March 2009

Cider update

Last autumn’s cider is now all well on its way. For the first time ever we had to add some sugar to the juice to get the desired final alcohol content. This process is called “chaptalisation”. The sugar levels in the apples were particularly low after the awful summer we had. Many cider makers did the same last year.

The cider has also taken much longer than normal to get going. This is mainly due to the cold spell we had after Christmas. It is a good thing that yeast is so resilient. There are not many living things that could cope with temperatures ranging from -20˚C to + 50˚C. Even if you put yeast in the freezer it will work when defrosted! What actually tends to happen in our system where we rely on “natural” yeasts for our fermentation, is that as the fermentation progresses different yeasts tend to predominate. It’s a bit like a relay race. As the alcohol levels increase different strains of yeast take over. When in the bottle (during the secondary fermentation… champagne method) and under considerable pressure the “wild” yeasts would probably not survive as their thin cell walls would rupture. The pressure builds up to about 75psi, much more than you would put in your car tyres! The special champagne yeast we get from France is able to withstand the pressure and is also a very aggressive yeast using up all the available sugars with glee.

Pruning

We have added another orchard to our local group of orchards that surround the farm. It is called Bumpston orchard. Hill’s Cider used to be based at Barkingdon Farm and were big on cider until they closed in the early 1980’s. All of the orchards we use were once part of the large acreage that Hill’s used. There is a fantastic range of tree varieties to be had, and generally the trees are in fairly good nick. My big moan though is the fact that they never seemed to prune their trees. I have talked about this in an earlier news page so I will not labour the point. Suffice to say, we have had a good session in one section of Bumpston orchard where I don’t think I have ever seen such enormous apple trees. Some must be fully 35 ft. high and with a spread much the same. Sadly some large branches have been ripped off in the winds and left a bad mess. One added bonus from pruning such large and dense trees is that the grass should start to grow again underneath them. This will make for a cleaner harvest. The owner will get a great supply of aromatic firewood for next winter too.


Events for 2009

So far, we are booked into the following events:

Taste of the West Trade Show, Westpoint, Exeter March 30/31

Exeter Festival of South West Food and Drink, Exeter April 17-19

Real Food Festival, Earls Court, London May 8-10

Devon County Show, Westpoint, Exeter May 21-23

Dartmouth Regatta, August 21-23

Tavistock Food Festival, Morwellham Quay September 12/13

Dartmouth Food Festival, October 21-25

October 2008

Ready for harvest

Some apples have been picked already, but the vast majority are still on the trees or are hiding in the grass. It comes as a surprise to some people that you always pick cider apples off the orchard floor. It doesn’t look as though we have a very good crop this year. Lots of rather small apples. I guess this could well be a reflection of the rather bad weather we had all through the main part of the summer.

We are always after the highest level of sugar in the apples, and this increases as the apples ripen. Apples only fall when they are ripe or nearly ripe. We will often store the apples for 2 weeks or so to ripen the fruit still further.

We hand pick all our apples to get a really good sample. A small amount of brown flesh is fine, as this indicates full ripeness. We might take 3 passes of the orchards to pick apples as they fall.

Larger enterprises use a mechanical tree shaker to get all the apples down in one go. This makes even unripe apples fall off the tree. The sugar levels in these hard apples tend to be quite low, so extra sugar is often added to make up the difference. We never add any sugar to our ciders at this stage.

The press and mill have all been assembled and given a trial run. All seems to be working perfectly….. not bad for machinery made in 1927.

New Cider Book

A new book on cider has just been published called “Ciderland”. Written by James Crowden, and it is a handsome looking book.
Ashridge Sparkling Ciders are featured in it, and he gives a very thorough treatise on the whole debate about who invented the “champagne method”. It seems from his research that he has come up with some interesting evidence to show that it was in the Westcountry that the process was first invented. Well worth a read, and it has great pictures too.

click here to visit James' website for more information

Weddings

We must have supplied our sparkling ciders to about 30 weddings this year. Most of them in the Westcountry, but some further afield. It always seems to go down very well. This year the Devon Blush has been pushing the Vintage off it’s perch in terms of sales, particularly at the weddings.
Although a great drink for a special occasion, I am keen to promote its use on the table, and investigate suitable recipes. I have in fact today, delivered some Vintage to the Fish Deli, in Ashburton, run by Nick Legg where he is going to do local Devon mussels in cider for part of the Devon Celebration of Food events. Watch this space for more tempting recipes using cider!

More prizes

In August we were pleased to be awarded yet another Gold from the Great Taste Awards. Although we could not repeat last years triumph of winning the top three star category, we came away with a very creditable two star gold award. Only 220 2 star Gold awards were won out of 4800 entries. In addition, we won both first and second prizes at the Devon County Show, third prize at The Bath and West Show and third prize at The Three Counties Show in Malvern. So a good haul after all.

Events

We will be at the Dartmouth Food Festival on Saturday October 11th and in London for the BBC Good Food Show at Olympia on November 14-16th .

April 2008

Spring is here?

We have just come back from the first big show of the year for us. This is the Exeter Festival of South West Food and Drink. Last year people were wandering around in tee shirts and lounging on the lawns. The weather was certainly very different this year, with a keen easterly wind and sharp showers that kept you on your toes.

Notwithstanding the inclement weather, we managed to top our takings from last year by a small margin, and picked up some very good trade contacts.

Taste of the West, who organise the event have been busy over the last few months. Over the last few years it has become clear that the South West of England contains an abundance of high quality producers of food and drink. They are in the process of setting up an interesting new initiative which is to attempt to link up the South West of England with Tuscany in Italy.

Things are at a fairly early stage, but the possibilities are exiting. It is interesting to note that some of the Italians I met at the Exeter event were saying that although they feel their region is “ahead” of the South West in terms of promoting their regional produce, it would not be long before we caught up, and there was much we could learn from each other.

Pruning and orchard work

All the pruning has been completed now, and we now have a fantastic flush of celandines and late primroses. The sheep will soon see to that when they turn up with lambs at foot.

Cider still working

Cold weather has kept the fermentation rate down, but soon, the cider will have reached “dryness” and at this point the first part of the job of cider making is complete. All available sugar has been converted by the yeasts which will have mainly all fallen to the bottom of the fermenting vessels as a bright orange sludge.

The next job will be to blend all the different barrels together and bottle the still cider with some sugar, champagne yeast and a fining agent. The fining agent helps clear the cider right at the end of the process. We then put the bottles in special racks to start the process of getting rid of the sediment caused by the secondary in-bottle fermentation. This is called riddling or rémuage.

Shows

Here is list of the Shows we will be attending this year:

Real Food Festival, Earls Court, London. April 24-27 Stand 64

Devon County Show, Exeter. May 15-17

Bristol Wine and Food Fair. July 11-13

Dartmouth Regatta, Dartmouth, Devon. August 28-30

Dartmouth Food Festival. October 18,19

Tastings

We are doing many more tastings this year. We find it a really useful way of meeting the general public and getting feedback, but probably more important is the business of having some time with the staff that work in the various shops. We can explain in detail what makes our ciders’ special. We talk about the products and the process. This “knowledge transfer” is a win-win situation due to the fact that the shop staff enjoy understanding about the products they are selling, and hopefully, when we have gone, they do a bit of selling for us!

We are taking on more suppliers in an ever increasing area, so if you want to know where your nearest outlet is, e-mail us with your postcode and we will let you know where to go.

Cheers, Jason

January 2008
We are now entering our quietest time of year so it is a good time to summarise recent events and look forward to the New Year.

Top Award
In the last newsletter I mentioned that we were having a very good year on the competition front. This has continued with Ashridge Vintage being awarded a Three Star Gold Award at the Great Taste Awards held at Olympia in London. We were the only cider to receive the top award of Three Stars.

Countryfile programme with Oz Clarke
We had a great day filming with Oz Clarke and Lotti. The programme was doing a feature called “The Devon Wine Trail” and featured Ashridge Cider quite prominently. While in Devon, the BBC thought they would visit a cider maker. The fact that we put all our ciders through the champagne process made a useful link with the wine producers from Devon.

We happened to be at the Dartmouth Regatta when the programme was aired, and I was amazed at the immediate response of being on television. Website orders rocketed for a short period, and they have kept at a level much higher than before the programme. Powerful medium indeed.

The brush with Celebrity (!) has continued with a full length “On Your Farm” feature on BBC Radio 4. The emphasis for this programme was different to the Countryfile programme, and concentrated more on orchards and apple varieties etc.

Waitrose
We are now supplying all the Westcountry Waitrose stores with both products, Vintage and Devon Blush. The stores are in Saltash, Okehampton, Sidmouth and Dorchester.

I have had mixed feelings about getting involved with Supermarkets. I have to say though, how impressed I have been with Waitrose. They really do seem to go that extra mile, and have made the whole process for us a very pleasant one.

Organic Certification
We have completed all the steps necessary for certification with the Soil Association. The orchards have all been inspected and fruit harvested in the autumn of 2009 will be eligible for full organic status. The actual process (i.e. cider making facilities) has to be inspected also. This is now complete, so if organic fruit is used we can legitimately market our drinks as Organic.

Next autumn we shall source organic apples to get the whole process under way, and then by 2009 we can use our own apples again and sell any extra as organic. As I found out last autumn there is a considerable premium on organic cider apples, anything up 200% more in fact.

Winter Work
Pruning has started in earnest at Pennywell orchard and we will make a start on the Barkingdon orchard in February. Some trees we planted last winter in this orchard fruited in a very modest way last autumn, but they have a very long way to go to compete with some of the old stalwarts that must be about 60 yrs old now. It certainly is a long term business this.

There seems to be a “tradition” amongst many orchard owners of simply not pruning their trees at all. I can see the logic in thinking that if you cut a whole lot of branches off a tree there will be less chance of a good crop the next year. The trouble is, if you keep on doing nothing, in time the long rangy branches break in a heavy cropping year and then you have no apples from a large section of a tree for many years.

So we try and do an area of each orchard in turn, cutting out dead, crossing and inward growing branches. Nothing too fussy. In three years we will have covered the whole orchard.

The press and mill have all been put to bed, cleaned and oiled to keep the metal parts in good nick. Apple juice is quite corrosive, and even some stainless steel will mark up if not given a burnish every now and then. The leather seals on the press are removed and given a good dose of neatsfoot oil.

Due to the cold weather we have had recently the cider is barely working now. This often happens, but it is reassuring when you can hear the yeast waking up again. I press my ear up against the side of the fermenting vessel, and you can hear the gentle crackle and fizz of the bubbles as they pass up the tank.

We will rack off the cider a couple of times before April, by which time the fermentation will have nearly stopped. We sometimes get another “fermentation” later when the weather warms up. This is called the “malo-lactic process”. Some wine producers highly prize the effect this process has on their product.

Small Cidermakers Duty Exemption
There has been a bit of a rumpus going on in the cider world recently.

If you make 70Hectolitres (1500 gallons) or less of cider per year, you are exempt from paying any duty to HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs). If you make more than this per annum, you have to pay duty on the total volume you make.

There are many cider makers like us at Ashridge that fall into the first category. You might call us artisan or craft cider makers, but we all produce 1500 gallons or less per year.

There is at present a EU Working group looking into whole issue of dispensations to small businesses across the EU. The duty free band mentioned above is just such one of these. There has been talk it could be abolished altogether.

Not surprisingly there has been quite a furore within the trade about this, and it has divided opinion markedly across the industry.

The rate of duty for still cider is 27p per litre. The rate of duty for sparkling cider is £1.65 per litre!, so you can see why I for one, am agitated about this.

There is a campaign running at the moment in support of the retention of the duty free band. If you feel you would like to support this please do sign the petition (see www.ukcider.co.uk). There is link on the main page.

I for one would really like to see this Working Group look seriously at not just deciding to scrap or retain the duty free band: but to look into the possibility of bringing in the tax on a sliding scale. Something similar happens in the brewing industry. Details of a proposal put forward by the Three Counties Cider and Perry Association (3CCPA) can be viewed on the ukcider site also.

All the best for now, and a Happy New Year to all.

June 2007
Welcome to the Ashridge news page. Here we will keep you up to date with relevant orchard and appley news.

Since writing last, much has happened, so a brief summary to get us up to date.

Prizes-Prizes
We are having a good year on the competition front. At the Royal Bath and West Show we won 1st prize in the bottle fermented section. This competition now attracts a large entry, and this year justifiably called itself an international competition.

Then just recently we got another 1st prize at the Three Counties Show held near Malvern. The Three Counties (Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire) is a platform for the area containing more cider and perry makers than any other in the UK…. Maybe even the world! So, a good one to win.

At the Hereford International Cider and Perry Competition we won 2nd Prize for Best Presented Bottle.

At the Devon County Show held back in May, we won 2nd and 3rd prizes. There are some more competitions to go, most notably the Fine Food and Drink Awards, and Taste of the West’s annual awards, so watch this space!

Shows/Festivals coming soon
Two big events are coming up for us shortly:

Taste of Bath June 28 - July1
The Taste of Bath is a fairly new breed of event being run by Channel 4. Royal Victoria Park is the setting for the Bath event, and it looks well worth a visit. You can buy our ciders by the glass, the bottle, or if feeling flush by the case. Special offer: One bottle free if you buy a case! www.channel4.com/life/microsites/T/taste/bath.html

Port Eliot Lit Fest July 20 – July 22
Port Eliot Lit Fest is now well established as a regular event for us and is one of our favourite, aka “Glastonbury for Books”. We team up with Chris, who serves fantastic fresh seafood in a marquee set up within a large walled garden. Very chilled out and relaxing spot, and our cider goes down a bomb! www.porteliotlitfest.com

Underground Publicity
In fact, Ashridge cider featured in an article in the Metro newspaper (June 19 2007) about good food and drink suitable for taking to festivals. Wildchild-chef Allegra McEvedy recommends taking a good perry or local cider “try an Ashridge Cider to reach cider nirvana”! I like that.

BBC Countryfile Programme
In August Ashridge Cider will be featured in one of the Countryfile programmes. They have recently done an item on “The Devon Wine-trail”. While in Devon they thought it important to visit a cider maker, and they chose to visit us. Oz Clark was duly excited to see real hands-on “méthode champenoise” being practised. We finished off the shoot with a picnic in one of our orchards where Lotti (Oz’s partner in the double act) had us in fits. PS They really liked the Sparkling Cider too!

“New” Press and Mill installed
In September of last year we installed a magnificent old apple press. Believed to date back to 1927 this is a classic example of Victorian engineering. Massively overbuilt, simple and everlasting! The only parts that ever need replacing are two bits of leather… brilliant. It generates 75 tons of pressure using water as the hydraulic fluid. The maker was H Beare and Sons, Newton Abbot.

It was owned by my mentor, Cyril Trenchard who sadly died last year after a long and fascinating life. I had used the equipment at his place for the last 8 years or so. When it came up for auction it was a case of “this must be mine”!

We had to build a substantial timber mezzanine floor above the press to house the mill, motors and gearing. Below, we constructed a large tank to receive the milled fruit. Most cider makers press their fruit immediately after the milling process. I copied Cyril’s method, whereby you mill the fruit into this large tank, and then leave it to macerate for 24 hrs or so. This brings out a lovely golden colour to the cider, helps clear the juice later on, and produces a richer more complex flavoured cider. The science behind it is very interesting if you are into that sort of thing, but I will not bore you with it now! The French cider makers in Normandy and Brittany use this method.

Time was tight because after the warm/hot autumn, the fruit were dropping at least 2 weeks earlier than normal. Just got it done in time, and the old beast did us proud. Came right up to pressure first time. We raised a glass of the cool golden juice in Cyril’s memory and said “Happy Days”, just as he would have done.

New Product “Devon Blush”
Sales of the newish “Devon Blush” are excellent, particularly now that we are in high summer. I think it works really well as an aperitif, while the Vintage is more versatile and combines well with a wide range of foods. If you have not tried the Blush, give it a go. It is a stunning looking pink appley fizz made by adding some blackberry liqueur to our standard vintage sparkler. Sold in clear bottles to show off the colour, it really looks the part. Devon’s answer to Kir Royale! The blush is sweeter than the vintage, with more than a hint of berry fruit.

Organic Status
In the last newsletter, I mentioned that we were in the process of applying for full organic certification from the Soil Association. This is still true, but there have been delays. It is a complicated process because both the orchards and the actual process have to be certified. This should all be done in time for this autumns’ pressing season. Suffice to say, we ARE to all intents and purposes organic, but we have not “jumped through all the hoops yet”.

Website changes
We are at last catching up with the real world and very soon you will be able to pay online using ‘paypal’. This should make the whole on-line ordering service much easier.

I am determined to keep the news page much more up to date. The new system we have will make this much easier too. More photos, more frequent changes etc. Any comments, please feel to free to contact us on the response form.

Cheers for now, and happy and safe drinking, Jason