"Stay me with Flagons, Comfort me with Apples"
After three months of drinking dangerous amounts of mezcal in Mexico, I was planning to take some time off alcohol. I pictured myself in the middle of Spain, milking goats, pressing cheese, and cleansing my liver. Per my previous post, that didn't work, and I found myself in the cider capital of the UK. In fact, even prior to that, I was drawn into the seductive embrace of €2 glasses of wine in the tapas bars of Madrid. I'm a sucker for a deal, and I also didn't want to miss out on what felt like a pillar of Spanish culture. Two euros, how could I say no?
As a compromise, I instituted a rule I learned from a British sketch show, which states that the key to happiness lies in never finishing your second drink: "You must never drink any more than slightly less than two drinks. Beyond that state of mildly intoxicated perfection lies drunken madness, 3rd pints, kebabs, and destruction." It's funny because it's true.
It also gives you a tremendous sense of false-willpower. You get to have nearly 2 drinks and still feel like you're making a responsible decision. I call that a win win.
These rules become very, very blurry when you're handed your first glass of cider before lunchtime. How much is a drink? How long before the counter resets? Does it count as one drink if my glass is constantly being refilled? The calculus hurts the brain and can necessitate another sip of cider for added clarity. I am Newton under the apple tree, discovering my own laws of physics, formulating yet uncharted equations of the universe. But mostly I'm slightly buzzed, a little sleepy, humbly enjoying the small wonders of life.
I spent my in the UK time between two orchards, three(ish) weeks at Welsh Mountain Cider in mid-Wales, and one(ish) week at Cwm Maddoc on the Welsh-English border near Ross-on-Wye.
Welsh Mountain Cider:
Prospect Orchard is a six acre small holding with over 500 types of apple and pear trees. They created this museum of tree varieties by exchanging clone wood with people through the mail and beyond. The orchard is on a slope, with the house on the bottom, the cider shed on top, and the rows of trees in between. From the top of the hill you can look out across to pastures dotted with sheep. Behind you there will be a hedge, but you can rest assure behind it lay more pastures, dotted with more sheep. The roads are about as a wide as one car and are contested by tractors, speeding vans, and, of course, a stray sheep or two. The hedges can reach to the sky, blocking out the sun and obscuring upcoming cars. Supposedly they harbor mythical woodland creatures like hedgehogs and badgers.
I was Wwoof'ing here alongside a New Zealand couple: in exchange for helping on the farm you get food and housing. As I mentioned in my last letter, it usually goes a bit beyond this and it might be better to think of it as a cultural exchange mediated by digging holes, picking weeds, and other such tasks. The lovely Kiwis, Louis and Gemma, are now readers of the letter, which means we've infected three continents.
My housing was an old caravan, supposedly from the 70's, with a comfy bed, layers of thick comforters, a wood burning stove, and holes where slugs crawl through like nightmares to haunt me in both my waking and sleeping hours. Walking through tall grasses amongst bushes ladened with berries while being serenaded by a choir of sheep on your way to curl up and light a fire in your little caravan can only make you feel like a garden gnome. As such, for the following sections, I ask the reader to picture me in their mind's eye to be sporting a pointed red cap and a bushy white beard, with my typical hunched posture, sitting on a toadstool smoking a pipe.
Many mornings were filled with fruit picking: blackberries, raspberries, yellow-raspberries, hairy-green gooseberries, tart-red gooseberries, hairy-tart-pink gooseberries, black currants, red currants, a hybrid gooseberry-currant, unripe currants, overripe currants, currants being eaten by wasps, currants with snails on them, currants poorly protected by spiderwebs, currants which tumbled to the ground, currants which tumbled into my mouth, currants which became pulp at my gentle caress, currants which would become jam later in the day. As I picked the currants they would multiply like the severed heads of the Lernean Hydra. For each currant picked, three more would sprout from its place. For a few glorious sun-filled mornings, crouched in the dewey grass, I was the second coming of Hercules, albeit more gnomelike, tasked with the twelve labors of sticky fruits.
We had lots of tasks to do, but the berries and the bottling are the ones I remember best. Bill and Chav take a minimal intervention approach to cider, and as a result bottling-time is sometimes determined by convenience and opportunity (or lack thereof). Our arrival brought both convenience and opportunity, and so bottling was a near daily activity. As part of the quality control process, all the ciders get tasted before the bottling has begun. To ensure that the quality does not degrade during the process, the ciders are tasted continuously as they're bottled. To celebrate a successful bottling, there is usually a toast held with the remaining cider. We would take the last of the last dregs to lunch.
For a few music-filled mornings and afternoons, we were the third coming of Hercules, albeit more gnomelike, carrying the glowing, golden-brown carcass of the Nemean Lion (jugs of cider) down the hill to lunch. We would proudly displaying the fruits of our labors to any and all who would behold it. A medal of honor, sat at the center of the table, proof of the mornings very hard work.
On my way down to lunch, ladened with liquids
We bottled: sour ciders, sweet ciders, tannic ciders, ciders which, "will be delicious after a year in the bottle," pale-yellow ciders, glowing-golden ciders, "cosmic" ciders, ciders with "structure", ciders which were actually perries, ciders from oak barrels, ciders from old olive containers, ciders from 1000L IBCs, forgotten ciders, cold-racked ciders, ciders adored by wasps, and ciders adored by the bottlers, sometimes a little too fondly.
In my normal life, I am a member of the clicky-clacky computer class, who's main specialization is typing letters and numbers into a bright screen in the eternal quest to create or calculate more interesting letters and numbers. Most days, I am not gnomelike except in that I am hunched over, nor am I Herculean, except in that I am given impossible labors by a cruel and cunning king (my very nice bosses). In this year-long exemption from normal life, however, I am a highly configurable meat machine which is capable of performing innumerable mundane tasks.
At its lowest, cider bottling at Welsh Mountain Cider was an assembly line of brutish actions. In our three man team, these were the jobs:
Bottle Mover: Bottles are taken from a pallet and put in boxes, before being taken to the bottle filler. They have the second duty of breaking down extra cardboard boxes.
Bottle Filler: Bottles are taken from the Bottle Mover's boxes, and filled four at a time at the spouts of a stainless steel trough. They have the second duty of calling out for quality control, and refilling out glasses.
Bottle Capper: Bottles are taken from the Bottle Filler, and a crown cap is pressed on with the help of a table mounted bottler. Imagine a scene from a movie where the stereotypical factory worker presses down an ambiguous level and stamps something on an equally ambiguous piece of metal. That is what the bottle capper does, albeit more gnomelike. They have the second duty of moving the finished boxes to a pallet.
All of these actions, Bill was keen to remind us, get you anointed as a hero of the socialist revolution.
At its highest, though, cider bottling at Welsh Mountain Cider was a well orchestrated ballet of bottles and brawn, the stage on which old apple juice was at long last elevated to celestial heights, put into its rightful place in the exclusive pantheon of eon-enduring, culture-crossing creations. The bottle mover moved their first bottle in 1500BC. To be elected bottle mover is to become the most recent incarnation of a job which began in Mesopotamia and found its unlikely revival in you. The same is true for the bottle filler, the bottle capper, and the bottle drinker. It is a universal act, it is a timeless act, and an act which itself attempts to stop time. By placing the cap one makes a self contained whole, defying the transience of the harvest, closing off from air and time the cruel decrepit forces of nature. A bottle elevates cider from sustenance to a piece of culture, the same way sitting down for a meal transforms food from a base need to an act of humanity and civility.
But lots of times your shoulder hurts, and you wish you had more coffee, and you really need to squint to see it this way. Some days it's easier to just be the troll, smashing the lever and cranking out bottles. Maybe that's just the duality of man gnome.
I've never actually read the epic of Hercules, if there is one, but I wonder if Camus ever wanted to pen a, "One Must Imagine Hercules Happy." At the end of the day, he was a brute: a meat machine configured to do the most carnal action: smash and kill. Yet still we elevate him, cleansed of brutishness through brutality. Which is all to say that it's really easy for me to wonder what I'm doing with my life whilst I'm pulling a lever for multiple hours on end, but maybe there's some cleansing that the meat machine itself can never see.
The station of the Bottle Mover
Cider Museum:
Being in the holy land of Cider meant that I was spiritually required to make a pilgrimage to the Herefordshire Cider Museum. Based in a semi-industrial park, this former cider factory had two levels and a labyrinth of displays on the history, machinery, and varieties of cider in the UK. Unbeknownst to me, Chava had mentioned to one of the volunteers that I'd be visiting. As such, I got a free entrance, two free posters, and, most importantly, was hyped up as an "industry" person.
Marshall Borrus, "the chap who came down all the way from Wales" to grace the Herefordshire Cider Museum with his presence.
I had neither the heart nor desire to ruin this illusion for everyone by informing them that I had only been a volunteer for five days, and was less in the industry than an industrious cider drinker you would find in any pub.
The idea of visiting a cider museum probably doesn't strike up any fires in your soul, but let me convince you otherwise. Upon entrance you're dwarfed by a massive apple press, the size of a room, used for hundreds of years in Normandy. There is a stuffed hedgehog and mole, a diorama of an old mill that has a spinning horse and churning machinery, a video from the 90's telling the history of Herefordshire plays in the background, there are embroidered cider making smocks, vintage museum posters, a room full of delicate paintings of apples, framed labels from various cider makers, metal cutouts of pretty ladies drinking that would have been found in bars, and the gift shop had every variety of cider you could imagine and provided a free tasting before you left. Being an old factory, the basement was preserved in a state akin to what it would have been like during production. Every wall was filled with resting bottles and comically large barrels lined the walkway under fluorescent lights. Oh to be a meat stack pulling levers in a windowless basement: cement walls, cement floors, cement ceilings, apple flavored pressure bombs surrounding you.
All in all a good trip, if not just for the ego trip to feel like I was an insider, it also validated that I was in the right place to learn about Cider.
Cider Trials:
My next opportunity to play pretend cider-maker was at the prestigious Yew Tree Cider Trials. This is a competition hosted by the Ross-on-Wye Cider and Perry Company where cider-makers blindly judge their peers' ciders and perries. The entrance fee is a box of cider and Welsh Mountain Cider donated two so I could have this fun little day out and bear witness to the varied flavors of traditional cider and the even more varied characters who make it.
(Those 3 sentence included the word cider 8 times. Also, In case any of you are wondering how my 19 year old Volvo is holding up, on the morning I left for this event I found a 2 inch puddle of water in the backseat, which finally explained the mold which paints the ceiling like a Pollock. Like a sailor with too little time and a drinking problem, I bailed it out with a shot glass I found and went on with my day. I have yet to address this. It never dries.)
After a semi-mindless drive through 2 hours of hedge rows and sheep fields I arrived at the Yew Tree Inn, a connected orchard, pub, and inn. Despite being a relatively small field, there are a number of oft-repeated names, which I like to call cider celebrities. One of these people was Adam Wells, the writer of Cider Review. Without knowing it, I had read his review of Welsh Mountain Cider before I first arrived and found it very memorable. He offered to help me move some boxes, so he will forever have a gold star in my book.
My second celebrity citing was Albert, who runs the event and the company after taking over the farm and business with their father. He said I was welcome any time, which means he too gained a gold star.
I parked my wet car in the orchard camping area and followed the trail up through the trees to the inn, where lunch was taking place. Being alone, and not knowing anyone, I sat with another man who was eating alone, looking like he knew no one. He turned out to be an amateur cider maker who had submitted a few of the ciders he makes at home. When he moved to the area, the house he bought contain the remnants of an old orchard which he managed to revive and grow, which seems to be a big trend here. I don't remember his name but he was incredibly kind with an aura of a jolly Tolkien character, inviting me in and leading me under his wing. This year is about a lot of things, one of them being putting on my big-boy pants and going up to talk to a stranger. This stranger proved to be incredibly nice.
Next began the tasting, which consisted of 6 long tables filled with 8-10 ciders each. Let the record show that Marshall Borrus, the tramping twerp temporarily from Wales opened the first bottle at the 2023 Yew Tree Cider Trials. I started at one end of the dry category tables and braced myself for the 26 contestant microbial battle that was about to take place in my gut. I was also glancing around to see how others were going about keeping track of all this.
Next to me were two gentlemen who seemed to have a much better grasp of the event than I did. One of them, Tim, lived down the road and the other was his visiting friend. He was a wellspring of cider-facts, snap judgements, apple information, stories, and good quips. Tim, in his broken straw hat, his pastel madras shirt, and overflowing English charm, handed me my most powerful tool for cider rankings: "the baseline for a good cider is one which you can drink three pints of." He's now a subscriber to the newsletter and we even crossed paths later on. Thanks Tim!
I went in not knowing anyone, with my big boy pants hitched up high, ready to shake hands and network. Much like with mezcal in Mexico, I found myself accepted into another fraternity of amiable and affable (older) men. My only complaint is that there were fewer burly embraces this time. It often feels like I'm playing some big trick and am conning everyone in these settings into seeing me as one of them. Maybe I'm conning myself, unable to see something as simple as passion recognizing passion and a community of likeminded people taking in a likeminded person.
In the end, I gave up my tastings after 31 ciders. My notes ended with:
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Category: Dry Perry
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Bottle 1: A bit throw-uppy
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Bottle 2: Overly acidic
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Bottle 3: Bright- best of the bunch so far. Gotta slow down a bit. I think I'm pretty drunk at this point as it feels like I'm surrounded by a bunch of garden gnomes.
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Bottle 4: Flat
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Bottle 5: Smells kinda old
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I then retreated to my car to take a nap which proved to be the end of my day.
The cider trials in full swing, with me fully swaying
The Cider Salon:
The last stop on my tour, as sponsored by Welsh Mountain Cider, was amongst the cider elites at the Bristol Cider Salon. This is an event which brings together 20 speciality cider makers from around the world to introduce their ciders to new tasters. The event is based on Franklin County Cider Days, which takes place in Massachusetts, a short jump from my beloved Williamstown. Once again, I had to travel many many miles to learn this. It's called a salon and carries with it whatever implications that imbues.
I once again got to meet many cider celebrities, including Tom Oliver, the godfather of modern British cider, and Gabe Cook, who wrote the book titled, "Modern British Cider." I met a lovely husband and wife team from Hungary who served me my most memorable drink of the event after a separate tasting had finished. It was a Perry made from a tree they harvested under the cover of nightfall for fear of being caught. The technical term for taking apples or pears that aren't yours is called scrumping. Opening it, the carbonation showered the table. Explosions aside, it was delicious, and I liked knowing it was scrumped.
One of the goals of the event is to rebrand cider in the British imagination from something that is either crude, sour and made by their grandpa ("scrumpy") or sickly sweet, mass produced, and the first thing you get sick from as a devious teenager (think Angry Orchard). A higher society exists for craft beer and fine wine, but it doesn't exist in cider. Many people, like the two I mentioned above, are trying to change this and get cider recognized on the world stage as a drink that carries a rich history and all the complexity of a work of art.
Adam Wells, in his review of Welsh Mountain Cider, wrote about this with more beauty than I ever could, so I'll link his article here: Cider Review: A Visit to Welsh Mountain Cider. He ends his review with this:
"If Welsh Mountain Cider was a winery, and Prospect Orchard a vineyard; if Bill and Chava were making wine the way they make cider, they would be fêted by drinks magazines and wine cognoscenti. Internationally-read articles would be penned about them, oenophiles would make pilgrimages to see a vineyard on a mountainside boasting 450 varieties of grapes turned into natural wine without spraying or sulphites or pitched yeast or filtration. Their bottles would sit on the sort of restaurant wine lists that don't bother typing the pound sign and specialist retailers would bicker over allocations of new releases which would probably start at a minimum of £30 at least.
But because it is cider; because so many people still condescend, still saunter up to makers at market stalls smarming "zoider" at them in a faux-Somerset accent; because it is still so widely thought of as macro insipidness or chunky vinegar served from a flagon, this remarkable place, its museum of trees, the people who have sculpted it from barren sheep fields and the vibrant, living drink that it produces still slips beneath our collective national radar.
If the rethink movement of the last few years stands for anything, it is for a gradual shifting of this unfairness. For a realisation that places like this make something that glimmers and sparkles; is brilliant and worthy and unique and delicious. But to really get it we have to go there, and that's why cider isn't like a conjuring trick. If you buy a bottle of Welsh Mountain Cider -- and you should -- you will drink it, and you'll probably think that it's great. But it's when you go there -- when you visit a place like Prospect Orchard, this little gleaming Eden on its rough-hacked mountain -- when you wander, gawping, through the clusters of trees, take in the presses that stand on the hill, sit yourself down and look across the valley greenness with a glass of living cider, that you realise it isn't just great, it is magic. And it is. It really is."
"Two wooden presses command the crest of the hill, for all the world like Gondorian beacons." - Adam Wells
Following the Cider Salon I stayed with Cwm Maddoc for a week, in a similar Wwoof position. I would say my experiences there were more focused on learning new things about, and forming strong opinions on, the country of England. That is at least what I'm telling myself to justify saving it for the next post.