Making Traditional British Cider from Orchard Apples

Start with the Right Apples

Good cider begins in the orchard, not in the kitchen. The flavour of your finished drink is decided long before you press a single apple, and the single biggest influence is the fruit itself. Traditional British cider apples fall into four rough camps, based on how much tannin, acid and sugar they carry.

• Bittersweet — high tannin, low acid. Dabinett, Yarlington Mill and Tremlett's Bitter are the backbone of most West Country blends, giving body, colour and that characteristic dry, astringent finish.
• Bittersharp — high tannin, high acid. Kingston Black and Foxwhelp are prized but fussy croppers; a little goes a long way.
• Sharp — low tannin, high acid. Bramley and other cookers lift a blend and keep it from tasting flat.
• Sweet — low tannin, low acid. Eating apples such as Cox add sugar and aroma, but used alone they make a thin, wine-like cider.

A useful rule of thumb is roughly 60–70 per cent bittersweet, 20 per cent sharp and the rest sweet. If you only have garden apples, don't despair — mix in a handful of crab apples for tannin and a few cookers for bite, and you will get much closer to a proper farmhouse cider than any single variety will manage.

Picking, Sorting and Storing

Leave the fruit on the tree as long as you dare. Sugar rises and starch converts as apples ripen, and a fully ripe apple gives both more juice and more alcohol. Windfalls are perfectly usable provided they are sound, but discard anything mouldy, rotten or riddled with codling moth. A single mouldy apple can taint a whole batch with musty, earthy flavours that no amount of maturing will shift.

Traditional makers "sweat" their apples for a week or two in slatted crates or hessian sacks in a cool shed. This softens the flesh, improves pressing yield and lets the fruit finish ripening. Wash dirty fruit in cold water and let it drain before milling.

Milling and Pressing

You need the apples broken down to a pulp — known as pomace — before any juice will come out. A purpose-built scratter mill is ideal, but a garden shredder or a sturdy wooden bucket with a clean, sharpened spade will do the job at small scale. Aim for a coarse, even pulp rather than a smooth purée.

Traditional pressing uses the rack and cloth method: pomace is wrapped in cheesecloth or nylon bags to form "cheeses", which are stacked between wooden slats and pressed slowly. A small hydro press or a basket press works beautifully for a few hundred kilos. Apply pressure gradually — squeeze too hard and you will crush seeds and pull harsh, bitter compounds into the juice.

As a rough guide, 100 kg of ripe apples yields around 60–70 litres of juice. Let the juice stand for a few hours so the coarse sediment settles, then siphon or pour it off into your fermentation vessel.

Getting the Fermentation Going

Take a hydrometer reading before you do anything else. Most cider juice starts between 1.040 and 1.060, which will ferment out to roughly 5–7.5 per cent alcohol. If your reading is low, add a little sugar; if it is very high, dilute with water or expect a slow, stuck fermentation.

You have two choices. You can add sulphite at around 50 parts per million to knock back wild yeasts and bacteria, wait 24 hours, then pitch a cultured cider yeast — this gives you consistency and control. Or you can let the wild yeasts on the fruit do the work, which is how farmhouse cider has always been made, and which gives a more complex, unpredictable result.

Ferment in a food-grade vessel with an airlock at 15–20°C — cool and steady, not warm. A hot fermentation drives off aroma and produces harsh fusel alcohols. Primary fermentation takes anywhere from ten days to three weeks, and is finished when the gravity sits at 1.000 or slightly below and the bubbling slows to almost nothing.

Racking, Maturing and Blending

Once fermentation has calmed, rack the cider off its lees into a clean vessel, leaving the sediment behind. Top the vessel right up to the neck to minimise the air gap, and keep the airlock topped up with water. Over the winter, many ciders undergo a malolactic fermentation, where sharp malic acid converts to softer lactic acid — this is what rounds off a young, biting cider into something mellow and appley.

Rack again every two to three months, tasting as you go. Proper cider needs time: six months is a minimum, and a year is better. Store it somewhere cool and dark, around 10–12°C.

Blending is where the real skill lies. Keep a few separate batches — a tannic bittersweet, a sharp, a soft sweet — and blend to taste before bottling. It is far easier to build a balanced cider in the glass than to fix a disappointing one afterwards.

Finishing and Keeping

For a sparkling cider, prime with about 6 g of sugar per litre and bottle in strong, pressure-rated glass, then leave warm for a fortnight and cool for a month. Dry cider can be sweetened with a non-fermentable sweetener or by pasteurising or sterile filtering, since any fermentable sugar left in a bottle will simply referment.

Keep your equipment scrupulously clean, keep oxygen out of the finished cider, and be patient. A well-made orchard cider will drink beautifully for a year or two, and a carefully kept bottle will improve for far longer than that.