Legless

Today

One of the smaller pleasures that Paul and I enjoy as the weather warms up is to share a bottle of cider with our lunch.

Yesterday, as we we sat out in the late morning sunshine, Paul announced that he was thirsty and would like us to share our cider before lunch. I agreed and soon we were sipping some very nice Henry Westons Vintage Cider. It was pleasantly light and dry, and slipped down easily. Paul suggested another one. It was only then that I noticed the 8%vol label. Despite knowing that downing 500ml of 8% cider at lunchtime would have only one result I went ahead. The idea of making lunch was abandoned and we staggered upstairs for a very nice 2-hour sleep.

In My Day

We live in the land of cider, with a cider factory just down the road in Shepton Mallet. I became aware of the treacherous nature of this drink before we moved here by virtue of my brother David introducing us to the joys of scrumpy as made by Roger Wilkins at Land's End Farm at Mudgeley. 

Even the village name had an appealingly fuddled sound to it and Roger's farm was perched on a last outcropping of the Mendips, overlooking the levels towards the Poldens and King's Sedgemoor. Land's End indeed. This visit was the first of many.

There was a farmhouse and a large barn. Inside the barn were barrels of cider, At the end, through a little doorway with a handpainted sign "lounge bar, members only" and down a couple of steps, was a smaller area. There you could sit on rickety stools or upended barrels. "Whas'll 'ave"? Roger would enquire "sweet, dry or medium?" He then took a glass of dubious cleanliness from a tray, rinsed it under a cold tap and held in under the relevant barrel. Medium simply meant that he filled half at a dry barrel and half at a sweet.

The cider was a pale greenish-brown, thick as soap suds and not at all fizzy. It tasted like a compressed apple harvest (which is what it was, I suppose), light and appley. There seemed no limit to the number of times this was refilled at no cost, and whyever not? It wasn't very strong, was it, just apple juice really. Eventually you attempted to get up. This was much harder than it seemed. "I'll have a gallon of dry and one of sweet, Roger", one of us would slur "oh, some home-made pickle and strong cheddar."

Roger did once demonstrate to us how the cider was made - apples went up a great hopper into a funnel where they were crushed and slid down into sacking-lined wooden crates. these were stacked and pressed and the juice dripped into a bath underneath the floorboards. Fermenting was an entirely natural process, using the yeasts in the fruit. this picture shows the juice oozing out through the sacking.

The designated driver then had to carry home the load of snoring passengers. The cider, in plastic jars, was still fermenting and, if you didn't drink it up fairly quickly, tended to make the sides of the jar swell alarmingly and little white blobs of naturally occurring yeasts float about. Best drink it soon, then.

Someone once said to me that wine goes to your head, but cider goes to your feet, which is a nice summing up. I think.