Hot Rum Cow – Issue 02

PLUS Perfect Pear Praising perry * In a Nutshell Cat swinging in Britain’s smallest pub * Tipsy Gypsy Meeting Mikkeller

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A history of British cider, pips and all

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~ A thousand words

BevShots Putting drink under the microscope

In 1992, after a lengthy career spent taking microscopic photographs of DNA and biochemicals, Michael Davidson turned his attention and his powerful lens to a new subject matter – cocktails.

The results were spectacular: favourite tipples became swirling, psychedelic patterns in vivid colours.

The images were initially printed on gaudy ties, and BevShots – managed by chemist and art fan Lester Hutt – now produces photographs and canvases of a range

Vodka Tonic

Tequila

of drinks, which includes beers, wines and spirits.

So how does it work? Alcohol is crystallised on a slide, and then photographed under a standard light microscope. As the light is polarised, it refracts through the crystals, creating natural colour and composition. So, gin and tonics, champagnes and stouts become works of art. Take the classic pina colada, for example. Laid bare on this page, its resemblance to a peacock’s tail is uncanny. Who knew that art could be so intoxicating?

White Russian

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Applejack Comeback

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Americans are rediscovering the pleasures of their nation’s first drinking crush with a little help from their European friends

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mericans always had a soft spot for the apple. From Johnny Appleseed to The Big Apple via mom’s apple pie. When grain and grape crops failed for the first settlers, it was the adaptable, dependable apple which came to the rescue providing a vital source of food – and liquor.

Americans enjoyed a centuries-long love affair with what they call 'hard' [alcoholic] cider and its rough-hewn relation applejack, but Prohibition all but killed off this branch of the apple spirit tradition. So while both Britain and America have a history of distilling cider going back hundreds of years, today if most people were asked 88

to name an apple spirit, they would only know French Calvados.

On both sides of the Atlantic, producers are now fighting to address this by re-claiming, re-introducing and re-inventing products and techniques which are putting apple with oomph back on the market.

The variety of traditions, laws, methods and markets means that apple juice could reach you as anything within the range of cider brandy, cider spirit, applejack, apple brandy, apple spirit, pommeau, Calvados or eau de vie de pomme, and the distinctions are complex and often blurred.

The oldest commercial distillery in the US was established by Laird’s of New Jersey in 1780, which is still today producing a barrel-aged apple brandy and an applejack (made in this

case by blending apple brandy with neutral spirit). The company’s records reveal the nation’s father himself, George Washington, wrote to the Laird family asking for their applejack recipe and the family even supplied his troops with their applejack during the Revolutionary War. But what Laird’s produces today is far removed from the first applejack made by early colonists. And with good reason. For applejack – also fondly referred to as ‘essence of lockjaw’ – was a homestead drink made in backyards and barns with little or no control, often with very unpleasant consequences.

Erika Janik, author of Apple: A Global History, says: “There is a very controlled way of distilling. Most colonial Americans were not making their applejack that way though. They

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| | | | were making it a dangerous way. They would make their cider in the Fall and they’d fill up a barrel and stick it outside, and then it would freeze and, because the water freezes before alcohol, they would skim off the water as slush and that would leave the alcohol behind, which was impure and potentially dangerous. It could be some pretty rough stuff. Applejack is like hard cider’s burly cousin.”

Applejack and hard cider were vital to early settlers. While they had struggled to grow grains and grapes, everyone had apple trees and turning your apple juice into alcohol was a useful way to use and preserve the crop. Cider and cider brandy were so common they were used as trading currency in some areas. And applejack remained the hard drink

of choice in the US for many years even as whisky, bourbon, rum and beer grew in popularity. “In 1830 New Jersey had more than 400 distillers and they were all making some kind

Applejack – also fondly referred to as ‘essence of lockjaw’ – was a homestead drink made in backyards and barns with little or no control, often with very unpleasant consequences

of applejack product. It was still a big part of life,” says Janik.

Yet by the 1880s and 1890s with the campaign against alcohol in all its forms in full swing, and with a more urbanised population, many cider apple trees were chopped down.

More apples were consumed as apple juice, thanks to improvements in refrigeration, and the apple underwent a re-branding as a healthy source of food and drink.

“It really is temperance which does for apple drinks in the US and you really saw a sharp decline in the consumption of any kind of alcoholic apple drink by the early 20th century.

Because a lot of growers stopped producing these apple products, you just don’t see it come back after prohibition. Apple trees take a long www.hotrumcow.co.uk

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Nowhere Man

Gypsy brewing is everywhere – quite literally. Liz Longden heads to the Mikkeller bar to meet to man who started it all

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If you’ve ever felt bored and disillusioned at work, perhaps toyed with the idea of jacking it all in and starting afresh with something completely different, then Mikkel Borg Bjergsø might just be your new hero.

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Words: Liz Longden Pictures: Martin Stampe

en years ago he was a maths and science teacher, experimenting with beer-making kits in his kitchen to save a few kroner. Today he is an internationally renowned brewer of cult status and owner of a bar officially voted Copenhagen’s best, and which attracts beer fanatics from across the world.

It’s a great story, but the best part is that Bjergsø has achieved all of this without even owning a brewery.

Because back in 2006, he and his childhood friend Kristian Keller had an idea as simple as it was genius – to brew and sell their own beer, using other people’s stuff. In doing so, they founded the Mikkeller brewery and invented ‘gypsy brewing’, sparking a quiet revolution in the brewing world.

If Bjergsø is living the dream of a million bored employees worldwide, you wouldn’t know it to meet him. He is quiet and serious, and not obviously excited about being a cultural icon.

Actually, he says, he sometimes

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Old Style

Fawning over Babycham Who better than a smiling, prancing fawn in a royal blue bow to be the face of ‘the happiest drink in the world’?

Somerset cider-maker Francis Showering started selling his sparkling perry in glamorous miniature bottles in the early 1950s, and while the famous fawn is now the definition of collectable kitsch, the brand was at the cutting edge of marketing in its heyday, Babycham had to be rationed in the early days when supply couldn’t keep up with demand. Producers Showerings Ltd started a revolution in drinking, and selling drink, with pioneering television advertising, appealing directly to female drinkers – a UK first.

The smiling fawn and famous goblets couldn’t sustain the excitement though and, by the 1980s, wine and ready-mixed spirits were taking the lion’s share of sales. By the 1990s, the fawn suffered the ignominy of being dropped from the bottles, but was soon reinstated following a campaign by fans as part of a re-launch.

Today, sales are back up on the up and there is a roaring trade in nostalgic Babycham memorabilia online – from underwear to beer mats, and all points in-between.

Listen closely and you can hear the cry of “I’d love a Babycham” going up once again.

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Imagine a drink so fine it sat on the highest tables in the land; so valued it was used to pay workers’ wages; so worshipped it was used to baptise babies; and so wholesome it could save His Majesty’s fleet

words: Liz Longden Illustration: Peter Donnelly

A pomepirkin’s Tale or

the History of Cider in BrITain, Pips and All 28

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uch a drink, you would think, would be cherished as a cultural icon. Yet for most people the mention of cider seems to bring forth less patriotic pride than unhappy memories of its effects on an empty teenage stomach; or a comedy rural accent; perhaps a line or two of The Wurzels’ “I Am A Cider Drinker”.

More national joke than national treasure.

It’s a sorry shame for a drink as full of character as a gnarled old tree and dripping with history like a ripe autumn fruit. But there is, perhaps, a change in the air.

Like most drinks, the earliest origins of cider are lost in the damp and clammy mists of time. Some theories have the Romans rustling up the first batches of scrumpy under the empire’s cloudy northern skies. Others claim Julius Caesar stumbled upon the natives enjoying fermented crab apple juice when he invaded Britain in 55 BC. Some say its origins go back further – apple cider vinegar was prized in ancient civilisations as a natural weight-loss remedy and antiseptic; while others argue it was not until the foundation of the first monasteries, around the 6th century,

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that the technology was developed to efficiently extract juice from apples.

But what is known is that by the 7th century, fine cider was being made in Normandy. And when William the Conqueror and his knights arrived in England in the 11th century, they brought not only a new language, hairstyle and social hierarchy, but sophisticated cider-making skills. By the 13th century, the English cider-making industry was well underway, noted in tax returns and domestic inventories. And by the 15th century, it had even made its way into a translation of the Bible, which warned that the righteous man ‘shall not drinke syn ne sidir’.

When we think about the golden age of cider, however, it’s usually something more reminiscent of scenes from an episode of The Darling Buds of May which comes to mind: village fetes, and country boys and girls chewing on stalks of barley corn, oohing and aahing and chasing each other around haylofts. Yet if there ever was a golden age, it wasn’t in the 1950s, when cider drinking was already on the slide. Instead, according to James Crowden, cider historian and author of the book Ciderland, it was 400 years ago, when English orchards were producing cider

that sat on some of the best tables in Europe, auctioned at prices sometimes comparable to the best Bordeaux.

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ne reason for the flourishing of cidermaking in England at this time was the disappearance of English vineyards.

The 16th century saw a global drop in temperatures, often referred to as the ‘Little Ice Age’, and now thought to be caused by a series of massive volcanic eruptions around 1300. The phenomenon led to a succession of harsh winters, which all but killed off the English vines. It was a tough blow. And then along came Henry VIII. “If you think about it, a good vine can last about 100 years. Now if the dissolution of the monasteries was about 1539, and a lot of knowledge was tied up with the monasteries, then 100 years on from 1539, unless those monks had passed on their knowledge into their families, then the skills necessary for viticulture are likely to have taken a hit. So vineyards were probably not replanted,” Crowden argues. With no wine to be had from grapes, the natural solution was to source another fruit, especially when wars made importing and transporting wine from abroad almost impossible.

It wasn’t just about supply and demand, however. The Fall of Man may have begun with an apple, but for the 17th–century cider makers, orchards were, quite literally, heaven on earth. Beauty and productivity. Divine providence and human ingenuity. They showed how, like the soul, the earth could be transformed by hard work into something divine. After all, the word ‘paradise’, literally translated, means ‘walled garden’. Tellingly, the founder of the first large-scale production cider plant, Ralph Austen, also wrote a 1653 treatise on orchard horticulture entitled The Spiritual Use of an Orchard. Orchards also offered a very handy way to boost rural economies. As a consequence they were planted in earnest.

The aftermath of the English Civil War also had an impact, Crowden argues. Ostracised from politics, defeated cavaliers retreated to their country estates to brood and potter around in their orchards and outhouses.

There, they carried out experiments that took cider forwards in leaps and bounds: sophisticated techniques were developed; apple varieties were catalogued and studied; hygiene was improved. Cider making, like viticulture, is an art which benefits greatly www.hotrumcow.co.uk

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And now for something completely different …

words: Liz Longden Pictures: Luigi Di Pasquale

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he Scots invente d w h i s k y, b u t we’re terrified of scrumpy.” It’s said with a laugh, but Peter Stuart is only half joking, and it’s something he wants to change. His mission: to educate the Scottish palate, hitherto wary of “anything with bits in it”, and introduce his fellow countrymen and women to the joys of farmhouse cider.

It seems strange in this modern, multicultural age that drinking preferences could be defined by geography. But cider has always been something of a special case, tied to the land and to the orchards from 42

Free from the shackles of history, one producer is out to create a brave new tradition

which it springs. And while apples do grow north of the border – Scotland boasts around two dozen heritage varieties – this was always the land of whisky, beer and Buckfast. Not cider.

With a background as an artist, specialising in glass blowing and painting, Stuart himself is a relative newcomer to the cider world. But he has been plugging away for the past four years with Thistly Cross, his modest but growing cider business.

And taking his cue from the US craft beer revolution, he wants to bring the same kind of innovation and diversity to the cider market. Liberated by a lack of any established Scottish cider tradition, he has instead set out to

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Words: Liz Longden Montage: Adam Wilson

Phil Hill / UNP

“Goes down like velvet, around like thunder, and out like lightning” t’s not often that the praises of a laxative are so poetically sung, but then perry is not your typical drink. While cider has remained more or less a constant presence in the collective drinking consciousness, perry has been more of a ghost.

There, but not really there. People have sort of heard of it. They know it’s made from pears. Rarely they’ve drunk it. Or if they have, for example, in the guise of massproduced, commercial variations such as Lambrini or Babycham, they often don’t realise. Pear cider, people have heard of.

But perry isn’t pear cider. It’s an entirely different beast. A shy creature. Delicate, complex, temperamental. Difficult.

There are many reasons why perry can be a pain for producers. For a start, while apples float, pears sink. It sounds like an insignificant detail, but it makes washing hundreds of them at a time just that bit more difficult.

Then the rate at which the fruit ripens can vary tremendously from one type of pear to another, while individual fruits can pass from ripe to over-ripe very quickly. Some varieties with higher levels of tannin benefit from being left 24 hours between being milled and being pressed, similar to the process of maceration in winemaking. Fermentation, too, is a timesensitive affair, with a much smaller window of perfection in which to bottle. And then, even when a perry maker has taken all pains to keep air out of the batch, it can still turn to vinegar. In cider, rich in malic acid, the same process only happens aerobically, in the presence of oxygen. In pears, instead laden with citric acid, it can just happen anyway, anaerobically. For no reason. Just like that.

For a drink that most people don’t know of, and don’t seem to miss, you almost wonder why perry makers bother. But your perry farmer will tell you it’s worth it. Tom Oliver has been making both cider and perry on his family farm in Ocle Pychard, Herefordshire, since 1999. He has no doubt that while perry might be less of a sure bet, when it comes good, it’s something else.

“It’s not distributed widely and it’s not to everyone’s taste, in the sense that for some people it’s maybe a bit too delicate, not robust enough. But, actually, the difference in taste, the more delicate it is, I think it’s got a bit more …” he trails off, struggling to put his finger on it. “Perry doesn’t always taste of pears, but quite often a nice pear thing comes through.

And more than that, you can get a fair bit of elderflower, a fair bit of citrus. It can be guavatype citrus, pineapple, you can get apricot – all sorts of the citrus family coming through on a perry. And then you can get particularly wonderful individual perries that taste like nothing else you’ve ever tasted. They’re not as big and as robust as a cider can be, but they’re far more delicate, and more complex, and therefore, if you like them, more rewarding.”

They are also sweeter than cider, thanks to high natural levels of unfermentable sugars, such as sorbitol. Back in the day, when sweet food wasn’t so easy to come by, this made perry the drink of choice for country gentlemen out to impress. And its laxative properties were just one further bonus. “With the diet the way it was, a drink that helped to move things along would have been of great benefit,” Oliver points out.

Being a glutton for punishment, Oliver chooses not to pitch yeast in his perry but instead to leave it at the mercy www.hotrumcow.co.uk

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