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| "The
art of distilling has been revived in the orchards of Somerset..." |
| Rosy future
beckons for cider brandy |
| Andrew Jefford
finds a pioneering Somerset apple grower still leafing through
antique books for his inspiration |
A taste of fire and spice
- The Somerset Brandy Company's Apple Eau de Vie (40%) is
sappy, dry and perfumed, but less fiery than I expected: a
pungent abstract of the apple orchard. Somerset Royal (42%), the
three-year old, has close, moist scents of apple and sackcloth,
with a relatively punchy flavour showing quite a lot of wood
tannin.
- The Five Year Old (42%) mingles apple-skin perfume with a
floral note and some distinctive wood-derived sweetness, giving
a touch of banana and coconut: the flavour is taut, tight and
perfumed, the balance between the apple spirit and the sweet
wood working to succulent effect.
- The Ten Year Old (42%) is aromatically richer and more
complex, with a rasiny tang lending breadth to the refined apple
notes; on the palate, surprisingly, the apples seem to be back
in force, like ghosts returning to warm themselves on spirit
fire: concentrated, dense and warming.
- The Kingston Black Apple Aperitif (18%) is clean and fresh,
smelling as much of the orchard as the fruit; it is light, fresh
and refreshing to drink, with an intriguing honeyed, smoky
complexity.
- Finally, the beautifully packaged Somerset Pomona (20%) is
exotic and heady, smelling and tasting mysteriously of apples
spiked with spice, gentian root and almonds.
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| It was muddy; trailers, tools and
barrels littered the yard. Hens scooted to and fro, propelled by the
usual mixture of terror, greed and curiosity, while a tethered Welsh
collie superintended the chaos with a bright eye. The Vietnamese
pigs I remembered from my last visit had disappeared; I hoped they
had made a mouthwatering exit via the kitchen. Peacocks sauntered
meaninglessly on this occasion, the males engaged in the usual
exhausting displays of spring. |
| No blossom on the trees, yet, but it
would not be long, and there was no time to lose “You don't
distil,” said a perspiring Julian Temperley, watching the
trickling of the colourless apple spirit into its receiving jars, “when
the apple blossom's out. The cider warms up, and you might get a
malolactic fermentation starting – which means problems.”
February to April is when Somerset Cider Brandy comes into being. |
| It was 12 years since I had visited
Temperley's Pass Vale Farm. It lies in the heart of ell-and-apple
country: the Somerset Levels, where a loosened braid of streams and
rivers threads its way towards the sea through lush grass and sinewy
apple-tree roots. The orchards and buildings snuggle under Burrow
Hill, a 250-foot knob topped by a sycamore beneath which the
inevitable deposit of Arthurian remains are said to lie. Temperley
was older, greyer and bulkier than I remembered him in 1993, but no
less eccentric. Many of his sentences still evaporated into the air,
unfinished; the idiocies of the world beyond Burrow Hill were viewed
no less caustically; his jumpers and trousers were still demotically
torn' and Josephine and Fifi, now puffing away behind a plate-glass
screen at the farm, were still “very clever girls”. |
| Girls? Old maids, more like. The truth
is that when these two travelling continuous stills came into being
at the hands of a Parisian called Gazagne in the first half of the
20th century, they never envisioned a life beyond Normandy, nor
beyond the normal expectancy of two score years at most. But
everything has impressive endurance around here. Back in 1993, I was
not sure the business would last, because Temperley was a
small-scale cider farmer attempting to recreate a product for which
all living memory in Britain had been lost, and which required long
and expensive stock-holding to become viable. Later that same year,
by contrast, I went up to Hereford to visit Bulmers, still
family-owned and at that point the world's biggest cider company. It
seemed solid and proud, the marketing team assuring me that the
advent of alco-pops would mean a glorious future as “existing
drinkers” found “new usage occasions” to consume
apple-based drinks, and that cider's advantageous tax status in
Britain would ensure it remained the first choice for those who were
“really going for it at weekends”. |
| I remember thinking this was risky at
best, and at worst, mad. Bulmers stilled bottled, back then, a
memorably authentic cider called No 7, but it was only available
locally and no one even wanted to talk about it with me. Having
ditched its traditions, made some disastrous overseas investments,
cancelled an annual meeting because of accounting problems and seen
its share price tumble fivefold, Bulmers became part of the brewing
conglomerate Scottish Courage, Taunton and Coates-Gaymer, Bulmer's
former rivals, are now buried in the multinational Constellation
Wines; while Merrydown has just been acquired by Irish alco-pop
manufacturer SHS. Temperley, by contrast, has independently
prospered, acquiring more land and more orchards, and holding more
precious – and increasingly venerable – stock. He's even
optimistic enough to talk about a cider renaissance in Britain.
Medium-sized producers such as Thatchers and Sheppy's in Somerset
and Weston's in Herefordshire have profited from the disarray of the
large companies. Following the precedent created by varietal wine,
these genuine cider-makers have found considerable success with
single-variety ciders made in traditional style – even though,
as Temperley points out, “the art of cider-making is the art of
blending apples”. Cider apples are categorised as
bitter-sweets, sweets, sharps and bitter-sharps, and in general only
the great bittersharps (Kingston Black and Stoke Red) naturally make
well-balanced single-variety ciders; Sheppy's makes a good case for
bittersweets, too, with with its single-variety Dabinett. |
| Beneath Temperley's eccentric exterior
is a canny mind at work, and he has not altogether spurned the
demand for single-variety cider: his Burrow Hill Bottle Fermented
Sparkling Dry Cider is also based on Kingston Black, which he claims
is a “legendary variety – the Pinot Noir of the apple
world.” This refined cider, made with Champagne yeast by what
used to be called the Champagne method and given two years' ageing
on its lees before being disgorged, is almost floral in aroma and
has a dry, crisp, dancingly brisk flavour, which goes perfectly with
locally smoked eel. If he used more tannic varieties in it (like
Dabinett), the bubble would make those tannins taste metallic. “We're
moving towards the world of wine, whereas the bigger companies have
moved towards the world of lager,” Temperley summarises. “That's
the difference.” |
| The earliest record of cider brandy
production in Britian is found in J. Worlidge's Treatise of Cider,
published in 1678. Temperley has books showing that cider was still
being distilled on a small scale in the second half of the 19th
century, but oblivion seems to have come to this art, as it did to
so much else, with the trauma of the First World War. It was Bertram
Bulmer who had the idea of reviving it in the early 1980s; a small
still was established at Bulmer's Museum in 1984. Production was
never on a commercial scale, though. |
| “Bulmer himself was a cider
romantic,” claims Temperley. “so were the Showerings and
the Clarks and the other old cider grandees. They planted orchards;
they had a real attachment to them. But the accountants running the
companies didn't share that. Apple concentrate and glucose syrup won
the day.” Partly as a consequence of so much 'British' cider
being made with imported concentrate, orchard plantings have
plummeted: there were 24,000 acres in Somerset in 1894; today there
are only 2,860. |
| Temperley had a struggle to win
approval from the British Customs & Excise authorities to be
allowed to distil his cider, but he was evenutally given a licence
in 1989. He says he wanted to use continuous stills rather than pot
stills (both methods are used in the production of Calvados in
France) because continuous stills give a fresher, fruitier style,
whereas pot stills give a more caramelised spirit. It takes about
seven tons of cider apples to make one sherry butt (500 litres) of
cider brandy, and the cider has to be fresh and pure, made the year
before distillation, and not preserved with sulphur. There are about
40 different varieties of apples in Temperley's cider, most of them
grown in his own 150 acres of orchards, Distilling strength is about
70 per cent alcohol by volume, like most “new-make” malt
whisky; the spirit is then diluted to between 42 per cent and 40 per
cent before bottling. Distilling looks fun. Heat from the stills
means that the stillhouse is snug, and the main superintending
action appeared to be a kind of laying-on of hands half way up the
column of the still to find the exact point at which the cold
condensing trickle met the warm spirit vapour. As long as that mild
coupling takes place at the right spot, all will be well. |
| Temperley has always used a vast range
of different wooden barrels in which to age the spirit; so vast,
indeed, that generalisations are pointless. In the early years, the
aim was to create a spirit that would provide pleasant drinking
after three years. Now the years have passed, though, and the
three-year-old has been joined by a five and an 10-year-old; next
year they will be followed by a 15-year-old. The job of creating
profiles for each has begun. From the beginning, Temperley knew the
hard part of his vocation would be selling enough spirit to survive
financially, while putting aside the reserves he needed to create
older blends. “You do need a range of some sort. Wen I went to
Cognac, I noticed that smaller producers were often paying their
bills by selling Pineau des Charentes.” This blend of
unfermented grape juice and young Cognac inspired him to create his
own apple aperitif, once again based on (and named after) juice
pressed from the Kingston Black variety mixed with cider brandy; the
same mixture, he has discovered from the Herefordshire Pomona,
published between 1876 and 1885, used to be called Royal Cider. Not
content with that, he has created a “port-style” drink,
Somerset Pomona, made by mixing half-fermented cider with cider
brandy and ageing it in casks from some years. Finally – for
grappa enthusiasts – he has an unaged apple eau de vie. I'm
sure it hasn't been easy; I'm sure there have been setbacks; and the
challenges faced by a farm-scale enterprise differ from those faced
by large companies. Yet the quiet tenacity and the almost unlikely
success of Temperley and his Somerset Cider Brandy suggests that “the
vision think”, in commercial life as in politics, is not an
optional extra but the very marrow in the bone. |
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