Cidermaking for Beginners

Today's ciderheads aren’t content just to drink other people’s cider (and perry); increasingly they are making cider for themselves, and we’re not talking about rough old scrumpy. With a little money and rather more effort, anyone can make a delicious, old-fashioned Somerset cider at home…

It’s often said, in fact, that the best cider you will ever drink is the one you make yourself. Why is this? There may a little personal bias, but there are two other more important reasons. First, people who like cider tend to have a particular taste and, with practice, you can create a drink that suits your taste better than anyone else’s. Second, cider is much more than a glass of delicious amber liquid. It’s a process – a way of life to some people. The making, perfecting and drinking of cider is a year-round activity and one that is often sociable. Start making cider with a couple of friends, or as part of a community project, and you will be seeing plenty of your colleagues.


You start before the autumn apple harvest. As the first fruit – like the Bristol favourite Morgan Sweet – fall from the trees in September you need to make a plan. How much cider do you want to make? Where are you planning to find the fruit? Are you going to press your own apples or get someone else to do it for you? What are you going to store the juice in? Perhaps you’d like to start out by helping out with a community venture or a National Trust project, and take it from there.

In the Bristol area it isn’t hard to find either apples or equipment. Homebrew shops like Brewers Droop on Gloucester Road sell plastic fermenting vessels, airlocks and so on, or you can look online for gear. Look around and you’ll be amazed how many apples are left to rot on the ground every year, though if you want real cider apples you’ll need to do a bit more research. There are small farm orchards all over Somerset and Gloucestershire, many of them neglected or underused in spite of growing demand. If in doubt you can always press eating apples, with a few handfuls of crab apples thrown in to give the cider a bit of bite and to help it keep.


A number of cidermakers will press fruit for you, for a fee; you just go along with your apples and go home with the juice. Somerset cidermaker Neil Worley won first prize at the Bath & West Show one year with cider that he’d made in this way; he didn’t want to invest in pressing equipment so he had his apples pressed and focused on making the best cider he could.

But the more common solution is for like-minded people to get together and invest in a small fruit press and scratter. This rustic-sounding piece of equipment is a great labour-saving device, a bit like a heavy-duty kitchen blender, with a rotating blade that reduces apples to pulp very quickly. You then press this pulp in your fruit press and the sweet juice flows out. Be warned, though. Apple juice stains hard, and you will be covered in it by the end of a pressing session, so wear overalls or clothes you don’t care about.

The top supplier of cider-related equipment is Vigo, which you can find online, but at the Totterdown Press here in Bristol we use a Fruit Shark scratter, imported from the Czech Republic. It takes us, incidentally, two weekends of fairly hard work to gather and press enough apples to make 25-30 gallons of cider. Then again, a lot of that time is spent getting to orchards, cleaning equipment, and so on, so we could potentially make more in the same amount of time.

The cleaning part is especially time-consuming but absolutely vital. Ask a successful cidermaker for tips and they will insist that hygiene is essential. You can make cider out of any apples, on as large or small scale as you like, but you must ensure that equipment is sterilized and fruit washed; a plastic bin with holes in the bottom is perfect for hosing apples clean.

Think of it like this: each batch of fresh apple juice is a kind of world – an eco-system if you want to be technical. It is full of delicious sugars from the inside of the apple and, from the skin of the fruit, wild yeasts. In an ideal environment, the dominant yeast will spread rapidly through the juice, converting sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide; dirty equipment is likely to harbour bacteria that will do nasty things to the juice. By the same token it is also essential to keep air out of the fermenting juice. Microbes called acetobacter live in fruit juice, and given the opportunity will turn ethanol (alcohol) into acetic acid, or vinegar to you and me. But they need oxygen to do this, and you can keep air out of the juice by filling containers to the very brim and fitting an air lock.

If you don’t fit an air lock you will find yourself with an extremely sticky explosion on your hands, as carbon dioxide builds up in the fermenting vessel. An air lock lets gas out, but not in.

So you plan over the summer, pick and press fruit during the autumn, keep an eye on the fermentation through the winter, rack cider into barrels in the spring, then drink the cider while you’re planning the autumn’s adventures. Then of course you might want to think about planting an orchard, or making different blends of cider, or improving your blend in some way. Before you know it, you’ve fallen into cidermaking. And it’s very hard to climb out again.

This article first appeared in The Bristol Magazine.