Craft Cider Making E-Book

Andrew Lea

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

This new edition of the best-selling Craft Cider Making is fully revised and updated. Packed with essential advice and information, it gives step-by-step instruction for small scale cider making. It retains the best of traditional practice but also draws on modern understanding of orcharding and fermentation science. Written by an award-winning cider maker, it guides beginners into the rewarding world of cider making and helps those with more experience expand their skills to enjoy the craft more fully.

Leseprobe

Craft Cider Making

THIRD EDITION

Andrew Lea

This edition published in 2015 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

First published in 2008 by the GoodLife Press

© Andrew Lea 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 016 4

AcknowledgementsToo many people in the UK and overseas have contributed to my thinking for this book for me to acknowledge them all individually. The rise of the internet has created a worldwide craft cider community from which I am always learning. But I would especially like to thank Liz Copas for her comments on orcharding, Dick Dunn for many helpful discussions of small scale cidermaking in general, Rose Grant and Mark Powell for permission to photograph their cider houses, and Ray Blockley for supplying some of his own photographs. As for the rest of you, you know who you are!

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

1        WHAT DO I NEED TO MAKE CIDER?

2        CIDER FRUIT AND ITS CULTIVATION

3        JUICING AND FERMENTING

4        CUSTOMIZING YOUR CIDER

5        WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

6        APPLE JUICE, CIDER VINEGAR AND PERRY

CONVERSIONS AND CALCULATIONS

RESOURCES

INDEX

PREFACE

Just over fifty years ago a little book called Cider Making was published in the Countryman’s Library (Hart Davis, 1957). It was written for the amateur by Alfred Pollard and Fred Beech, two scientists at the Long Ashton Horticultural Research Station, which had been founded in 1903 in a small village just outside Bristol. By the 1950s Long Ashton was the premier Cider Research Station in the world and had become a major centre of horticultural research. Now the site where it once stood is a housing estate.

I was privileged to work at the Research Station in its later years, from 1972 until 1985, when the Cider Section closed. Much of what is in this book I learnt from my time at Long Ashton and from colleagues such as Fred Beech, Len Burroughs, Geoff Carr, Colin Timberlake, Ray Williams, and many, many more. Now that the Long Ashton Research Station is gone for good, I would like to dedicate this little book to its memory and to the memory of the men and women who worked there and who taught me so much. I hope this book will be a worthy and useful successor to the original Cider Making of half a century ago.

I would further like to dedicate it to my family who have indulged and helped me in my hobby for so long and, in particular, to my dear wife Josephine who was my Chief Assistant Cider Maker for so many years.

Andrew Lea

INTRODUCTION

This book is aimed at anyone who wants to learn how to grow cider apples and to make good cider. You might have inherited a back garden with a couple of apple trees or several acres of derelict orchard in an idyllic rural setting. You might be ‘scrumping’ apples from friends and neighbours every autumn or buying juice from someone who has a press. You might be planting a tiny suburban plot or you might be planting up an entire field. Either way, you want to learn how to make cider and this book is designed for all of you. It is aimed primarily at a UK readership but I hope will be of value to other English-speaking cider makers in North America, Australasia and elsewhere, and I have tried not to forget them.

The cider you make from this book will not be like most of what you can buy on the supermarket shelf or in a town centre bar. This book will not tell you how to make a Magners or a Strong-bow ‘clone’. It will not tell you how to make an alcopop style cider flavoured with herbs or other fruits, and it will not give you any ‘recipes’, because craft cider making is never just a matter of mixing ingredients together for a predictable result. Rather, this book aims to give you sufficient technique to be able to make cider in a way that retains the best of traditional practice, while drawing on the best modern understanding of orcharding and fermentation science. It is primarily for people working on a small scale, which could be as little as 10 litres every year up to say 10,000 litres. Larger than that and you will be verging on the industrial scale. That is not to say you cannot make good cider on a large scale – you can, but with scale come additional layers of logistical and business considerations which are not dealt with in this book. However, the fundamental principles of cider making remain the same irrespective of scale.