Good cider?
What makes a good cider?
Sometime during the Great Pandemic, whilst cider-makers, brewers, distillers and assorted others struggled with the new reality of closed pubs and much else besides, The Ciderologist and other leading lights of the cider world launched Discover Cider to help advance the cause. Their way of thinking is probably as good a place to start as any.
To paraphrase and simplify hugely, cider is about three things. It’s about cider - the drink, the liquid, the nectar - in all its glorious, unceasing variety, where there’s something for everyone and for every occasion.
It’s about people. Cider is a sociable drink, with a reputation for merriment and a tradition of togetherness - think of community orchards, community cider-making, community frolicking (sometimes known as wassailing).
And it’s about the environment. Cider is - or can be - a force for good in this environmentally precarious world. Cider is - or can be - made with local fruit, meaning low food miles and low carbon emissions. Cider is - or can be - made with apples from unsprayed traditional orchards, which are havens of biodiversity, home to literally hundreds of species of fauna and flora.
A Christmas present
We were lucky enough to be given Orchard: a year in England’s Eden for Christmas. Of all the books we’ve read about cider, about apples, about orchards, this struck a chord, this resonated. It’s beautifully written, for start, which always helps. It’s fascinating, too; each chapter reveals yet more detail about the extraordinary habits and rituals of the inhabitants - particularly the birds - of the authors’ secret orchard in Herefordshire, and how they interact with each other to weave and sustain an amazingly vibrant and lively environment - but one that is increasingly rare.
As we read it, we were reminded why we chose to become cider-makers, or at least to make cider in the way that we do; cider made from local apples, of course, but also cider made from UNSPRAYED apples. In the chapter describing the orchard in May, the authors compare “their” orchard (actually owned by “Nancy”) with a neighbouring commercial orchard;
Half a kilometre away, Nancy’s neighbours manage their orchard very differently to ours. Every week, sometimes every day, vast quantities of chemicals are sprayed onto their orchard - and the apples that we eat. And as we watch the bees returning to their orchard hives, you see first hand the devastating effect of indiscriminate pesticide use. Some bees appear visibly confused and disoriented. Others die in front of our eyes - you can, on occasions, watch bees dropping from the air and twitching pathetically on the ground, their tracheal tubes stuffed full of toxins.
On the next page, we read about nature’s very own pesticides that make chemical sprays unnecessary;
The orchard provides a sharing arrangement that shows farmland can still work in tandem with our vanishing insectivores. Ironically, the very parasites and larvae that the neighbouring orchards sprays against, at huge economic cost, are removed free of charge here by the orchard’s biomass of very hungry birds. Many wood- or fruit-boring species, damaging to commercial apple trees, are expertly killed not by costly chemicals - but by flycatchers, for free. Like barn owls in a farmer’s outbuilding, flycatchers might be seen as England’s most delightful pest-removal service.
A few pages along, writing about the living habits of redstarts;
But we have also searched dozens of sprayed orchards in the surrounding land for restarts too - and didn’t find a single one. Here crawl few beetles, leatherjackets or other invertebrates to be snatched on red tail-flashing forays onto green pasture. For orchards to harbour redstarts, starlings and many other birds, the soil, too, must be alive.
Please don’t be put off by these somewhat melancholy extracts; the book as a whole is a lyrical celebration of “their” orchard and the astonishing array of animals and plants that call it their home. Put it on your Birthday or Christmas list - it may be coming out in paperback soon? - or buy it for anyone you know with an interest in the wider world … preferably from an independent bookshop or, if you can’t get to one of them, from Bookshop.org (who’ll direct your purchase to a local independent bookshop). And whilst there, also look for The Ciderologist’s excellent book about cider.
bragging rights
There are three good reasons why we bang on about biodiversity and cider’s environmental credentials. First and foremost is that it’s important; the loss of biodiversity is as big an environmental issue for Homo sapiens as climate change and we can’t keep on sweeping inconvenient facts under the carpet. The second is that, if made in the “right” way, cider has unrivalled environmental bragging rights. Fields of wheat and barley aren’t priority habitat’s within the UK’s Biodiversity Action Plan, traditional orchards are. Fields of wheat and barley aren’t home to hundreds of species, traditional orchards are. Fields of wheat are not often located close to breweries and distilleries, whereas cider-barns often lie within a few miles of traditional orchards. If the cider world is feeling squeezed and marginalised by the beer, whisky and gin worlds then perhaps we should fight on ground that suits us and shout about our “green” credentials a bit louder - and it fits in with the zeitgeist, too.
And the final reason, of course, is that Bushel+Peck is made in the “right” way. When we started making cider 5+ years ago, the UK or the world didn’t really need another cider-maker; there were already 300+ commercial or semi-commercial cider-makers plying their wares in this country, so one more really wasn’t necessary. But the way we make our cider and the way we choose to do things - only unsprayed fruit from traditional orchards and surplus fruit from from local gardens - together with the voluntary work we do with the Gloucestershire Orchard Trust and our support for the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, distinguishes our methods from many others and perhaps makes our effort a bit more worthwhile.
And for the cynics out there, this isn’t a Johnny Come Lately conversion; our intermittent blogs have touched on the value of unsprayed orchards before Ben Macdonald’s and Nick Gates’ book was published. Less well-written, of course, but a similar message, about the joy of scruffy orchards, about the the stifling conformity of supermarkets’ purchasing habits, about the evil of peat compost, about the diversity of apple varieties, about the value of lichen … and much else besides.
We generally don’t blow our own trumpet, at least not very loudly, but if, as Discover Cider suggests, cider is about the drink itself and is about community and is about being “green”, then we’re quietly confident that we do pretty well on this last score, at least. Trumpet solo over.
Thank you for getting this far …