Cider Making in Le Corboulo

2004 Report of Cider and Music making in Brittany 23-31 October 2004
earlier years (Oct 1998, Oct 1999)  Oct 2000  Oct 2001 Oct 2002  Oct 2003
 

Cider or Sistr is the first choice of drink for many Bretons, and it is a pity that the Michelin Guide, with a sweeping generalisation, declared for all time that Breton Cider is inferior to the Norman variety. Certainly, industrial-scale production is often the norm in Normandy.

In the Breton interior, trees are abundant, although careful husbandry has declined along with the numbers working the land. Presses filled with flowers dot the area; holidaymakers filling the former farmsteads or camping near the seaside tend to drink wine from the South or lager from the North of France.

The good news is that the local Routier-style cafés usually include a litre bottle per four diners (and a bottle of red wine and mineral water!) and also that the major Celtic music festival nearby at Cléguérec is named En Arwen (A Tree) for the local tradition of making Pear cider (Sistre per or poiré,) and if you are there at exactly the right moment, you may get some free! There is a growing federation of traditional cider makers in the Region and we hope to join the club

When we bought the property at Le Corboulo, we should not have been surprised to find a full-sized cider press in the downstairs room of the oldest house; all three neighbours within 50 yards have one in the shed or barn! Our former owners had a licence to distil Calvados or rather Fine de Bretagne. The main buildings of separate family farms tend to be clustered together for community reasons while the fields are scattered far and wide, so the concentration of hardware is not surprising either. Our orchard - now no more than 6 trees after the ravages of mistletoe, storms, old age and our tardy pruning, still need a fair bit of (preferably) voluntary labour to harvest. For cider making, it is normal to wait for at least half the apples to fall off and so the more hands and bent backs the better.

We started in September 1998 to collect and store the apples (thanks to Penny and Ian) although the vital acquisition of a moulin aux pommes or 'scratter', as it is called in Somerset, had been unsuccessful up to that time. In fact it was not until early October 1998 that a chance visit to borrow a ladder from a neighbour revealed such a moulin in the corner of her barn, and a loan was immediately negotiated. A considerable application of wire brushing, yard brooms, buckets and buckets of water and bleach by Dave Hunt, a former Catering lecturer, got us to the starting point.

Sackfuls of washed apples go in the moulin aux pommes and two stout gents take a handle on either side and wind until the plastic tub fills with mush and juice,  while the 'Stick-Lady', as the first holder of this post was dubbed, pushes the apples down with a bit of 2"x2". The mush goes into clean polypropylene sacks, in another tub on a cart as they are now a) dripping and b) heavy.
 

Six or eight part-filled sacks are the minimum 'cheese' to be built up on the base of the press, with the bung in, as a large amount of juice is now flowing out. Two large oak doors go on top either side of the centre screw post, embedded in the concrete base (that's why this press is liable to stay put for another twenty years minimum!)  Four big baulks of oak cross these doors, and then two yokes of railway sleeper girth, down onto which the crownwheel is screwed. A wheel and pinion whizz this down a bit, and then you discover what the ratchet and two-metre long iron handle are for!

Pulling the bung on the press fills the bucket surprisingly fast, through a fine wire mesh to restrain pips, bugs etc and thence  into the home brew fermenter, with the cover replaced quickly to ensure macro hygiene.

The first phase of fermentation can take place with a reasonably close-fitting lid, but I now know, to my cost, that when the first rush is over, or when nothing much has happened because of winter weather, the juice or 'must', must be protected from the air, otherwise oxidisation takes place, and the 'cider' starts to taste like that from a half-emptied cask on a pub counter that rarely sells any - I am afraid that a lot is sold like that and probably accounts for many a tale of tourists' sad encounters with the stuff! 

What to do with 200+ litres of part-fermented Cider?
Opinions vary, but a few include:

1. Keep the September pressing warm and drink it in October, while pressing the Christmas batch and having a Cider Festival;
2. Bottle everything that is down to 1.000 gravity in Champagne-style bottles, with clipped or wired corks, and drink it in the Spring, or Summer, if kept cool in the pig-sty;
3. If it tastes nice, but hasn't finished fermenting, add Calvados and drink it straight away with care!

Drinking the stuff straight out of the press is also feasible, but the alcohol content (not zero even in the virgin apple) is not yet enough to sterilise the various bugs and yeasts present in fallen apples, and so an old-fashioned medicinal effect may be experienced.

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