27 March 2025
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Andrew Oldham shares his experiences of making the best use of apples and nasturtium remaining from the year’s harvest
The last of the orchard apple tree are in the kitchen and I have been bark on about buy a fruit press for too long . No more pot of orchard apple tree pies and crumbles . I now have good deal of bottles that I have been pile up over the last few months . I have been told by numerous people to be meticulously neat when juicing . I have been told : ‘ Beware of the bacterium ’ like some fifties B movie , ‘ It kills ! ’ Bad cyder smell of lemon or bananas , known as cider malady and anyone mad enough to imbibe it wo n’t get along out smell of lemons or bananas .
The idea of poisoning us or the neighbor , has put me off make cider for twelvemonth but as our orchard has grow and our apple yields have gone up , we have decided to have a go . The news travels tight in our hamlet and our Swedish neighbour has buzz off wind of our architectural plan to make cider . His foreland pops over our orchard paries as my married woman , Carol and I harvest apple ; two gravid trugs brim with the tart ‘ Keswick Codling ’ , the mellifluous ‘ Fillingham ’ , the flush ‘ Flower of the Town ’ and ‘ Hunt House ’ ; the orchard apple tree Captain Cook swore by . Our Swedish neighbor await at the trugs full of apples and inquire , ‘ Are you making cider ? ’ How long does cyder take to make ?
A short more talk of the town and an offer to assist and we realise that his ‘ help ’ comes in the shape of drinking the finished intersection . I must tell him that apple take a year to become cider . If I booze my juiced apples now , they would just be apple succus and by Christmas I will have something that will strip the non - cohere off any pan . By Easter , next year , I will have a palatable drink with a sharp kick but by summer , I will open a feeding bottle , have a glass , intend it ’s not unfit , stand up and descend headfirst into the flowerbed . tangible cider once ready is n’t like cyder in the pothouse , it is a sustenance deglutition that prompt you that the etiquette of any cyder drinking accept stead with you sat down .
Our Swedish neighbour looks put off , and he wanders off , he ’s never catch over the homemade rhubarb schnaps we gave him one class . No one in the village who receive a feeding bottle from us walk direct that Christmas . Now we need to make the cyder We take the Malus pumila harvest into the kitchen thinking juicing is well-off . We spend thirty instant chop up apples to make a ‘ mash ’ which we bone into the insistence .
As Carol turns the handgrip we both realise that we may have misinterpret what a ‘ mash ’ is . Our mash is like the raw salmagundi for Malus pumila pies . Muscles taut , face sweating , Carol turn and I immobilise down the press . Surely it should be childlike than this ? We look up what ‘ mash ’ should appear like . Red faced , mainly from embarrassment , we laden out the squashed Malus pumila and bash the Inferno out of it in a brewer ’s bucket with a large art object of wood . That ’s mash . We can press it now without fear of pop a blood vas . The juice work , gratifying and turbid .
We could stop here , bottle the juice after filter out it , add some citric dot to stop it from drop dead off and pop it in the fridge but we have three demi - johns waiting . So , we pop to pour and strain , watching the cloudy admixture go down inwardly and we add together barm , pop on an air lock and tread back . Carol talks about get to ginger beer at school , how no one wanted it , and a lad in her class took the lot home , hide out it in his wardrobe , left it there until it break loose need the press with it . We move the demi - johns into a expectant metallic element tray in the middle of the kitchen , if they break loose , they have nowhere to go , nothing to put down .
Home made brewing comes in many forms I am not novel to brewing . My dad was a beer maker of all right body politic wines , those hedge wines , those vino that when you sip admit the next words that make out out of your mouth to be several octaves lower than before . Gooseberry wine , elderberry , orangish , blackcurrant , vino made from his own grapes . Once we caught the heel underneath one of his kegs , on her back , catching the drips from a faulty wiretap , three sheets to the malarkey . Next month we will pour our first cider into bottles , adding sugar to a few to create effervescent cider , leaving the rest to be literal cider , and consort that if bad comes to the bad we can mix with lemonade , which by the way , is my favourite way to drink cider with loads of glass . blasphemy , I know .
