Cider Making
We start gathering in our apples from the orchard in late September. We are very lucky in being able to find wonderful friends and neighbours each year to help us with this intensive period of hard work.
Cider making starts in earnest in October.
The entire cider making is carried out here on the Fruit Farm, using traditional methods.
Our cider is carefully blended using 9 varieties of cider apple ranging from bittersweet to bittersharp. The three principle cider apple varieties being Dabinett, Michelin and Yarlington Mill. In addition, we add Bramley apples to give extra "bite" to the flavour.
Before milling and pressing, all the apples are sorted by hand to ensure only 100% sound apples go into our cider.
The apples are then milled. The milling processing basically turns the apples into a pulp ready for pressing. The pulp is then pressed immediately in our wooden press to extract the apple juice.
After pressing, the surplus pulp remaining is recycled by being spread in the orchard to provide food for the wild life.
The apple juice is put into 300 gallon vats, to which we add a little sugar and wine yeast to start the fermentation process. Fermentation times will vary, dependent on outside temperatures, but it is normally completed by January.
The young cider is "racked" off twice during the winter to ensure that the final product is clear and untainted. The cider is then stored until mature.
None of our ciders are ever sold until a minimum of 9 months old. When our shop re-opened in 2008, accordingly, we were still selling our 2006 cider.
Our overall aim is to produce the best quality cider by the most natural of methods.