If anyone ever asks me which one plant I’d choose to grow above all, it would be an apple tree. It offers perfumed, bee- rich blossom in spring, lush shade in summer, fruit in autumn and structural beauty in winter. Apples are just so versatile – for creating pies, purées and, of course, juices and cider.
Apples tend to be split into three types: eaters (sweet), cookers (sharp) and cider apples (bitter). Historically, a smallholding or cottage garden would have probably grown all three to give year-round nourishment.
Much of that diversity has been lost, for many different reasons, leaving us with a supermarket handful of blandly super-sweet, imported varieties. But we’re missing out on something wonderful. The joy of juicing your own apples, or making your own cider, taps into centuries of self-sufficiency.
What to Read NextHow to press home-grown apples to make juice and cider
Starting with apple juice, the most delicious blends are often a mixture of sweet eating apples and tangy cookers. Most recipes call for a 1:1 ratio, others 1:3 cookers to eaters, but it’s all down to taste.
Some devotees stick to single varieties for juicing, choosing something with the ideal balance of sweetness and tartness, like ‘Ashmead’s Kernel’ or ‘Cornish Gilliflower’, but it’s often down to what’s in your garden. As a rule, about 2kg of apples will make 1 litre of apple juice.
Cider apples are traditionally more complex when it comes to flavour – they’re pleasingly bittersweet thanks to their sugar and tannin levels – but don’t make good eaters. The old name for cider apples was “spitters” for that exact reason. Cider can also be made from eating and cooking apples, or a blend of cider apples with eaters and cookers.
Most home cidermaking is an exercise in experimentation, finding a blend that suits your palate and makes a decent alcoholic drink. Anyone interested in discovering which varieties to use or grow should seek out Pomiferous, an astonishing database of more than 7,000 heritage apples.
Country Living / Andrew Montgomery
Both juice and cider start off the same way: crushing and pressing. All apples must be milled into squishy, small pieces before they can be juiced.
On the farm, we have a scratter – a hand-cranked mincing machine – that mashes them up whole. The pulp is then collected and squashed flat using a press. It’s a gloriously sticky, messy afternoon’s work but it’s thrilling to see liquid gold pour out. When the last drops of apple juice run from the press, you remove the squeezed pulp. The chickens like the odd handful of pomace but most of it goes on the compost heap.
Apple juice keeps for a few days in the fridge or freeze it in plastic bags for up to four months. Once defrosted, drink it the same day.
Cider making is more complicated and you’ll need to do some homework. Find a decent craft cider manual and get to grips with the process and all the kit you’ll need. Most homebrewers make cider in a 25-litre plastic fermenting bin. In the lid will be a bubbler, or airlock, which allows fermenting gases to escape without letting any nasty bacteria back in. Most people first kill off any wild yeasts and bacteria in the apple juice by adding sulphur dioxide in a Campden tablet, leaving it for 24 hours, then adding cultured cider yeast. It’s then left in a stable temperature to start fermenting.
It usually takes between five and 14 days to finish bubbling and fermenting, at which point you siphon off the cider into another container to separate it from the sediment. From this point, you tweak the mixture and the process to produce different kinds of cider – drink it flat, add sugar to make it lightly carbonated, leave it to age and so on. This is where the real skill lies. However, patience is not one of my virtues. One of these days, someone is going to find me lying underneath the apple press, drinking it straight from the spout.
Read more from Sally on The New Good Life.
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I’m a smallholder, Country Living columnist and expert in rural living, residing in North Yorkshire.
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