It’s often claimed that the best cider you will ever drink is the one you make yourself. It’s partly because after a while, with practice and a little trial and error, you will end up making a home made cider which is closer to your personal taste than anything which can be bought commercially. But its also because some of the satisfaction obtained from the slow annual process of making craft cider is somehow transferred into the glass when you finally get to drink it!
To make cider at home you need a certain amount of basic equipment, access to apple trees, knowledge, patience, a little sporadic hard work and plenty of waiting time.
A plan is needed starting from right before the forst apples start to fall in the autumn, or in some cases late summer. You need to decide how much cider to make, where to store the juice, how to source the apples, whether to enlist some help or go it alone etc etc.
If you have your own orchard, which can be just a few trees in a garden or something much larger, then you have a supply of apples but are there enough proper cider apples amongst the mixture? If not you can usually find plenty of small farms in Somerset and Gloucestershire willing to sell cider apples, as long as Magners and co haven’t bought them all up first! You can also use a mixture of eating apples and cooking apples for an eastern counties style of cider, or add plenty of crab apples to add a little more sour, sharp and tannin flavours.
The biggest piece of equipment is usually the cider press, but you might also consider asking another cidermaker to press your apples for you, or form a coop, or for very small quantities use a juicer. Apple presses come in all shapes and sizes, and if you are handy with a bit of woodwork you can also build your own home made cider press once you know you are going to be taking the hobby up on a sustainable basis.
Cider apple mashing, the old way !
Before you can press your cider apples though, you need to mince them up first in a machine called a Scratter or apple grinder. These are cheaper to buy than presses, but also more fun to make!
Well that’s enough about cider making equipment for now, it’s only July so there’s plenty of time left still to make plans for the autumn, although there are rosy red apples almost full size on some of the trees in the far southwest, the real cidermakers will hold off until November before pressing the main crop of cider apples, after having stored all the earlies for months first to develop a little more sweetness and lost some of the excessive acidity.
