Making cider the traditional way
In a New Forest farmyard, cider is pressed using machinery from yesteryear, filling the air with the sweet smell of apples
ON THE OUTSKIRTS of a tranquil hamlet in the New Forest sits a farmyard filled with smoke, steam and the sweet, pervasive smell of thousands of ripe fermenting apples. Here, cider is being made, but it is not just any cider. This is cider “jus’ as ’twer made in grandfer’s day”, with steam-driven presses and machinery that is more than 100 years old. Once a year, the Topp family, of New Forest Cider in Burley, Hampshire, hold an annual cider pressing event that uses the machinery and methods of the past. Driven by steam engines, two vintage presses and their accessories come to life once again. Operating them is a team of passionate enthusiasts determined to keep traditional skills alive. “It’s part of our heritage,” says volunteer Chris Gerrard. “Soon, nobody will remember how things used to be done.” The bigger of the two cider presses dates back to the end of the 19th century. Mounted on a trailer, it comprises two separate presses and a central scratter. This is the device that crushes the apples into a pulp, known as pomace. The whole thing is belt-driven by a steam engine from an overhead shaft.
“It’s from 1890. They built four of them, and this is the only known one that’s up and running,” says owner Barry Topp. “It was made by Workman and Sons, based on the Severn, near Lydney. We got it at auction in the mid 1990s, and we’ve used it every year since. We had to rebuild it, though. The floor was rotted, and we had to get some pitch pine cut out to make a new one.” Although large, at approximately 8ft (2.5m) high and 10ft (3m) wide, the press is designed to be mobile. When new, it was conceived as a state of the art, efficient and profitable machine. “Workman built them
at the time as a contractor’s tool,” says Barry. “It was hired out and taken round from place to place. It would be towed by traction engine to the orchards, where the pressing would be done.” Today, the volunteers use shovels and buckets to get the apples to the scratter. But this was unlikely to be the case in the past. “I think they would have had an elevator, so you’d just start with the pile on the ground and shove them all into the lift,” says Jeff Carpenter, who operates the scratter during the cider festival. The press was designed to be efficient. It is run by a strap from a steam engine connected to an overhead shaft. By using three sets of dog clutches, devices for coupling two shafts to transmit motion, on the mechanism, the operators can set the drive to work either one of the two presses or the central scratter. “You build one side, and you set that in motion to be pressing, then you go on the other side and work that one,” says Barry. “So while one side is being squeezed, the other is either filling or emptying. It takes approximately a half-hour cycle to get all the juice out. They reckoned that with this, three people
on a 12-hour day could turn out 2,000 gallons of juice, as long as they had the apples there to do it.”
Producing pomace
Placing apples directly into a press to obtain the juice does not work. Instead, they first need to be mashed and pulped into what is known as pomace. This is the role of the scratter, or mill. The apple skin contains compounds that contribute to the taste, so the peel is left on. The apples are thrown into a hopper, where a spinning drum set with teeth mashes them up. “You can’t press apples as apples; they’ve got to be ground up to extract the juice,” explains Barry. “With the scratter in this big old press, there’s a drum. We call it a hedgehog. It’s a piece of wood turned out from an apple tree trunk, with nails driven into it. The original one had split iron nails that had gone rusty. If you’ve got iron, the acid in the apple reacts to create black juice. To prevent this, and to make it more hygienic, we put stainless steel screws in and cut them to size.” This chemical reaction problem is something the old cider makers took great pains to avoid. Although the moving parts of traditional presses are metal for longevity, the parts that came into contact with the apples were always made of wood. The tray, juice troughs, barrels and shovels for moving the apples were all wood too. As well as the scratter in the Workman, there is a small free-standing one driven by a second steam engine, Poppy. This provides pomace for a hand press. “This old scratter’s a lethal machine; you wouldn’t want to put your hands in the top,” says Steve Lowe, who is operating Poppy. “There are two granite wheels in there, and it weighs about a ton. There’s a hedgehog munching in the centre shaft, then the apples drop down between two granite wheels, which crush them into even more of a pulp.” “You can alter these, and also the teeth on the top, for a finer pomace,” says John Wilson, who is operating the hand press. “But there’s no clutch on it. The engine just powers it at a constant speed. It takes a long time to stop. In fact, the only way to stop it quickly is to pull the belt off.”
Squeezing the cheese
Once the scratter has done its job, the next stage is to extract the juice from the pomace by squeezing it out under pressure.
“...everywhere about him the sweet atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards” Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders
To start, shovels of pomace are transferred from the output hopper of the scratters. These are tipped straight onto cloths specially woven for juice production, placed in a wooden rack, or former, on the press. The corners of this cloth are folded up and the rack removed, resulting in a large square-shaped layer of wrapped pomace. This is known as a cheese. Another rack is placed on top of this, and the process begins again until there is
a tall stack of cheeses ready for the press. Squeezed slowly under great pressure, the pomace releases its juice through the cloth. In Somerset, straw would sometimes be used if cloths were not available.
A hand press
The hand press powered by Poppy is of the same vintage as the Workman. Owned by Arthur Rixen, it is also kept permanently on the farm. “With this hand press, you put the pressure on with a huge spanner and a hand winder. It’s done bit by bit,” says volunteer Mike Selwood. Aided by his two young sons, Gethyn and Morgan, he is busy shovelling pomace from the scratter to the press. “You’ve got to let the juice start to come out of the apples slowly. It is no good just wanging it right down hard straight away. You do a bit, let the juice come out, then do another bit. It must take us over an hour to do one full press. Then you’ve got to empty the cheeses out each time and build them back up. It is not a five minute process.”
The traction engines
It is not only the old presses which have a long history and have inspired volunteers. Smokey, the steam engine driving the Workman press, dates back to 1926. It was originally owned by Kent County Council, which used it for the first 10 years of its life for hauling traction wagons and trailers during road-building projects. Following this, it was sold to another company in Kent, which converted it to a steamroller. It continued in this guise until the 1960s, when its working life ended. “It was owned by the Tarmac road-building company at that stage. They were intending to use it for demonstrations, but never got round to finishing it, and so they decided to sell it,” says Chris Gerrard, the current owner. “I put it back into steam tractor form, because it’s a lot easier to use on the roads. I had to find another old pair of front
wheels and then make a new axle and steering box. The rear wheels had been extended out for road rolling. I took those extensions off and got it running again. Almost all the parts have had to be made by hand. I drive it to Burley, literally under its own steam.” Supplying traction to the big Workman press is not an easy task. “We have to be careful because it’s such an old press,” says Chris. “We do everything very slowly, otherwise it shakes it to pieces. Once you’ve gone through all the apple mulching in the central scratter, and the cheeses are on the press, I just run continually at slow speed over the first half-hour or so, with the gears on the press allowing for that. Then, for the last 15 minutes, you just leave it alone to get that last bit out of the apples before you bring it all the way up again and start all over.” Poppy, the other engine, is much smaller and older. It was built in Ipswich in 1890 and then shipped straight out to Chile, where it was used for approximately 80 years by a workers’ co-operative for driving machinery, and then later placed in a dairy. It eventually returned to England in 2007 in a very derelict state. The front and back end of the boiler turned out to be full of concrete. It was only this that was holding it together and plugging all the gaps up in an effort to stop the water leaking out. It has now undergone a total restoration to bring it back into gleaming condition. “There’s only one bit of the original boiler left,” explains operator Steve. “We had to remake all new safety valve gear and a whole new crankshaft. The old crank was bent, so we machined a new one out of solid 3in plate.” All the volunteers share a mutual passion for passing on countryside skills. Mike Selwood involves his young sons at the event. “It’s good for them to understand the food-making process,” he says. “Everyone drinks apple juice, but they don’t see how it all happens.” “I’m lucky enough to have passed my passion for steam engines on to my sons,” adds Steve. “Two years ago, my oldest bought himself an 8-ton steamroller. We need to keep this stuff alive.”