Western Morning News (Saturday)
Traditional drink I learned to treat with caution
IWAS pleased to see that a small Cornish business, St Ives Cider Farmhouse, have won The World Cider Awards for the world’s best still cider, beating hundreds of other producers.
The extraordinary thing is that St Ives cider is so small, run just by David Berwick and his wife Kate. The company’s output is tiny compared with the rival entries who came from all over the world. They were unable to beat the flavour, colour and bouquet of the Cornish company’s cider and as a result the couple walked away as the clear winner of the World Cider Awards.
No vast factory to maintain, instead the Berwicks tow an apple press round collecting apples from various orchards in Cornwall selecting cookers, eaters and cider apples, many of which are from very old stock that has been regenerated by local farmers who allow the Berwicks to harvest the crops.
The couple gather about 30,000 tons of apples, turning out 25,000 litres of the nectar that won them the prestigious Cider award. Because the product is so niche, you’ll be quite lucky to get your hands on a glass of it if you live outside Cornwall.
Content with their production, David says: “I’m not tempted up get bigger, I just want to create a consistent cider and try and stay on top of our game”
I take my hat off to the panel of judges who were impressed by the “massive flavour” of the winning brew. I couldn’t have done their job. I’ve only just been able to bear the smell of cider and it was only recently that I managed to down a glass of the stuff – my first since I was 16.
The memory of buying a couple of large flagons of the apple nectar straight from the barrel in a wonderful old shop in Dunster, Somerset, will never leave me. I was youth hostelling with three girlfriends and we decided to indulge, thinking cider was not much more than lemonade with attitude.
Cider and Gardenia talcum powder go together for me, and I still can’t smell the latter. Probably because Janet Wilmot, one of our gang threw up throughout the night and covered her bunk bed in talc to cover the smell. Cara spent the night in the loo. I laid on my bunk with my head spinning and being sick, as I discovered in the morning, on my shoes. Lesley laid in a flower bed underneath the dormitory window and could only groan. We’re still friends but even now, the smell of cider, is enough to make us go green. Many years later, putting the experiences of my mis-spent youth behind me, I visited a cider farm in the Westcountry. I refused point blank to
try any of the samples on offer, but I was interested to learn some of the facts behind making the brew.
In times past, cider and beer was drunk by all, though the alcohol content was much lower. Water could be deadly because it was often infected with the cholera bacteria which killed a great many people.
Making cider wasn’t too difficult. Containing the liquid was the issue. In those days, barrels often leaked – that is, until they discovered that lining them with lead solved the problems. Yippee! It sealed the barrels well and on the plus side, it made the amber liquid taste even sweeter. So successful was the new taste that the makers decided to hang lead ingots in the cider to make it sweeter still. The news of the new taste spread far and wide and the cider sold quicker than you could say “hangover”. Victorian cider presses were often lead lined too. Gradually, people began to get sick and eventually numbers of people were falling off their perch or going mad. “Devon Blindness” became a known condition.
“Ah ha!” thought the cider makers. “It must be the apples”. So in an apple apocalypse they ripped up and burned some of the finest species of Westcountry fruit trees thinking that they’d solved the problem. By the time science stepped in and the penny dropped that lead was a deadly poison, many lives had been lost and a great number of people were irreversibly sick.
Fortunately, in time the terrible effects of lead were discovered and, apart from the odd rat falling in the vats, cider making became safe.
Nowadays half the apples grown in the UK are used for cider and it’s a drink with many traditions, including wassailing at Christmas when people go from house to house imbibing cider and singing.
Pagan influences surround cider making too. Centuries back groups would visit orchards and sing to the trees and spirits hoping for a good harvest. They’d chuck a jug of cider over the apple tree roots for good measure. They believed in the apple tree man, said to be the spirit of the oldest tree in the orchard. Leave the tree a mug of mulled cider and the Apple Tree man will take you straight to buried treasure. I reckon that’s what David Berwick did. He’s certainly got a rich reward with his St Ives Farmhouse Cider. Cheers David, long may it last!
‘I laid on my bunk with my head spinning and being sick on my shoes .... until recently I had never touched a drop of cider since that night’