Tim Bannerman's Cider Chronicles - Part 3 - Cider-Making the French Way
Tim and Gill Bannerman and children, Joshua, Amy and Sam (all now grown up) in their French cellar
Just before or just after Christmas came pressing time for us, like many others in the villages and farms around us in the Pays d’Auge. Like most people, we had no press of our own. Fortunately, you could book the travelling press or presse ambulante for the brassage, as it was called. I forget how much it cost but not much, even for us. So around Christmas, life became very busy and soon the smell of freshly pressed apple juice rose up from the open barrel through the floorboards from the cellar and permeated the whole of our rickety old house.
And the old veteran of a 1200 l. barrel held, grâce a Dieu. With a few drips here and there, of course. But with the aid of lashings of mastic, the guichet sealed as promised and the old thing settled like a proud old sow, glad to be carrying its litter again, despite all the odds.
Then you wait. If it’s cold, the magic moment takes a little longer. If warm, then the brimful barrel – always important to minimise contact with the air, cider’s worst enemy – with its eye open at the top and the last drips oozing from beneath as the barrel tightens and seals in its cargo, shows a new life beginning.
One morning, perhaps three to six days depending on temperature after pressing, you go down the steep steps into the cellar and there, in the gloom on the top of the barrel you make out dirty white against the old grey-brown oak, the first fine foam of fermentation.
The beauty of cider-making, unlike beer, is that the apple has everything you need – sugar, yeast and juice. The very best cider, in my opinion at least, is one that has had nothing added and nothing taken away. You don’t even need to carbonate it if you like a bit of fizz. A bottle-conditioned cider will undergo a secondary fermentation in the bottle, as long as there’s some sugar left to trigger it. So the trick is to bottle before all the sugar has converted to alcohol – et voilà!
And as long as you make it in a thick, champagne-type bottle, corked and wired accordingly, and don’t bottle too early, you will have a sparkle and a mousse to lift the saddest heart.
It won’t surprise you that the moon plays a part in this too but my wife has made me swear to hold my peace – otherwise everyone would make cider as good as ours, wouldn’t they? Suffice it to say that there are ways and means to ensure you don’t lose half the bottle when you shoot the cork over the hedge, or worse, have a battery of lethal Molotov cocktails hanging on the wall, ready to go off at any moment, as we found out first time round.
From the start of fermentation on, things start moving rapidly. A lot of stuff emerges out of the open bunghole of the barrel - bits of apple, dirt, dung and any other impurities not cleaned from the apples in the filthy bath in which they’re washed before being scratted or munched up in the giant mincer by the two aproned gars.
They feed the apples from the bath to the scratter to the press itself, by which time you have a chunky pulp of broken bits of apple, skin, stalks, pips and all. It’s important to keep all parts of the apple, except when they’re rotten, as that’s how you get the required mix of sugar, yeast and other enzymes which live in and on the apple. This is then stacked in cheeses, one on top of the other, as they load up the press, each cheese neatly wrapped in a juice-stained cloth, before the whole pile is slowly crushed down by the hydraulic press and the juice starts to flow.
A pipe runs straight from the press, taking the fresh, deliciously sweet juice into, in our case, the small street-level window which opened high up in the wall of the cellar. The pipe could then go straight into the bung-hole of the barrel or a large funnel placed in the hole . Then we would listen to the music of the juice filling the hollow empty barrel, the note rising as the level crept higher and higher as did the anxiety of wondering if we’ve got enough to fill it – or too much.
But all was well, the barrel was full, with enough spare juice to top it up as the wood absorbed it and the initial leaks gradually sealed themselves. And now – fermentation was on its way.
As I mentioned in Part One, everyone has their own idea of what should happen next. First the question of: to bung or not to bung and, more critically, what with and when? Second: when to soutire or ‘rack’ the cider, which means taking the cider off the lees – leaving the sludge at the bottom of the barrel – and putting it into other barrels that you can fill right up to the top? Remember – no air! And third: how to tell what stage the cider is at, in terms of strength and its equivalent sweetness or dryness, and ultimately its readiness, or not, to bottle?
The first question sounds straightforward but, of course, it isn’t.
Fermenting cider lets off carbon dioxide and a great deal else besides. While the cider is in its first fermentation, this can help to protect it by creating a barrier of carbon dioxide at the top of the barrel between the juice and the air. However, there comes a point at which this not enough and then you have to bung it.
Leaving the bunghole open at the start also allows the wild yeasts in the air to do their work, something that more serious cider-makers might be less happy with. The risk is that you might get the wrong kind of yeast or bacteria of various kinds finding their way in and thus spoiling the cider. However, in our case again, we found that by letting the first fermentation take place and measuring the specific gravity on a daily basis, we were able to bung the barrel some three or four weeks or so after fermentation started, with the wild yeasts happily doing their work to contribute to the unique character of each vintage.
The only problem we had with tainted cider was because of mistakenly leaving a smaller barrel upside down while cleaning and swelling it which allowed a fungal infection to form inside it, not having a guichet or little door at the end to allow the air circulate. In the end, we had to stop using it as the taint proved too persistent.
Many people still use the traditional method of using sulphur to eradicate any unwanted bacteria, either in a solution or by lowering a sulphur candle into the actual barrel. Risky or not, we only ever used water, sometimes hot to steam the barrel from the inside with a bung in the hole to hold it in, before then sluicing it with cold, fresh water, many times, having scrubbed the inside of the barrel beforehand.
On the subject of which, NEVER go into a barrel, should you be able to, before all the cider has been sluiced out and the potentially dangerous fumes cleared with the guichet left open to air it. But once inside, you knew then what it was to be an anchorite, immersed in solitary, fragrant, almost holy darkness.
On the second and third question, it is important to measure the Original Specific Gravity or OSG in the pure juice, fresh from pressing. This then gives you the guide to how far and how quickly the level has dropped during the process of fermentation, and also allows you to calculate the percentage alcohol at the time of bottling.
The earlier you bottle, the weaker and sweeter the cider. Using the hydrometer – a weighted, thermometer-shaped glass vessel with a measure down the side that you lower carefully into a glass cylinder containing the cider – our cider varied in OSG from high-mid 1.050s to mid 1.040s, much of which depended on how much sun/rain there had been over the course of the ripening season. Then as the yeast converts the sugar into alcohol, the level drops as the fermentation continues, in drops and plateaus over the following weeks and months.
As regards the bung itself, we just used a well-fitting cork, loosely fitted at first and then bunged tight, although many would advocate a valved bung that allows the gas to escape but stops the air coming in.
So – when to soutire or rack the cider? Again, many were the views but most, like Christian, our cider-making friend in a neighbouring village, advocated early racking. He always soutires at 1.048, he says, some 24-48 hours after the marron shows. The marron is the levure of yeast, or chapeau brun – brown hat – as some call it, or ‘flying lees’ to use an old English term, that is a natural process involved in this style of ‘keeved’ cider. Keeving implies using only tannin-rich cider apples and allowing a pectin gel to form on the top, leaving a protected clear juice underneath while a sediment falls to the bottom. You can then draw out the clear juice and pump or siphon it into another barrel where it will ferment much more slowly to the benefit of the cider, ensuring that the barrel is full to the brim.
Our cider tended to form a brown hat fairly soon but we often didn’t get round to soutiring until a month or so later, initially because we couldn’t find a pump to soutire it with! Our mayor, a cider and calvados maker himself, of whom more to be said, came to the rescue in the end with a beautiful cast iron and brass affair called ‘La Super’ which he kindly gave to us as he no longer used it.
On trying it out, we soon discovered why as it was full of rust inside and the brass fittings, while beautiful, were hell’s own job to mate and form a cider-tight join. Nevertheless, we persisted and by Candlemas, on 2nd February, we were finally able to soutire from bigger to smaller barrels which we had gradually amassed and squeezed into the cellar alongside our veteran 1200.
Candlemas or Imbolc, or Cerridwen or Diana’s day – take your pick, But, pagans as we were, despite the welcome in the church they gave us without prejudice in their Christian charity, my favoured patron was Brigit, protector of poets and goddess of fire and smithing. On this particular year, it was also a moment of conjuction between Uranus and Pluto, implying a time of initiation and change.
That night, we laid a bed of hay on sacking for Brigit to sleep on when she came and then went out to see the sheep. It was very still, quite warm for early February. The sheep were out in the orchard. We didn’t have many but those we had, we knew very well. Fatty was a lovely old ewe who always lambed discreetly by herself in the shed, heaving herself up at the moment juste and making her slow, lumbering way into the glimmering straw inside. It looked that night as though she didn’t have long.
She was breathing uncomfortably and I went over and gently wiped her nose. Very full she was, quite possibly twins on their way. Warm teets and pink at the rear. Could be any time over the next few days. Thin Face was over by a tree, bare of fruit now, with her two new born lambs together that, as usual, she’d made a fuss about. Both Fatty and Thin Face were Texel ewes. We also had a Suffolk – pronounced Sue-fŏlk, by the French – who was as clever as Fatty, the lambs out and up and feeding before you could say Frere Jacques. But new-born lambs have no water-proofing when they’re first born and we had to take them up to the shed as, yes, we had a lot of rain. In fact, the country, climate and culture were not dissimilar to Herefordshire, except we were on chalk with wonderful beech stands and a flora to die for. But that’s for another time.
I was working on a poem that night, with everyone asleep. Meanwhile, the candle was lit and Brigit invited in. ‘Come in, Brigit’. Come in – three times. ‘Thy bed is ready.’ And in the 11th century, octagonal bell tower, the masons’ marks still fresh as the day they carved them up there, inside, at the top, the beautiful bell struck …10, 11, 12. It’s Candlemas and the bell resonates on and on and on.
The candle was still just burning when I came down at 6.30 that morning and Brigit’s bed? How comfortable it looked – was that a barely perceptible dent?
Maybe my poem would come together after all.
La Voix du Clocher*
or
Body, Blood and Bells
Bells break like blossom on the stone
The masons sang a thousand years ago
And still the tower swings, uplifts the spire,
To pivot like a limestone stamens to the sun.
From all eight sides, the bells, the bells
Beat the woodland beeches bronze,
The crucibles, crashed open, erupting
Holy heaven-fire, swinging, singing
To the halleluia bluebells in the wood below,
The woodland mass, the blue still wet
As freshly painted sky below the green, where
I reach out to touch and, shockingly, conduct
The voice of stone and molten bronze,
Brazen as the final trump the sarcophagi await
Where cold souls long the long night long
For that day to come, the sun to shine, the bells
To ring out endless as the bell of time.
Between the first and last bell, breaking
Bread and wine to blossom in the masons’ song
In Body, Blood and Bells forever, on and on.
TB, ’91
*the old octagonal Norman church tower of the village where we lived, opposite the church at the top of the hill, in the Pays d’Auge, Calvados ’89-9. It was a family game to see who could hear the bells the longest, as their astonishingly pure sound resonated on – and on and on – down the length of our little valley. The bells also struck the hour twice, day or night, just in case you missed it first time round. Inside the bell tower, at the top, having climbed a perilously decrepit, worm-eaten ladder almost as old as the tower itself, you could see the masons’ marks – a wheel, a pair of compasses, initials, etc – around the walls, a thousand years old and fresh as if they had been carved that day. If you timed it wrong and the bells rang while you were up there, you became the modern day equivalent of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and would never be the same again. As proven by Patrick, the itinerant and melancholy man who would visit us from time to time. He kept a mediaeval roof tile that he said had fallen, intact, from a sacred roof he knew not where and now it was his destiny to wander the world in search of the roof with the space into which his tile would fit perfectly, as if it had never been lost, and the roof would shelter him too and love him for what he was.
Working with the travelling press outside the Bannerman house in Tordouet, Normandy
