He claimed that his parishioners lived from 90 to114 years of age and drunk nothing but cider all their life. He went on to claim that a Morris dance had been performed by ten parishioners and the collective age of the group was over one thousand years. If you're not convinced about the health giving qualities of real cider by now I leave you with the following poem from England's West country:

I were brought up on cider
And I be a hundred and two
But still that be nothing when you come to think
Me father and mother be still in the pink
And they be brought up on cider
Of the rare old Tavistock brew
And me granfer drinks quarts
For he's one of the sports
That were brought up on cider too.

At Thorogoods we don't lay claim to the above speculation. What we do claim is that we use a minimum of preservatives and people who have an allergic reaction to wine drink our cider and have not reported any side effects. We also claim that our sparkling cider, Misty Morning has no sugar and is often chosen by customers with diabetes. We also believe that if you drink only Thorogoods cider you will live for ever but we have not been able to prove that claim yet!

"A diet rich in antioxidants may help to protect against disease, and our research confirms cider has the same levels of antioxidants as red wine" said Dr Caroline Walker, a scientist at Brewing Research International. A second set of studies at the Institute of Food Research, Norwich in the UK found that antioxidants are rapidly absorbed by cider drinkers enhancing the health benefit.

I've always known that real cider, made from cider apples was good for the health, in fact the Royal Navy proved centuries ago that ships that took cider aboard before a voyage had a healthier crew. Our philosophy at Thorogoods, is to cut out the use of additives and make our cider naturally which I am sure enhances its health giving properties.