CIDER SPOTLIGHT
ULLAGE & SPILLAGE | opinion
A BRIEF, OPINIONATED,
HISTORY OF CIDER
A
>> J. RANDOM
bout ten million years ago, Earth’s warming climate changed much of its densecanopied forest into savanna, mixed grassland and woodland. With trees spaced a lot farther apart, early hominids were forced to live a terrestrial life. According to genetic research out of Santa Fe College Florida, at about the time our ancestors came down from the trees, they developed a taste—or at least tolerance—for the alcohol that naturally develops in rotting fruit. With fruiting trees becoming scarce, they couldn’t afford to be picky about their food. Perhaps the toothless over-forty elders ended up with the rotting fruit, passing knowledge of the fun effects to the next generation. These evolving hunter-gatherers might have fermented a beverage from collected fruit well before agriculture and the multi-step process required for ale. As humans spread across the planet, they would have adapted to use local fruits. For the civilizations that grew up around the Mediterranean, wild grapes were the obvious choice since they were easy to harvest and crush. Other fruit were occasionally used—including apples, according to Pliny’s Natural History. Further north in Europe was too cold for grapevines, but crabapples were abundant. Crabapples are pretty much inedible, owing to their acid and tannin content. Crushed and fermented, with their sugar converted to alcohol, the mouth-puckering results would have been undrinkable. These nasty little apples were almost certainly blended with honey that contributed wild yeasts and a sweet counterpoint to the apples’ bitterness. (Mead fermented from wild honey is another competitor for the title of earliest alcoholic drink; if it came to primitive humans versus African bees, my money would be on the bees). The precursor to modern cider could not have been made before the Romans in-
troduced the much less acidic cultivated apple to Northern Europe and the British Isles. These varieties were derived from species native to Kazakhstan, crossed with European wild apples. The acidity and tannins have been further bred out of eating apples, but cider apples still have these desirable traits and might have changed relatively little since Roman times.
ID) and instructions to “run along, sonny.” Strongbow was 4.5% ABV and draft beer around 3%, but nobody seemed to be aware of this, including me. Going one-for-one with my beer-drinking, older-looking, bigger mates got me into all sorts of trouble. Graduating from cider to Double Diamond pale ale as I approached
Several sources claim Julius Caesar recorded cider making in Britain during his two voyages of reconnaissance before the Roman conquest, though there’s no reference to it in Caesar’s descriptions of Britain in his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Nevertheless, Britain still seems the best bet as the original home of cider making. It can’t be a coincidence that the two other regions of Europe that lay claim to be the birthplace of cider—northwest Spain’s Britonia and northwest France’s Bretagne—are the two continental refuges of the Celts driven out of Britain by the Saxons. Cider remained in favour among the Celts driven into the western and northern hills of Britain. Ale and beer came to dominate the lowlands of Saxon England. After 1066, the Celtic tradition of cider making may have been reinforced by the substantial proportion of Bretons in the Norman army of occupation. As with beer, cider production became increasingly consolidated in the UK during the industrial revolution. Smaller cideries survived in southwest Britain and Wales. The big cideries proceeded to dumb down cider in the same way mega-breweries were dumbing down keg beer. They used a blend of eating apples with, they claimed, some cider apples, but mass-market cider retained little of the character of old-fashioned West Country scrumpy. By the early 1970s, Bulmer’s was as common as Guinness in British pubs (because neither had tied-houses and their products did not compete with those of the mega-breweries). As an underage drinker, I could often get served a cider when asking for beer would have gotten me a close visual inspection (no one carried
Where the Britons gathered
legal drinking age probably saved my liver. My next graduation, to real ale, was well underway before the opportunity to backslide came by. After several days on a field course at a former stately home in the wilds of Somerset, several of us were dying for a beer. Staff revealed the existence of a pub half an hour’s walk by road or “a moile by the parth ower the fields m’dear”. A country mile and much later, five muddy and bedraggled students trooped into the Notley Arms in MonksilContinued on page 30 S P R I N G 2020 WHAT'S BREWING 29
