Ross on Wye Cider festival 2011

This year was our first visit to the Ross Cider festival put on by these lovely people Ross Cider. It was a great event. Very well organised. We camped in an old orchard full of heritage varieties of cider apples and perry pears.



The event is limited to 400 people due to fire regulations. This keeps it feeling a small, friendly and cosy festival. On the friday night there was a ceilidh with lots of people dancing intoxicated on Ross Cider delicious cider and perry. On Saturday there was a demonstration of cider making.



Ross cider has invested in a new type of press which uses water pressure to do the pressing. The pressure only goes up to two and a half bar which is quite amazing as my hydraulic press goes up to 380 bar! The juice is extracted slowly so should be of good quality.



Ross cider invites other cider producers to come and sell their wares at the festival which is nice of them! The Marchers Cyder Circle's Palmer's Upland Cyder was there. Other present were Tom Oliver, Greggs Pitt, Gwatkins, Swallowfields, Seidr Dai and Carey Organic. Needless to say we tried them all over the day and bought a few to take home with us too.

Throughout Saturday there were various folk musicians playing for our entertainment



There was also fantastic food available all weekend so we didn't really have to take any food with us. We'll certainly be going next year.

Herefordshire Cider at Checkley Brook

Beer on the Wye 2011 and Perry tasting

This post is a bit after the event but I've been busy. Well Beer on the Wye, the Hereford CAMRA event was very enjoyable again this year. There were 99 ciders available all from the county of Herefordshire, which just goes to show what a mecca for Cyder Herefordshire is. In the picture above is Roger's Jolly our offering this year. The same cyder appears in Beer the CAMRA publication in an article by Tom Stainer - Mick Lewis, CAMRA's long serving cider campaigner gives cyder tasting lessons and tries our cyder at the Cambridge Beer festival earlier this summer.

Anyway back to Beer on the Wye - Pat Pope from Herefordshire CAMRA asked me to do the perry tasting again this year. A job I am delighted ti perform as you can probably guess. The quality of the perries on offer were not as great as the year before. Many of them still tasted young and this may be due to the cold winter. In fact the other judges and I were convinced one was still fermenting!

One new cider of note I tried was Gryfter cider (below).



Among the other judges was Dave from Gryfter cider and his friend Charlie. That's Dave on the left.




Thanks again to Charlie for giving me a bed after far to much 'apple juice' and saving me from a precarious 6 mile cycle ride home! Hope to see them at the Ross Cider festival in September.


Herefordshire Cyder at Checkley Brook

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We were on Countrywise Kitchen last winter. They came and did a bit of filming of us making cider. Anyway I have finally got round to editing the DVD they sent me to produce a three minute clip of us on telly. This involved new territory for me. Downloading various DVD to WMV converters and merging the two resulting files into one. Of course Windows media maker did not work probably and cut off the last few seconds ruining the whole thing. Anyway a good learning experience. Might have another go at some sort of video in the future.

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Herefordshire Cyder at Checkley Brook

Selling a barrel of cyder to the British Army today. It's going out to Waterbeach barracks for an officer's ball.

This reminded me of an amusing (to me anyway) passage from my father's book The history and Virtues of cyder about cyder as a national English drink.

"Social reform was seen as one of the major avenues to prepare for the coming of the new millennium. It was suggested that landowners should be legally obliged to plant a certain proportion of their land with fruit trees. R. Austen, who wrote a Treatise on Fruit Trees in 1653 (it included "The Spiritual use of an Orchard"), approached Cromwell with an appeal for state aid in a national scheme for the planting of fruit trees. The appeal was unsuccessful, but it embodied many of the points that were to be used many times again: the planting of fruit trees in hedges and orchards would supply timber, both for joiners and heavy use; the bark would supply the tanner's needs, which were currently raising the price of leather to a very high level; wood useless for construction would provide fuel; the general adoption of cider instead of ale would save malt, the wood used in preparing the malt (as fuel) , and the grain itself, freeing land for other purposes; moreover, cider was a such a health-giving drink that Englishmen, newly prosperous from following the above advice, "would be strong and healthy People, and Long-Lived, able to goe forth to Warre and bee a terror to all our enemies".

So cyder seems to have had great social implications in the past. To some extent many of the points made then are true today. As far as making English strong and a terror to our enemies, well I'll just have to ask the army after they have drunk some!

Herefordshire Cider at Checkley Brook

The great task of racking off 5000 liters of cyder has begun. Surprisingly enough some of the cyder from last autumn has finished fermenting and needed racking off. It was cyder I had made last September so it had had the chance to get most of the fermentation done before the very cold spell we had again this winter. Some of this is ready to sell and will be winging its way to a beer festival in Liverpool as I type.

Much of the later cyder is still cloudy and bubbling away. Hydrometer readings showed there was still sugar being fermented. I expect them to have finished by Easter.

The cold weather had another effect of bursting some pipe connectors in the kitchen and bathroom of the cottage. So it looks like I'll have to turn my had to a bit of plumbing next time I am over in Hereford ;-(

Herefordshire Cyder at Checkley Brook

Acetification of Cyder

I got a worried phone call from a worried amateur cyder maker the other day. They had found my phone number via my website (this is encouraging news for the visibility of the site). They were worried about whether to leave a gap of air at the top of the cyder's maturation tank. They should of course NOT leave an air gap. Whilst this is not a problem whilst the cyder is vigorously fermenting, all air should be excluded when the cyder has stopped fermenting and it being left to mature.

It is preferable to fill up the gap with water rather than leave it to aerate and acidify the cyder so turning it to vinegar. Of course adding water will weaken the cyder. Some people may actually do this to reduce the strength of a cyder. They only needed to add 2 litres to a 30 litre tank so the impact on the strength and taste of the cyder would be minimal.

Making cyder at Checkley Brook

Checkley Brook Cyder on Countrywise

It's been just under a week since Checkley Brook Cyder was on ITV's Countrywise Kitchen. Apart from the nervous anticipation I quite enjoyed watching. Fortunately we were only on for three minutes or so so it wasn't too excruciating. People have been taking the mike out of my accent; I was trying to sound posh - i.e. not swear on prime time TV. Anyway it was good to see more hits on the website - though no sales have materialised yet. Oh well if it had been too popular I probably wouldn't have enough for demand supplying three pubs already. A big thanks to all the Countrywise crew for making it happen.

Herefordshire Cyder at Checkley Brook