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.

Britain's Oldest Cidermaker

Being a writer I'm acutely aware that people tend to look at the pictures in a book before the words. I do this myself, come to think of it. On numerous occasions I've handed somebody a book, only for them to flick through, look at the photos and say, 'This is great!'.

Which is fine, as far as I'm concerned. If a reader can be enticed into a book by good pictures they're more likely to read the words. I want my books to be as visually exciting as possible, not just because people are more likely to buy them, but also because I think a book - I mean a real book, made of paper - ought to be a thing of beauty, or of wonder.

But how do you go about matching pictures and text? Often photographers are commissioned to illustrate particular aspects of the text, but I prefer pictures - or series of pictures - that stand on their own. Photo essays, I suppose you'd call them.

When I came across Neil Phillips' pictures of Frank Naish, the Somerset farmer dubbed Britain's Oldest Cidermaker by The Sun newspaper, I knew they were exactly what The Naked Guide to Cider needed. They don't illustrate anything I wrote, but they are gorgeous pictures in which the character of the men shown, and the place where they live and work (and the photographer, who loves orchards and cidermaking), shines through.

Naked Guide to Cider Available Now!

The Naked Guide to Cider is at the printers and should be back around the end of the month. It will go on sale nationwide on 15 Sept, but you can pre-order the book now from Tangent Books.


Richard and I wrote an article on cidermaking for Issue 13 of Fork Magazine - you'll find more on this in the book plus lots of stuff about the history and culture of cider and perry, and area guides with tips on places to go and ciders to try...

The book is illustrated throughout with black and white photos, including some real old classics, and there are two colour sections with work by Neil Phillips, Bill Bradshaw, Stephen Morris, Beezer and, er, me.

Look out for the photo series on Frank Naish, aka Britain's Oldest Cidermaker.

Bristol Harbourside Cider

This weekend's Harbour Festival has plenty to offer - including easy access to some of the world's finest cider. Come to think of it, the cider is there all the time, and you could take a very pleasant boat tour that combines great views, an opportunity to test your sea legs and car-free drinking...

Make your way to Temple Meads station and go round the back to the ferry terminal. From there you can take a boat to the Centre and trot across Queen Square to The Apple, the now-legendary bar-on-a-boat moored on Welsh Back. A swift half there, then back to the Centre and off again to the ss Great Britain.

The essential trick here is to walk past the entrance of the museum, up Gas Ferry Road to the alleyway on the right opposite Aardman's offices. Dodge down said alley, past the back of David Abel's shipyard and across the road to The Orchard, a fine local boozer with the most challenging list of farmhouse ciders in town.

If that doesn't finish you off, sail away again to the Nova Scotia, hard up against Cumberland Basin... You can sit on the quayside and enjoy a pint of Thatchers, and a very reasonably-priced one at that, then take a ferry home again...

There's more on Bristol Cider in The Naked Guide to Cider, out in September from Tangent Books...

Here comes The Naked Guide to Cider!

Tangent Books launches The Naked Guide to Cider on September 15, just as the apples are starting to ripen and thousands of people are asking themselves ‘I wonder if I can make cider out of those?’

The answer is a resounding Yes! and The Naked Guide to Cider shows you how to do it. The book’s premise is that anybody can make cider out of any apple. It’s that easy. Of course, to make very good cider you need very good apples and a great deal of skill and The Naked Guide to Cider contains profiles of many of the country’s most accomplished craft cider and perry makers many of whom share their tips and hints.

The Naked Guide to Cider also contains an area-by-area guide to all of Britain’s cider-making regions, chapters offering an entertaining, in-depth introduction to cider culture and history, and a comprehensive listings section which will be invaluable for makers and drinkers alike.

This is the third in the Naked Guide series alongside The Naked Guide to Bristol and The Naked Guide to Bath. It is sponsored by Thatchers, one of the country’s leading family cider makers. The Naked Guides set out to be sharp, informative and witty guide books, packed with information.

Martin Thatcher, Managing Director of Thatchers said: “The Naked Guides are a well established brand and the modern, witty but informative tone is ideal for the new generation of cider drinkers.”

Introducing... The Naked Guide to Cider

This week's Budget may well put a number of cider makers out of business - not the very very large companies of course, but the small producers who champion quality and distinctiveness. At their best, cider and perry are unique, characterful drinks, products made in particular places from particular fruit, by particular people.

Unfortunately governments work on the same scale as big businesses and tend to support them, rather than the small producer. In this instance, the health people are nagging the government to tax strong cider more heavily, in an effort to deter youngsters from drinking so much nasty white cider.

But raising the duty on strong cider will neither stop youngsters drinking nor have much effect on the companies that make white cider. They will either change the formula to bring the alcohol level below the cut-off point (probably 5.5% ABV) or make alcopops instead.

The only losers in this ill-conceived health crusade will be the artisan producers of cider and perry in Somerset, the Three Counties and elsewhere, whose undoctored, full juice drinks are naturally high in alcohol (though far less strong than wine, of course). Producers like Tom Oliver are respected the world over - but not in Whitehall.

British tourists love to drink sparkly French cider in Normandy and Brittany, and the French government recognises this. Whatever its other faults, it appreciates that fine, locally-produced food and drink attracts tourists, and it administers its duty regime accordingly.

The UK Government, on the other hand, sees only the shortest possible view: a nice headline about binge drinking and a few more quid in the coffers - until the cider makers give up and do something else.

So what better time to announce the imminent arrival (well, sort of - it's out in September) of The Naked Guide to Cider? A guide book, and more. Learn how to make your own cider and how to support the best producers of cider and perry - after this week, they're probably going to need it.

Totterdown Press: Cider in the City

Now in its third year, the Totterdown Press makes a fine, dry cider from a secret blend of bittersharp and bittersweet cider apples gathered from orchards in Somerset and Gloucester- shire.

This year we ran into competition from Orchard Pig, which has been supporting Somerset growers by trading orchard maintenance (planting and pruning) for fruit. At least the apples have gone to a good cause.
Anyway, we still collected enough to press about thirty gallons of juice using a Fruit Shark scratter and small-ish press. A certain amount of rainwater may have found its way into the mix, but I'm sure that's all to the good. No rodents in there yet, but there's still time...

We pressed during Front Room, the annual Totterdown art trail. Fun to chat with passers-by, though we should have remembered that the weather is always terrible that weekend.

Now we wait... This year's cider should be reaching its peak in time for the launch of The Naked Guide to Cider. But that's another story