Alchemy and magic in cider-making

Magic potion?

In the weird and wonderful world of Social Media there has been a bit of chittering and chattering recently about what is and what isn’t #RealCider, with particular focus on the subject of chaptalisation. Five years ago we’d never heard of the word, but now it’s a subject on which we have an actual opinion.

Chaptalisation - don’t do it. Let the apples speak for themselves.

So there you have it, that’s our opinion. Why? That takes a bit longer to explain.

Chaptalisation is the process where cider-makers add sugar to the apple juice, prior to fermentation. Fermentation, of course, is the process whereby yeasts turn sugar - natural sugar or added sugar - into alcohol, so the more sugar there is the more alcohol there will be. Cider-makers do this, either to make cider stronger (in the sense of being more alcoholic) or to enable them to make more cider out of a quantity of apples.

Perhaps it’s best explained with the help of some numbers. Typically, we’ll get about a 65% yield** (see our footnote on yields) from the apples we mill and press, so for every tonne of apples we’ll get 650 litres of apple juice. This juice will have a specific gravity of around 1.054, meaning that when the yeasts have turned all the sugar into alcohol the resulting cider will have an ABV of around 7.2%. Pokey enough, one would have thought.

Add sugar - chaptalise - before the fermentation starts and the whole equation becomes very different. It’s not uncommon for enough sugar to be added to increase the specific gravity from 1.054 to something like 1.105. Now, when the yeasts have finished their work, the ABV of the resulting “cider” is a whopping 14%. That’s not cider, it’s wine - and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs would tax it as wine. Cider-makers sell cider, not wine, so our cider-maker waters his (or her) cider down from 14% ABV to a commercially standard and HMRC cider-compliant 5.0% ABV. This involves him (we’ll assume it is a “him”) adding a copious 1,170 litres of water to the chaptalised and fermented “cider” and the end result is 1,820 litres of “cider” with an ABV of 5.0%.

It’s magic. It’s alchemy. We started off with 650 litres cider and now we have 1,820 litres of “cider”. Of course, our new cider is just 36% is apple juice - just above the pathetically low UK legal minimum of 35%, but above it nevertheless - and 64% water. It probably won’t taste that great - it’ll be a bit thin and watery, one would imagine - but that can be easily fixed by adding some apple flavour, perhaps some acidulants to give it an acidic twang, maybe some gum arabic to give it some body, a drop of apple aroma to improve the aromatics and some artificial sweetener to create a perfectly palatable Medium Dry cider. And a consistent cider too - not really surprising when just 36% of it is apple juice, the rest being water and industrial additives.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how an awful lot of cider that you drink in the United Kingdom is made. And one reason why you can buy a bottle of ”cider” in your local supermarket for a price below which we can make a bottle of Bushel+Peck; suddenly one tonne of apples makes three times as much “cider”. Oh, and no requirement by law, by regulation or by convention, to state the ingredients or the process on the label, nothing to distinguish this “cider” from cider made from 100% apple juice. Weird.

Exchange between Cider Mike, a passionate advocate of proper cider, and one of the country’s largest cider-makers

A brighter side?

There is a more refined side to the process, too. In the unlikely event that you’re an avid reader of our blog, you’ll know that apples tell the story of the summer and in cool and damp summers the apples won’t be as sweet as they are in hot and dry summers; less sweet, less sugar, less alcohol. A large (proper) cider-maker in Cheltenham makes one of their ciders from 15 or more different varieties of apples and in order to obtain consistency from year to year they sometimes chaptalise in order to get the ABV high enough. In other years, they’ll have to water it down a bit. One of the country’s biggest cider-makers, based near Hereford, does the same thing with one of their “premium” brands. The Small Independent Cider-Makers Association, a gathering of “craft” cider-makers (of which we are a member), approves of chaptalisation, so long as the resulting cider consists of at least 90% apple juice.

So, why don’t we participate in the process? For the very simple reason that we want Bushel+Peck to reflect the apples from which they are made. Hot summer, cold summer, wet summer, dry summer, the apples are what they are, and we feel that it’s OK for the cider to change from year to year, to reflect the climate, the weather, the different varieties we get from the different gardens and orchards we get them from. We don’t seek consistency - we could never beat the industrial giants at that game - but we do hope that the ciders we produce reveal something of the characteristics of the fruit we use, their natural sweetness, their subtlety, their complexity. Adding sugar to the mix just messes about with that sweetness, subtlety and complexity. Not a sensible thing to do in our book.

** Yields

Yields are to cider-makers what size is to fishermen. Where a piscator will proudly proclaim the landing of an 11 kg pike, so a cider-maker speaks of yields. Industrial scale equipment generates yields of anything up to 80%, apparently (800 litres of juice per tonne of fruit), and we come across many craft cider-makers who claim 70% yields. We have no bragging rights on this topic; occasionally we get 70% from some particularly luscious pears, but it’s a rarety. We plan on 62.5% and are happy when we get 65%.

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