Tag: Cider

| Apples, Books, Cider, Orchards, The Apple Orchard

Apple Porn

The simple pleasures of tramping round an orchard.

Autumn is a season of two halves. Both are definitely autumn, but one is summer’s older sibling, looking back fondly, while the other is winter’s harbinger. The change comes almost overnight some time late in October, just before the clocks go back. By this time we’ve all been remarking for several weeks that the nights are drawing in and it’s getting a bit chilly, but then, around the 21st – which is, coincidentally (or not) now celebrated as Apple Day – the season finally shifts its weight to the other foot.

Before the change it’s all about crisp blue skies with a chill at the edge, the leaves turning and sweaters coming out of the wardrobe. After, it’s mud, rain, bare branches and those recently beautiful golds and yellows and browns clogging the drains and flying in your face. In short, Autumn Part One is a time to be outside. Part Two is the bit where you rediscover the joys of open fires, home baking and soup.

Every year, it’s a panicked rush to make sure I enjoy Autumn Part One as much as I can. It’s a very busy time of year with festivals, events and trade shows, and from early September to mid-October I’m invariably living out of suitcase most of the time. So when Thatcher’s Cider invited me down to Somerset for a walk in their orchards – with no other agenda than simply catching up with each other – I jumped at the chance.

Thatcher’s has grown at an incredible rate in the last few years. Many locals still remember when it was a small cider farm, but now it’s a national brand. Thatcher’s Gold is pretty much a mainstream cider now, dismissed by purists but superior to the likes of Magner’s, from which it seems to be soaking up a lot business. It doesn’t appeal to me personally, but there are other ciders within the Thatcher’s range that do, particularly the crisp, satisfying oak aged Vintage. The new special vintage blends of apple varieties, such as Tremletts and Falstaff, are also really interesting.

But for me, the most exciting thing Thatchers has done recently is to create a periodic table of the apples they use.

 

I can’t really post a big enough picture of it here to do it justice, though you should hopefully be able to enlarge it.

Apart from it being ridiculously clear and informative, and fascinating if you’re an apple nerd like me, this is what the whole cider industry needs to be looking at. Good cider is made from apples. Obvious I know, but bad cider is made from cheap, imported apple concentrate of indeterminate origin.

Different apples have different characteristics, just like different grapes or hops. Wine became popular in the UK when people began to discover their favourite grape varieties. Craft beer exploded when people started to learn about different hops. It really doesn’t take a genius to see apple varieties as the key building block for a stable, established premium quality cider market.

Martin Thatcher is genuinely fascinated by apples, after having spent his whole life around them. Walking around the massively expanded cider production facility at Myrtle Farm in the village of Sandford, he points to the house where he was born. “I’ve moved house six times in my life,” he says, “And I think they’re all within about 600 yards of each other.”

Between these houses there are over 500 acres of orchards.

Martin is currently experimenting with the effects of terroir. He’s planting stands of the same apple varieties in different types of soil and monitoring the results, and is convinced the fruit will show significant differences.

You can see where this hunch comes from down in the Exhibition Orchard.

Here there are 458 different cider apple varieties. When the Long Ashton Research Station’s Pomology and Plant Breeding programme was disbanded in 1981, Martin’s father John took cuttings from as many different trees as he could and grafted them onto rootstock in his own orchard. It’s just as well he did: the Long Ashton orchards were bulldozed soon afterwards, and a library of old cider varieties could have been lost for ever.

Walking around the Exhibition Orchard in a brief but wonderful interval of clear blue skies, I’m compelled to take photos like some kind of apple ticker. My cider comrade Bill Bradshaw always says that when he was commissioned for a photography project about apples and cider making, he found he couldn’t stop afterwards. I now see why. He’s a professional photographer. I’m a bloke who can just about work out how to point a smartphone in the right direction. But the apple demands to be captured and recorded. It’s the centre of still-life art. The artists who create Pomonas – the visual guides to apple varieties – obsess over capturing their beauty far more than they need to for simple identification purposes.

 

At various points, Martin stops and points to groups of trees bursting with life and fruit, and to others next to them, small and wizened, like the last kids to get picked when a school games lesson splits into two football teams. “These were planted at the same time, in the same soil, and given exactly the same watering, pruning and spraying regime,” says Martin. “Look at the difference.”

 

If you’re a grower, that’s fascinating. But if you’re a lucky tourist in the orchard at harvest time, you have eyes only for those that have decided this particular soil type, this precise elevation and position,  is just right, and have shown their gratitude in the best way they know.

My new book The Apple Orchard is out now. This week’s BBC Radio 4 Food Programme is about the book, and is broadcast for the first time on Sunday 9th October at 12.32pm.

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A cynical attempt to get more readers by writing a blog post tenuously linked to Great British Bake Off

Beer, cider and Mary Berry…

I have a confession to make: I am one of the few people in the United Kingdom who did not watch the final of Great British Bake Off on Wednesday night. In fact I’ve never watched the programme. It doesn’t interest me. The smirky gags about ‘soggy bottoms’ are tired, and I’ve started getting a twitch whenever I hear someone say something ‘has a good crumb’. There are loads of crumbs. Which one is good? What about the other crumbs all over the table?

It might also have something to do with Mary Berry. I know she is now virtually the Queen, but she and I don’t really get on.

I’ve met Mary Berry twice. The first time was when we were both guests on a daytime cooking programme called Great Food Live. I went on there originally to promote my second book, Three Sheets to the Wind, and they kept inviting me back to do beer and cider items. Just when I was getting quite good at doing it, becoming their resident drinks person, the show got cancelled. It was a shame – it was a great show.

At this point Mary was not a household name, but she had been around for ages as a solid, dependable cookbook writer and presenter who could turn her hand to anything. The show was recorded as live, in one take, with minimal editing. As well as doing my drinks round-up I would usually be asked to find something to pair with a dish that one of the chefs was demonstrating. On this occasion someone made a rich treacle tart, and I selected a sweet barley wine to go with it. Four of us stood in a line behind the cooking station, facing the camera, and Mary was standing next to me. Just before I was about to do my bit introducing the beer, she turned to me, gestured vaguely towards the bottle and whispered, “I hope you’re not expecting ME to drink THAT.”

I was gobsmacked. The whole idea of the show was to try stuff. It was an informal set-up and everyone just dug in, grabbing spoons and talking over each other. In all the TV I ever did, it was the first of only two occasions when someone simply refused to try the drink I’d taken on.* I began to say something like, “Well, I’d expect you to give it a try, given that’s the reason you’re standing here,” but before I could I was up and had to do my bit, which I fluffed slightly having been so flustered.

The next time I met Mary Berry was six months ago, at the presentation of the BBC Food and Farming Awards. Because I was presenting the award for best drinks producer, I was sitting in the front row, two seats down from Jamie Oliver (who was friendly, decent and not at all a knob). Mary Berry arrived and spotted someone she wanted to talk to sitting just behind me, so she came over and leaned heavily on my shoulder as she stretched across to have a conversation. She’s only little, but the conversation carried on for several minutes during which she leant her entire weight on me, and I could do nothing but sit there patiently. At no point did she acknowledge me, apologise or make a joke about the situation. Other than the fact that she was using my shoulder like a crutch, it was like I wasn’t there. When she had finished her chat, she said nothing to me and walked away.

I hear she’s quite direct on the telly. In my limited experience in person, she’s the rudest woman I’ve ever met.

But while she may not like beer, she bloody loves cider. While I was researching World’s Best Ciders, I discovered that back in 1977, she even wrote a book about it.

It’s full of recipes for all kinds of dishes, organised by season, with a section at the end featuring cups, coolers and cocktails. For Bake Off fans, there’s even a ‘Crunchy Cider Cake’, a stodgy looking thing that calls for ‘1/4 pint sweet cider such as Woodpecker’. 
Woodpecker?
Why yes. In fact if you look closely at the front cover, that’s a two-litre bottle of Woodpecker she’s pouring from. That’s because the book was published by H P Bulmer & Son. Almost every recipe calls for a sweet cider such as Woodpecker or a dry cider such as Strongbow. Many of the cocktails include that lost classic of the cider world, Pomagne.
I don’t have a problem with this – Bulmer’s stumped up the cash for the book and actually, doing a cookbook as a way of promoting your brands is a great idea. I would even cook with these ciders today if I had them lying around.
But I wonder if Mary Berry still drinks them?
*The other person who flatly refused to drink the beers I took on a show was Gordon Ramsay’s wife Tana, when she was one of the presenter’s of Great Food Live’s successor, Market Kitchen. After needing five takes to walk towards the camera while saying ‘Hello and welcome to Market Kitchen’, she simply shook her head when I presented each of several beers to her and co-hosts Matthew Fort and Tom Parker-Bowles.

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| Apples, Cider, Strongbow

How to fail completely at social media: an object lesson from @StrongbowUK

Good marketing practice is not that difficult. It just seems that it’s so much easier to screw it up.

Whenever I’ve been in a meeting room where marketers are discussing social media, everyone agrees unanimously that the difference between it and straightforward advertising is that it’s a two-way street. Twitter and Facebook are platforms for conversations. In strategic meetings, at conferences and in marketing textbooks everywhere, everyone says they understand this.

And yet in practice, it’s so very different.

Today, this tweet appeared on my timeline.

It made me quite annoyed. While I’m sure there is the equivalent of the juice from eight apples in a pint of Strongbow, by omission it very clearly implies that this is all there is. It suggests that the apples are squeezed, the juice is fermented, and that’s basically it.

But this is completely untrue. Strongbow is approximately 37% apple juice . If that’s the wrong figure, I’ll happily correct it if anyone from Bulmers – now part of Heineken – cares to tell me the correct figure. But they won’t, because they don’t want you to know. Anyway, I’ve been told on good authority that it’s 37%.

That juice has been reconstituted from concentrate, much of which is shipped in from abroad. Bulmers does use a lot of apples from Herefordshire as they claim, but there are not enough apples in Herefordshire to cater for the huge volumes it makes.

Strongbow then has more water added to bring the alcohol strength down from its natural 7-8% ABV, and lots of sugar, additives and flavourings to stop it tasting so watery.

So the tweet above is misleading, if not downright dishonest.

You can get away with that in advertising (though I will also be complaining to the Advertising Standards Authority about this tweet) but you can’t get away with it in the conversation that is social media.

You might be able to make out the first response above: “that’s bollocks and you know it!”

Further down the page, the responses come thick and fast:

“haven’t mentioned fermented apple juice & glucose syrup,water sugar,carbon dioxide,acid:E270,E330,antioxidant:E224(sulphites)”

“how come I can’t taste them then?”

“..and then bung in a load of artificial sweetener, right?”

There’s even a correction to the incorrect terminology on the tweet:

“You’d probably find it easier to press them [apples] rather than squeeze.”

This reminds me of the claim in another tweet from the brand which claims Strongbow is ‘brewed in Herefordshire’. I’m not sure how Strongbow is made, but I do know that cider is not ‘brewed’. Brewing is the heating/boiling of water with infused ingredients, such as tea leaves or hops. Cider is ‘made’ – at least in the method that Strongbow claims to follow here – and no brewing takes place. You’d really expect the UK’s biggest cider brand to know a little bit about how cider is made.

You could argue that people who drink Strongbow don’t really care about this, and there are enough ‘so what?’ comments on the thread to suggest you would have a point.

But either way, what is Strongbow’s response to this? How does the brand react to having its claims challenged in a conversational medium?

It completely ignores them.

The above statements, which are potentially very damaging to the brand, remain completely unanswered. As does every other comment on the thread. The above pic was first posted on 9th August, and Strongbow UK have not responded to a single comment.

You could argue that with regard to their critics, they simply stopped digging – but I still believe it’s foolish to leave these criticisms up there, unanswered. But elsewhere in the thread there are real fans of the brand who get the same silent treatment: several people ask semi-seriously if a pint of Strongbow counts towards their five a day. One fan asks if he can blag some beer mats or other swag for his pub shed. Another asks if the tall glass featured in the shot is available to buy.

Curious, I went through a few other tweets, and its the same story every time: a mix of stinging criticism and genuine questions from passionate fans, ignored. Having looked at five or six threads, I can’t find a single follow-up comment from the brand.

What a genius way to do marketing!

Join a conversational medium and use it as free advertising space. Make outrageous claims that you couldn’t get away with on TV. Then allow your critics to take potshots at you on your own timeline, leaving them there for everyone to see, making you look stupid and dishonest, and also piss off your most loyal fans by ignoring them as well.

No wonder this brand with a marketing budget running into millions has got fewer than 10,000 Twitter followers. They’re actually lucky they don’t have more people to watch online brand marketing commit painful suicide.

Boys and girls of Strongbow, I’m afraid you really haven’t earned it with this sad, sorry show.

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Beer and cider and music and books and food in North London

I don’t often do sponsor-heavy sales blurby posts, but this is is a special exception each year. Apologies if you can’t make it to North London next weekend…

It’s nearly here – the fifth Stoke Newington Literary Festival takes place all around N16 from 6th to 8th June – that’s in just over a week!

The festival is the creation of my wife Liz, and is organised by her, me, and a bunch of die-hard volunteers. It’s a charitable venture that aims to improve literacy in the Borough of Hackney. More than that, it’s about everyone enjoying ideas, debate, comedy, and brilliant words of all kinds. Last year Irvine Welsh – one of our headliners – described it as “The real London LitFest,”and Time Out said it’s “Like Hay-on-Wye, but in Hackney.”

With me involved, there’s always a strong boozy element – so here are the bits that might be of interest to readers of this blog.

Drinks Sponsors
We receive no formal funding for the festival, and we keep ticket prices lower than anywhere else we know to encourage the widest possible access. The support I blag from friends in the drinks industry to run bars at events is therefore what makes the festival viable. If you come, every beer or cider you buy helps a small child to read! Budweiser Budvar are our main sponsor, and last year they introduced the Budvar Marquee – a fantastic, informal bar space where we have a rolling, loose programme of authors, poets, comedians DJs and musicians chatting away while you enjoy a quality pint.

Local favourites the Bikini Beach Band are back to do another set:

and Phill Jupitus will be back with his mate poet Tim Wells to spin some platters that matter and do a bit of dad dancing for your edification. 
The marquee is outside Stoke Newington Town Hall and you don’t need a ticket for any of the festival events to soak up the buzz and free events. (You do have to pay for the booze though.)
Our other key drinks sponsors are Aspall, who very kindly provide us with top quality cider, and local brewer Redemption who have been with us from the start, supplying a specially brewed festival cask ale that’s light, hoppy, and perfect for what will hopefully be a lovely summer weekend. Talking of which… 

Name the Festival Beer!
Andy from Redemption is routinely declared the nicest man in brewing. And not just by us.

Each year he brews a special festival cask ale and donates it to us, and since year two of the festival we’ve run a competition to name the festival beer. It’s usually a dreadful pun on one of the acts or strands in the festival. Edgar Allen Poe lived in Stoke Newington, and the year we commemorated this we went for ‘Cask of the Red Death’. When Alexei Sayle headlined, ‘Alexei’s Ale’ was an obvious winner.

Get the idea?

OK, this year’s programme is more diverse and eclectic than ever before, but it does have a strong music strand running through it. Our closing headliner is Ray Davies. Yes, the real Ray Davies out of the Kinks! If you can think of a beery pun based around Waterloo Sunset, You Really Got Me, All Day And All The Night or any other of the songs this man wrote that changed the face of British music, let us know. We’ve also got Thurston Moore out of Sonic Youth, because he now lives locally (and drinks Guinness or locally brewed hoppy pale ales). We’ve got Viv Albertine out of The Slits. We’ve got Ben Watt out of Everything But The Girl. All talking about books about music. Or check out the rest of the programme and see if anyone else inspires. It doesn’t have to be a pun. It just usually turns out that way.

The winner gets free beers and entry to an event of their choice at the festival. Or just the satisfaction of knowing hundreds of people will be saying your pun as a bar call if you can’t make it along. Send entries to info@stokenewingtonliteraryfestival.com, marked ‘beer names’.

Beer and Music Matching – Sunday 8th, 7pm

I’ve been doing a lot about this recently, and my first event was at this festival two years ago. Now it’s back, bigger and better, with added neuroscience and real time experiments. Discover how your senses overlap and often deceive you. Learn how memory ‘primes’ your appreciation of flavour. And experience the Pavlovian brilliance of Duvel vs. the Pixies. Tickets available here, and the price includes a flight of outstanding beers. The event is on just before Ray Davies starts, in the venue just around the corner from his. Trust me, we will be finishing on time so I can get to see Ray too.

The Craft Cider Revolution – Saturday 7th, 4pm
As part of our food and drink strand, last year I hosted a panel discussion with local brewers. This year I thought I’d do the same with cider – but are there any local cider makers? Well, yes – London Glider make cider with apples foraged inside London – there are more of those than you thought, and the resulting cider is excellent. They’ll be joining me on stage along with the somewhat less local Andy Hallett of Hallet’s Cider, who will be bringing some of his brilliant ciders up from South Wales to try. (If you live locally but can’t make this event, don’t miss Andy’s Meet The Cider Maker this Saturday, May 31st at the Jolly Butchers). I’ll have some special stuff from our sponsors Aspall too. Tickets available here, and the price includes enough cider samples to give you a nice afternoon buzz.

The food and drink venue also has the legendary Claudia Roden being interviewed by Valentine Warner, Julian Baggini talking about the philosophy of food and drink, and the brilliant Gastrosalon – food confessions chaired by Radio 4’s Rachel McCormack.

It’s going to be our best festival yet. Please join us if you can.

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Shiny shiny cider shiny

Look at the shiny. Go on, look at it. 

I think I may just about be recovering from a two-week long hangover. That’s the only reason I can think of why I haven’t written this blog before now.

On Tuesday 13th May, my compadre Bill Bradshaw and I were named winners of the Drink Book of the Year at the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards, for our book World’s Best Cider.
This is a deeply gratifying award to win. For one thing, it’s very heavy and shiny. Judged purely in terms of melted down scrap value, it’s worth more than my six Guild of Beer Writers Awards tankards put together. It works far better than those awards as a doorstop. On the downside, it’s not nearly as good as those tankards for drinking warm Efes out of in a kebab shop at 3am as you try in vain to keep the post-award party vibe going. 
What was even more gratifying was that this is, as the name suggests, an award that judges books on all types of drink. We were in a shortlist of three, up against a book about wine and a book about champagne. Every single judge on the panel from the drinks world was a wine writer. And when we stepped onto the fourth floor of Fortnum and Mason for the drinks and canapé reception, the only drinks being served were champagne and rosé wine. 
After a couple of remarks that could have been interpreted as hints by an optimistic dreamer, and one too many phone calls from the organisers just checking that we were both definitely coming, I’d started to get my hopes up. But as I took my glass of rosé across a jungle-thick carpet to admire flower arrangements that probably cost more than my house, I thought, ‘Under this brand, in this place, there is absolutely no way a book on cider is going to beat a book about wine or a book about champagne. No way.’
But we did. And we were quite happy about it.
Playing it cool for the cameras.
Apart from succeeding in a much broader (and posher) arena than I’m used to, what was so gratifying was the reaction from judges I had very, very wrongly assumed would be sniffy about our subject. I still occasionally bump into people who think the idea of writing about beer is humorously absurd. Not as much as I used to. But for many, the idea of a serious book on cider is laughable. 
Not so for chefs, food writers and wine writers. 
I won’t repeat the best complements we had (unless you ask me in the pub) because this would be an insufferably smug blog entry if I did. Safe to say people who write about other drinks and get much more attention for them are genuinely excited about cider and its potential to be explored in more detail.
Following the ceremony we were ushered to the basement bar in Fortnum’s for the after-party. Now, I’ve been to a great many beer events. I’ve seen people get pissed at parties. I thought beer writers, brewers and publicans could really put it away. But nothing I’ve seen in a decade in the beer world prepared me for the sheer almighty CARNAGE that happens when the broader food and drink industry gets together to party. Perhaps it’s because champagne gets you pissed quicker. Maybe it’s because the only food on offer did a far better job of looking beautiful than of filling you up. But I have never seen so many people get so drunk, so quickly, in one space.
At one point Stephen Fry popped in for what I’m guessing was a quiet drink. His face registered surprise at seeing us all there, briefly, before being torn apart by sotted chefs and fucked-up food writers clawing at him for selfies. He held his ground and chatted like a hero for as long as he could stand, and was then literally chased out of the building by several people who had been waiting their turn when he decided to flee. 
The Hairy Bikers – also winners on the night – stuck it out with us. Dave Myers has read my books and says he likes them so this didn’t feel too much of an imposition:

L-R: Hairy Pedestrian, Hairy Biker, unhairy publisher who believed in the cider book and made it happen 

The bar stocked one beer – Meantime Lager – and no ciders. None at all. There’s still a lot of work to do to get people to reconsider good quality cider and take it seriously outside its current niche. But this night felt like a start. I’ll be suggesting a few brands to Fortnum’s that they might want to stock now this has happened. We’re talking to another TV chef about ideas around cider. It feels like things might happen, and if feels like there’s a broader appetite to learn more about this misunderstood drink.

Thank you so much to Jo Copestick (above with Dave) who has been hassling me to work on a book with her for years and guided us into shaping the book that needed to be written about cider even when we wanted to write a different one. And thanks to everyone else at Jacqui Small Publishing who made it happen. And thanks to my co-conspirator, who emailed me out of the blue one day, never having met me, and informed me that we needed to work on a book together. Turns out the mad scrumpy-necking bastard was right.

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‘Imperial’

In February I was in Chicago for the US Cider Conference. It was massively exciting, because craft cider in America is where craft beer was twenty years ago. It’s impossible not to draw some parallels between the two drinks. 
Because of the way the two scenes have grown in the States – with all the energy and hunger of new discovery and a bold ambition to push flavour into new places that sometimes, just occasionally, outpaces the brewer/cidermaker’s level of skill – they are much closer than they are in the UK. 
Sure, over here CAMRA represents both beer and cider to some extent, but at the craft end of things the two scenes seem quite separate – almost hostile to each other at times, as I have discovered since I began straddling both. 
In the US, craft beer and craft cider walk hand in hand to a much greater extent. Many ambitious young cidermakers have a craft brewing background. The growth of dry-hopped cider is only the most visible example of this. 
But cider still has a way to go, and that’s what makes it so exciting. 
One session we had at the conference was titled “Defining cider style by flavour.” It as based around this booklet:
by a guy called Dave Selden, who runs a beer blog and creates these stylish publications for a range of drinks. I enjoyed hanging out with Dave at the Cider Summit – a public event the day after CiderCon finished – talking among other things about how you define style.
This is something that obsesses Americans more than anyone else. In beer, before there was a debate about the definition of craft beer, there was a debate about beer styles that was just as tedious and pointless. I ridiculed it and said my final word on beer style back in 2010, but anyone who thinks there are nearly 200 different styles of beer (or is it even more now?) has far too much time on their hands.
On the other hand, I have to agree that cider needs more style definition than it currently has. The whole point of writing World’s Best Cider was that no one had looked at cider from a global perspective before, comparing the different traditions that exist around the globe. With a few exceptions, everyone has been defining cider within their own cultural frame of reference. The good thing about the Americans getting involved is that they instinctively look everywhere they can for inspiration and education. America already has a better range of international ciders readily available in craft bars and good bottle shops than you’ll find in any other country. A little bit of that rigorous analysis of style – not too much mind – might be very useful.
So back to the event where we were using Dave’s new cider booklet to try to analyse style by flavour. 
It was an open session, with each table sharing several different ciders and trying to agree on what they were like. The booklet gave us a flavour wheel and a bunch of other classifications for pinning down what was in the bottle.

It was improvisational, spontaneous, and very enjoyable. One cider was described by one table as a ‘porch’ cider, because it was the kind of thing you wanted to drink on a rocking chair while watching the sunset. The guy from Angry Orchard was clearly miffed when few people agreed that the cider he had brought to show was ‘French farmhouse’ in style. (To me, it was nowhere near tannic enough and had a hint of Spanish-style sourness.)

The highlight of the session though was when we got to one table who, after some conversation, pronounced that this cider should be classed as ‘Imperial’, with little explanation as to why. Immediately, various other tables rolled their eyes, sniggered and said, “Huh, brewers!”

It was a perfect moment: highlighting the various different factions that exist within craft cider; craft brewers parodying themselves by showing how utterly meaningless the ‘imperial’ classification is when divorced from its context; and revealing that none of us really had a clue about what to call this decent, drinkable but unmemorable cider.

By the end of the session we had picked various faults in the tasting wheel (which can be easily fixed). We were no closer to a framework of cider style by flavour. I wasn’t sure that Dave’s approach was right, but the session had convinced me that my own attempt to devise a set of cider styles was hopelessly inadequate – a mishmash that defines some styles by their region of origin, others by production methods or ingredients, and still others by flavour.

Back to the drawing board for all of us then. But taxonomy has never been so much fun.

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Barcelona II: This Time it’s Sidra

Food of Los Dioses

Around the corner from La Cerveteca in Barcelona’s Bari Gotic I stumble (literally) upon La Socarenna, a small bar built into an arch, offering productes asturias y catalans. They make cider in Asturias, and sure enough, the front window is piled high with thick green bottles. I go in.

An ancient transistor radio behind the bar gives football commentary that sounds like it’s being broadcast by bees. A grey haired man outside on the step takes his time finishing his cigarette before slowly walking back in and heading behind the bar to serve me. There’s one other customer standing at the bar.

I ask for sidra and there’s one choice: Camin, a brand from Trabanco. Mainstream stuff as far as the Asturians are concerned, but a far cry from Bulmer’s, Magner’s or Woodchuck. It comes in 660ml bottles. The bartender pops the cork and hands me the bottle and a traditional sidra glass, thin and delicate with a wide mouth, perfect for ‘throwing’ the sidra in the traditional Asturian way. I order a bowl of cockles to go with it, and am in heaven.

The other guy at the bar is throwing his sidra properly. This is the Spanish tradition: sidra is flat and very acidic compared to other cider traditions. The idea is to throw the cider into the glass from a great height. It explodes onto the side of the thin glass, which sings with the impact. This aerates the cider, giving it a champagne-like moussy texture and softening the acidity to something pleasant. That’s the first swig anyway – anything left in the glass after thirty seconds is poured away.

This means traditional sidra drinking is an active pursuit: small mouthfuls poured and drunk quickly, so you soon lose track of how fast you are drinking.

The floor of La Socarenna is tiled, and right at the foot of the bar there’s a neat drainage channel. But this must be for show: it’s perfectly dry, and the guy further down the bar has a black wooden bucket at his feet. He throws his sidra confidently from above his head, over the bucket, spilling a few drops.

I know how it should be done. I compromise, carefully pouring from about a foot over the glass. It’s not a bad first effort.

The sidra tastes beautiful, more like the easy end of Somerset cider rather than the traditional ascetic Asturian liquid some cider makers insist is just vinegar. There’s that lovely soft, woozy apple you get from scrumpy, and the acidity is perfect for me – enough to make your palate perk up without attacking it. Similarly, the farmyard notes are strong enough to suggest character, not so much that your palate is transported to the cowsheds.

Together with the cockles, it’s perfect: seafood and clean, crisp acidity together are so simple yet so right. One urges you back to the other, until you’re stabbing with your cocktail stick in a frenzy. As typical bar fayre, it beats the crap out of lager and crisps, and is no more expensive.

While I’m writing about drainage and buckets, three very heavily made up English girls stop to look at the menu outside. The surly barman is transformed, drifting over to the window with a big grin he has kept well hidden until now. The girls move on and the grin disappears. The other guy has finished his sidra and left. The barman goes back to conspicuously ignoring me, standing with his back to me, the only customer in the bar.

The sidra is 6% and it’s doing its job well. Half a bottle in, from nowhere I’m completely pissed. And in my half-hearted, very English attempt at throwing my cider, I manage to pour it all over my notebook. My cover is blown. I’ve gone from ‘Obviously I’m not from Asturias but I am aware of the tradition and I’m trying to demonstrate that even though I know I can’t do it properly’ to ‘Basically, I’m just a twat.’

I now have about a quarter of my bottle left. Another couple arrive and order a bottle of Camin. A Spanish couple. They sit at a table and she throws the cider from about a foot over her glass, without spilling a drop. He pours his nervously, right over the top of the glass. They both look uncomfortable and transfer their attention to a bowl of olives. The methodical spearing of shiny green morsels is a skill they are both proficient in, and it becomes their entire world. Meanwhile I stand behind them, writing furiously in my sodden notebook at 11pm on a Saturday night, pretending to myself that I look inconspicuous.

It’s brilliant that this sidra tradition exists, and that people are aware of it but have different levels of comfort with it, they’re not quite sure about it. It feels more authentic somehow that something that is ruthlessly observed and policed.

I pour the last of my sidra timidly, like the guy at the table, neck it and make the universal sign for la cuenta, secretly pleased that my new notebook is now impregnated with smelly booze, and stagger, soused, into the night.

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If you aren’t spending this weekend in a muddy field shouting at a tree, why not?

It’s wassail weekend. We covered Wassails in World’s Best Cider. I also wrote about different wassails for the now-defunct magazine Fire and Knives. Below is one edited piece that’s an amalgam of three of my favourite wassails. Photos by Bill Bradshaw. If you’ve never been to a wassail, now’s the time to start.

A man wearing a
facial disguise, a coat that looks like it’s made out of 1970s wallpaper and a
top hat with flowers and ostrich feathers on it advances towards me with a lit
blowtorch, his eyes gleaming in the firelight. 
There would be no point
trying to run – we’re up to our ankles in sticky mud. We’d be blind outside
this circle of firelight. And we’re in the middle of a field, miles from the
nearest village.
The man with the
blowtorch raises it above my head and lights a torch I’m carrying. Soon there
is a procession of us carrying yellow flames that give surprising illumination
against the night.
Strings of light
bulbs adorn the naked apple trees, turning them silvery and petrified,
faerie-like. 
We gather around a
large, hot bonfire, a poker protruding from its
embers, and the drizzle loses its spirit-sapping powers completely if you get
close enough to the flames.  Someone
plays a jolly tune on an accordion – and then everyone falls silent.  The Wassail Master of Ceremonies takes the
poker from the fire and plunges it into a wooden pail brimming with cider. The
liquid steams and foams, spewing onto the grass.  The MC carries the pail solemnly towards the
oldest apple tree in the orchard, steam flowing down its sides like a witch’s
cauldron.
Now, the Morris
men carry the queen on their shoulders and deposit her at the base of the
tree.  She takes a pitchfork with a slice
of toast speared on its prongs and dips it into the pail, then raises it into
the tree and teases the toast free from the prongs, leaving it in the branches
of the tree to attract robins, who will in turn attract good spirits to the
tree. The crowd raises a hearty cheer, and scores of flashlights fire, freezing
raindrops in the air like diamonds. 
The Queen’s reward
is a hearty drink from the cider pail, something she accomplishes so
enthusiastically it earns her another cheer. 
She pours the remains around the base of the old apple tree, giving back
the fruits of last year’s harvest to its roots. 
And now the entire crowd is gong batshit-crazy, banging sticks, cheering
and ululating, scaring away the evil spirits from the tree. Five men in flat
caps and neckerchiefs stride forward, raise shotguns and fire two volleys into
the branches, the retorts so loud I feel it in my chest rather than hear
it.  Orange sparks fly, smoke fills the
branches, and the air is thick with the smell of cordite.
And that’s when it
happens.  Reality shifts.
Mythology often
talks about ‘liminal’ places. 
Liminality, from the Latin limen,
or ‘threshold’, basically refers to a transitional state during a rite of
passage. Anywhere from an airport terminal to TV’s Twilight Zone could be described as a liminal place.  Throughout our history we’ve spun tales of
the existence of other worlds parallel to ours own, various heavens and hells
and, especially, the world of faerie. Normally these worlds are entirely separate
from ours and it’s impossible to pass between them at will. But there are
certain places – liminal places –
where the walls between the worlds are thin. 
A little magic seeps through and the edges, the margins of our world,
become infected by it.  Normal rules
bend, and at times don’t apply at all. 
In our search for
liminality, for mental freedom, we’re rediscovering that childlike ability to
simultaneously believe and disbelieve in magic. 
And as the cordite fills the air and the thick smoke hazes the faerie-lit
trees, for a few minutes I genuinely believe – I know – that we have succeeded in driving evil spirits from this
realm, back through the liminal space to the dimension where they belong.
Everyone else
knows it too. Tomorrow we’ll completely accept that the apple harvest is down
to weather patterns and soil, judicious stewarding and farming technology.  But not tonight.
Or maybe it’s all
just a good excuse to get pissed.
As the younger
children start to file out home, happy and tired, the Fallen Apples take the
stage and do a brief soundcheck, West Country style:
Harmonica player
(blasts a note): Z’at sound oroight?
Audience: cheers
Guitar (strums a
chord): Z’at sound oroight?
Audience: cheers
Bass (plays a few
notes): Z’at sound oroight?
Audience: cheers,
and then before the cheers have chance to die down, the band launches into
something so stupidly bluegrass-catchy that there’s a moshpit where families
were standing only seconds before.  Cider
flies through the air in golden arcs. 
The farmyard mud is stamped into submission.
It’s late by the
time they finish their set, but over in the big barn, the Skimmity Hitchers are
just getting going. These are the kings of the genre known as ‘Scrumpy &
Western,’ possibly because they invented it. 
In the hands of these funnier, modern day Wurzels (a band they’ve
supported), My Girl Lollipop becomes My Girl Cider Cup, and Ring of Fire becomes, well:
I drank down a lovely point of cider
It went down, down, down and my smile it
grew wider
And I yearns, yearns, yearns,
For a pint o’ cider
For a pint o’ cider
By the time Monkey Man is somehow impossibly
improved by its mutation into Badger Man,
and a fully-grown man in a badger costume takes centre-stage, the audience has
abandoned its earlier moderation. 
Everyone, myself included, has their own
two-litre carton of Jungle Juice hooked over one thumb.  Plastic glasses long since hurled through the
air, we drink straight from the spout.
As the set nears
its end, the audience reaction, while enthusiastic, sounds strangely incomplete.
Then I work out what it is: people are too drunk to clap.
One of the nice
things about this wassail is that it requires no crowd control. By midnight,
the crowd is simply too wankered to carry on, and everyone makes their way home
happily, haphazardly, with wide, warm grins on their faces.
But that’s not the
best thing about wassailing. The best thing is simply that it’s here, it
happens. Wassail simply sticks up two fingers to the most depressing time of
the year. It says, yes, I know party season is over, but we’re going to have a
party anyway, a really big party, and we’re going to hold it in a farmyard, in
the middle of winter, and it’s going to be really good.
And while I’ll
admit it might be the drink talking, I can think of no more laudable triumph of
the human spirit.

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My new website: www.petebrown.net

After months of talking about it, I’ve finally had my blog revamped as more of a full website with more permanent content.

I’ve always struggled with trying to put stuff on here and not being able to, and setting it up like this means I can take self-promotion stuff out of the main blog feed and put it somewhere else, and make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

I’ve also registered the domain petebrown.net, which is easier to remember and redirects to this site.

So there are some new tabs along the top – here’s a brief guide to what’s behind them.

  • What’s new? Keep an eye on the black newsstrip feed, where I’ll talk about new blog posts, events, newly posted articles elsewhere etc.
  • Home – the main blog page. Hello.
  • About Pete – a brief bio, longer description and hi-res press shot – I get asked for these a lot! Now they’re here.
  • Events – I do loads of readings and corporate events. I’m going to keep an ongoing list of events I’ve been booked for, complete with details of tickets etc. There is also some information here about the variety of events I do, from straightforward book readings to experimental beer and music evenings to full dinners, and how to book me for an event.
  • Books – a summary page for all the books I’ve written, in order of publication. Click on each title and you’ll go to a page on that specific book, with more blurb and a bit of background, and some reviews with links to any I’ve managed to find in full online. In time, most of these pages will also have a photo gallery relating to the book.
  • Other writing – the main reason I don’t blog as often as I used to is that I have two or three press deadlines a week. I thought it might be nice to collect links to these so that if I haven’t posted for a while and you are for some reason desperate to see what I’ve been thinking about, you can read more of my stuff here. I’ve only put a fraction of it on here so far but will eventually build it to be comprehensive.
  • Consultancy – very few people can make a living just from writing these days. I do consultancy for drinks manufacturers and their agencies (which I keep entirely separate from my writing) and here’s a bit of a sell page on what you can hire me for. 
  • Links – I’ve gone for a cleaner design overall. Soon I’ll put a blog roll back up here as well as links to other useful resources.
  • Contact – there’s a form here that sends messages to my personal email.
Sorry to blog about my own blog, but this helps me get my career on a more professional footing, and hopefully helps you find what you want.
The next step of course, now I’m not working on a book for the first time in three years, is to start posting some more interesting content on the blog itself, now I don’t have to clutter it up with posts about events etc. I’ve got so much to write about – some stories going back over a year – so will try to post more often from now on.

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