One of the best things about autumn, and one of the reasons this is my favourite season, is all the fruit that suddenly appears, the last of the lingering warmth but the hint of cold telling us winter is just around the corner….one of my favourite poems is To Autumn by Keats:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

In our garden the trees are definitely bent with apples and so we turn some of these into cider like this.

You start with some of these –

You chop, “bash” and press them

..as you can see this is a family affair – my brother is chopping, J is bashing (or pulping) and I’m pressing. Cider making is a very sociable affair, it is a celebration of low-tech, labour intensive processes that have been around, unchanged for hundreds of years. The thought that the end product will be so delicious is always a motivation.

Making cider always makes me feel it’s autumn – and moving towards Christmas. The weather had been wet and miserable but, as you can see from the photos, as soon as we went out into the garden to start the cider making the sun came out. My cider making book “Real Cidermaking” by Michael Pooley & John Lomax states “choose one of those lovely crisp sunny days in October….you will be blessed with fine weather anyway because cidermaking is a virtuous thing”

The pressed juice is decanted straight from the press into demi-johns which are placed in a warm place (our kitchen) and a loose plug of cotton wool placed in the neck.

No yeast is added as there is sufficient yeast present on the skins of the fruit to start the fermentation process. After a day or so the juice begins to ferment rapidly – hence the need for the loose cotton plug – any bits of apple that made it through the press are usually pushed out of the neck along with a brown “scum”. After 2 or 3 days the fermentation slows and then an airlock can be added.

The cider should ferment quite quickly for around 2-4 weeks at which point it will slow and we have to “rack-off” (transfer into a clean demi-john) to continue fermenting a little longer. At this point we can add sugar if we want the cider to be a little stronger. The specific gravity of our juice was 1.050 which would convert to around 6% alcohol by volume if all the sugar turns to alcohol. After another 1-2 weeks the fermentation will be virtually ceased and the cider should have cleared to a hazy golden colour (as opposed to the murky brown it is at the moment).

We then rack off again adding sugar if we want either sparkling cider or medium sweet cider. It’s then bottled, for sparkling cider it will continue to condition in the bottle. It’s then stored somewhere cold for 4-8 weeks which means it’s ready just in time for Christmas!