Tag: Cider

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World’s Best Cider is out now and all over the place!

My new book, World’s Best Cider (co-authored with Bill Bradshaw) is out in the UK this week. The North American edition was published on October 1st).

Ever since I became known as a beer writer, people have asked me about cider. They seem to assume I’ll be just as knowledgeable about it as I am about beer. Why? “Well obviously, because you’re a beer writer.”

My mantra throughout the writing of this book was that cider is ‘The world’s most misunderstood drink’. This is just one example – people assuming that because you know something about a drink that is made by malting barley, mixing it with hot water, boiling the resulting wort and adding hops and then yeast for a drink that combines bitterness and sweetness, you’ll also be perfectly au fait with a drink that is made by the careful selection and blending of different kinds of apples (or pears), mashing up the fruit, squeezing out the juice and allowing a months-long fermentation (usually with either wild yeast or champagne yeast) to create drink characterised by a balance of sweetness, acidity and tannin.

Many who don’t drink cider believe it offers a simple choice between sweet, fizzy commercial stuff containing as little as 35% apple juice, and hardcore ‘scrumpy’ that can be awesome but can just as easily be cheesy or vinegary or smell like a farmyard. Cider campaigners tell them that this is ‘the good stuff,’ and they think ‘Really? In that case, I’ll pass.’

Go to the US, and most people think that cider is fresh, unpasteurised, non-alcoholic apple juice.

Poverty Lane Orchards, New Hampshire.

Go to Frankfurt and talk to the apfelwein community, and they will refuse to believe you that Britain makes and drinks fifty per cent of the world’s total cider volume.

Go to Quebec, and you’re likely to find a cider maker who treats his product like fine wine, and has no idea that most of the world’s cider volume is sold fizzy and long, with an an alcohol content more in line with beer.

I didn’t know any of this when photographer Bill Bradshaw e-mailed me out of the blue in 2010. He’d read Three Sheets to the Wind on holiday and decided that we had to work together. He suggested we do a road trip across Belgium, drinking beer and recording our progress. Maybe we’ll still do that someday. But when I found out that Bill was fanatical about cider (as well as being a former beer brewer) I suggested he teach me about cider instead.

Lovely section headers…

As we delved into the subject, pitching early ideas at publishers, we realised something extraordinary. Michael Jackson wrote the first World Guide to Beer in 1977. He introduced Belgian beer to the world. He set out a classification of global beer styles. He inspired the beginning of the American craft beer revolution. Since he wrote that book, countless others have followed, evolving into a fixed format that breezes through the history of beer, talks about how beer is made, then travels around the world’s most notable brewing regions comparing styles and traditions. As book has followed book, this format has evolved into a catalogue of beers, comprising hundreds of bottle shots and tasting notes. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the first World Guide to Beer 35 years later is the almost complete absence of bottle shots. From a time less plagued by attention deficit disorder, the book is a collection of longer essays about countries and beer styles, written with quiet authority. Examples and tasting notes crop up in these essays, but the beers are never presented in an identity parade.

Hugh Johnson had done the first World Atlas of Wine six years earlier. Since then we now have similar books on cocktails, rim, whisky, coffee, tea – you name it. But not a single example of the same approach to cider.

Why not?

I think it comes back again to being misunderstood. Very few cider lovers realise that there is any cider tradition in the world other than their own. Here in the UK we believe cider is a quintessentially British drink, and most existing cider books I’ve found focus on Britain exclusively. But the sidra-loving Asturians in northern Spain think they own cider, as do the artisanal producers of Normandy, many of whom only make cider as a step along the way to creating Calvados, the most treasured produce of the orchard.

Canadian ice cider. Your new favourite drink.

The cream of the producers from these regions, plus others from Canada, Germany, Austria, the US, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Norway and Japan, have only really started sharing and meeting with each other in the last five years or so. It’s rare (but not impossible) to find a collection of great ciders from around the world in any shop, pub, restaurant or bar on the planet. (We did find one. It’s in the book.)

El Gaitero in Spain proves you can do both big and good.

So the format of World’s Best Cider will be familiar to pretty much anyone who’s ever bought a book about beer or wine. But the content won’t. As Bill and I discovered on our travels, almost everything you thought you know about cider is, if not wrong, then certainly incomplete. We soon realised we only knew a fraction of what was going on, and went on a very steep learning curve. We met three, maybe four people in the world who had a good grasp of the whole global picture. It’s thrilling to be part of broadening that appreciation.

Because this book is the first of its kind, I took some inspiration from the original World Guide to Beer, and there are more essays and longer articles than readers of this style of book may be used to. We both wanted to explore the culture and tradition of cider a well as the taste and style, and profile some of the characters who create it. This comes at a cost: this is not the Good Cider Guide. It doesn’t aim to give you every cider worth drinking so tickers can work their way though it. We give tasting notes for about 250 ciders. Some people tell us they never realised there even were 250 ciders in existence, but we’ve only scratched the surface here. Ben McFarland’s World’s Best Beers – the sister title to this book, from the same publisher – features 1000 beers.

Some of the 250 ciders in the book.

This means that if you’re a cider fan there’s a possibility your favourite cider may not be here. If you make good craft cider and your brand doesn’t feature, this is not a slight. When you break it down, there’s very little space of each individual country. The ciders here are just a cross-section and are not meant to be the last word.

Worth going to Japan for…

The book also covers pairing cider with food, and cooking with cider, as well as a section on the apple itself – a wonderful story in its own right. And we’ve attempted an initial cider style guide, going from light commercial cider and farmhouse scrumpy though apple wine style ciders to perry, Calvados and pommeau. (If you’ve never hard of pommeau, as I hadn’t three years ago, that’s worth reading about on its own).

No jokes about pork in cider…

We’re doing a whole bunch of events to support the book – tomorrow I’m meeting London Glider Cider at Stoke Newington Farmers’ Market for a reading and tasting at 1pm. My blog is finally in the middle of a long-overdue revamp, and in the next few days there will be a new, separate events page which will be updated regularly with more tastings and talks.

Most exciting of all – for me at any rate – I’ve made a programme for BBC Radio 4 about cider as the world’s most misunderstood drink, and the new wave of cider production and enthusiasm that’s spreading around the world. It is broadcast at 12.30pm on Sunday 20th, and will be available on iPlayer for a while afterwards.

Cider is a very different drink from beer, closer in many ways to wine, but not too close. Deceptively simple and straightforward on the commercial side, it opens up to reveal a world of craft cider that is both more straightforward than craft beer (our definition if craft cider is basically cider made with a hundred per cent apple juice, or near to it) but goes in all sorts of different directions (dry hopped cider, anyone?)

I am, inevitably, being drawn into conversations about which is best – cider or beer – and whether this new push into the cider world means I’m abandoning beer.

But why settle for one awesome craft drink when you can have two?

Whatever makes you thirsty.

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Cider: Always drink responsibly. Unless you’re from the 1970s.

It’s Cider O’ Clock here on Pete Brown’s Blog for the next week or so. World’s Best Cider is now on sale, and launches officially next week, which is nice, because it’s also the week of various Apple Day celebrations.
I’ll be writing quite a bit about the book, about the themes within it and some of the fantastic people we met while researching it, over the next week or two. But to kick things off, I wanted to share with you some images of real cider ads that ran in the 1970s and can still be seen in the Bulmer’s Museum in Hereford. It’s a great place. If you think Bulmer’s have only ever done bland, tasteless commercial crap, you need to go and have your perceptions changed. Once, they made the best cider in the world, by any reasonable standards, and the evidence of this is still there.
By the time the images below were being developed, they were making bland, commercial crap. But without this crap, we would never have got these ads. It’s a price worth paying. It’s ads like these that made Woodpecker such a success for Bulmer’s in the 1970s and 1980s, and they remain an inspiration – a lodestone – for alcohol advertisers in the new millennium.
Today, the British advertising Code of Practice states:

“Marketing communications must neither link alcohol with seduction, sexual activity or sexual success nor imply that alcohol can enhance attractiveness… [and] must not imply that drinking alcohol is a key component of the success of a personal relationship or social event.”
Happily then, this ad targets bar staff and simply urges them to draw pints of Woodpecker from the font, ready for thirsty customers with nothing but refreshment on their minds. 

Beer still struggles to shed a macho, boorish image after decades of advertising that many women have found alienating, or even offensive. This has led to a situation where only 15% of beer volume in the UK is drunk by women, compared to 40% in Spain.

Meanwhile, one of the main reasons for cider’s success is that it is acceptable to both men and women. It’s managed to avoid the sexist tropes and stereotypes that beer relied on for so long, and cider vlume is split much more evenly between men and women.
This ad, for example, simply asks us to imagine ourselves as winged creatures, as embodiments of Woodpecker’s brand values – colourful, interesting and free, chirpy and beloved, and to share our drinks in a responsible fashion with our fellow ‘birds’.

The rules on alcohol advertising in the UK are some of the strictest in the world. The introduction to the regulatory code states that “marketing communications for alcoholic drinks should not… imply, condone or encourage immoderate, irresponsible or anti-social drinking. The spirit as well as the letter of the rules applies.”
Mindful of this, our final ad depicts an abstract representation of two Woodpecker consumers sitting in a relaxed fashion, enjoying a responsible drink away from their natural habitat. Their informal poses indicate ease and comfort in each other’s company and their environment. The line simply reminds us that our usual routine and habitat – our ‘tree’ if you will – can feel restrictive, and every now and then it’s nice to go somewhere else and do something different. The very use of the word ‘some’, when it could have said ‘lots of’ or even ‘all’, reminds us that fact that consuming alcohol should be only an occasional occurrence.  
If only more of today’s alcohol advertisers followed the Code of Practice so closely, perhaps we’d have less of the Daily Mail/health lobby hysteria around alcohol that we have to endure today.

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Alcopop: the drink that dare not speak its name.

Where’s George Orwell when you need him?

The inventor of double speak, already one of the best writers on pubs we’ve ever had, would have loved the shenanigans happening in the drinks market today.

A couple of days ago, the BBC proclaimed ‘The quiet death of the alcopop‘.

These are – or were – alcopops.
Under the image above, they told us that the ready-to-drink, flavoured alcoholic beverage sector of the drinks market (alcopops to you or me) has halved in size since 2005. Interestingly, the decline is blamed on the tacky, garish image of the products above. Not much is said about the desire for sickly sweet, fruit-flavoured alcoholic beverages, and whether that has gone away or not.
The truth is, our desire for these concoctions is just as strong as ever. Sales of alcopops are soaring. The leading brands just don’t want you to call them alcopops, and some get angry if you do. 
A few weeks ago I wrote in my column for the Publican’s Morning Advertiser that Kopparberg and Rekorderlig, which refer to themselves as ‘premium fruit ciders’, are nothing of the sort. They are alcopops in disguise – admittedly a very fetching, stylish disguise, especially in the case of Rekorderlig, whose packaging and labels are so beautiful that it sometimes takes a mental struggle to remember how unpleasant the product was – to my palate – when I tasted it. 
And this is another alcopop.

I understand that both brands were rather angry with the PMA for printing my opinion. I don’t understand why. I based my contention that these producers are not cider simply by quoting the ingredients they list on their labels/websites.

This is also an alcopop.

Kopparberg is made from ‘naturally occurring soft water’, fruit juice, sugar, acidifier (citric acid), flavouring, and potassium sorbate.

Likewise, Rekorderlig consists of ‘fresh spring water, pear and apple wines, sugar, acids: citric acid and sodium citric, berry flavours, preservatives: E202, E220 and caramel colour.’

Cider, on the other hand, is made from apples. The character of any cider depends on the varieties of apple that are blended, just as most great wines are about the blend of grapes (you can of course have single varieties of either). Even a leading commercial cider such as Magner’s – which many cider geeks would not consider cider at all – proudly talks on its website about the 17 varieties of apple used to make it. Say what you like about Magner’s, and I don’t drink it myself, but the draught version contains more Dabinett apple than the bottle does, a specific move to compensate for the fact that it’s going to taste different when not poured over ice.

By contrast, I can find no mention of apple varieties anywhere in Kopparberg or Rekorderlig’s promotional material. Rekorderlig’s website has a tab telling you about ‘flavours’. When you click on ‘apple’, this is what it says:

“Made from the purest Swedish spring water, traditional yet modern Rekorderlig Apple Cider is best served over ice for a crisp, cool and refreshing experience.” 

IN THEIR OWN WORDS, the ‘apple-flavoured’ variant of their ‘cider’ is made from water rather than apples.

Click on the ‘history’ bit on Kopparberg’s website, and the word ‘apple’ doesn’t appear once. Instead it talks about the minerality in ‘Koppaberg’s lakes and waters’, which proved inspirational to Kopparberg’s first ‘brew master’. Cider is not ‘brewed’. And once again, cider is made from apples. Not water.

It’s sad that we have such a lax regulatory environment that these alcopops are allowed to get away with calling themselves ciders. They do so, of course, because cider is so much more fashionable these days than any kind of flavoured alcoholic beverage.

But this post is not just about faux ‘fruit’ ciders – the current alcopop boom is much broader than that.

This, too, is an alcopop

Jeremiah Weed has had a brilliant launch. Again, it looks and feels too posh to be called an alcopop, but as a ready-to-drink, flavoured alcoholic beverage, that’s exactly what it is. It reeks of authenticity and heritage. In fact it has none whatsoever – it’s entirely a creation of 21st century Big Marketing. That aside, at least it doesn’t claim to be a different kind of product from what it is.

Or that’s what I thought – until the second comment below from eatingisntcheating.blogspot.com alerted me to this news story from last month – it seems Jeremiah Weed is now a cider too! In the company’s own words, although this product:

This is an alcopop, also

has not changed from when it was launched as a ‘ginger brew’, it is now, apparently, a ‘Kentucky style cider brew’. (Remember, cider isn’t brewed. At all.) And why have they pulled off this astonishing feat? Why have they changed one type of product into a completely different type of product, while not changing the product AT ALL? Why, “to help consumers, retailers and bar staff to better understand the brand’s exciting and innovative offering and [entirely fictitious] Kentucky heritage” (my italics). That’s right: they’ve started calling something a cider that isn’t a cider and didn’t used to be called cider to help people better understand what it is.

And then there’s the recent summer sensation: Crabbies ginger beer.

This is a tricky one, because ‘ginger beer’ is a recognised style of drink. You could get into an awful lot of semantics here because a true ‘ginger beer’ is brewed from a combination of ginger, sugar, water, lemon juice and a bacteria called ‘ginger beer plant’, and this fermentation process produces alcohol. But while it may be called ‘beer’, it resembles what we commonly understand as ‘beer’ in no way whatsoever – it has a completely different base of fermentable sugars and flavour ingredients from any beer. In terms of ingredients and process, it looks a lot more like an alcopop. And that’s assuming Crabbie’s is brewed in the traditional way – which it isn’t.
This is – oh, you get it by now.

But this ambiguity has now led to something truly absurd, something which makes the whole long-drinks market look utterly farcical, even more ridiculous than water-based ‘ciders’. Here’s the trade ad for Crabbie’s that ran on the back of the Publican’s Morning Advertiser last week:

I don’t know what the hell this is, but it’s certainly not a premium ale.

A cloudy alcoholic lemonade. Haven’t we had these before? Oh yes, they were the original alcopops weren’t they? Before the riot of different flavours came along. Surely there is no argument whatsoever that this is an alcopop.

But no: look at the second bullet point down: on the basis that ginger beer could be confused with actual beer, Crabbie’s claims to be not an alcopop at all, but a premium ale. That’s right: an alcoholic lemonade is classed as being the same kind of product as Fuller’s London Pride, Thornbridge Jaipur, and any other ale between 4.2% and 7% ABV.

Alcopops are enjoying a boom to rival anything they saw in the mid-90s, but they’ve learned their lesson and are now seeking to establish a credibility that will allow them to outlive the natural ‘fad’ life cycle they enjoyed last time. Because they do not have any intrinsic credibility of their own, the leading brands are stealing it from beer and cider, ashamed to admit what they really are.

A lot of people like them and that’s fine – not everything has to be crafted and balanced in flavour. But by claiming to be something they are not, they displace other products that have some integrity, increase confusion among paying punters, and denigrate the image of the drinks they are masquerading as.

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The Guide to Welsh Cider and Perry

Wales has got its mojo back. The last refuge of off-colour jokes about people based on their nationality or ethnicity has flourished since getting its own Regional Assembly in the late 1990s (and a healthy wodge of EU funding), transforming itself from a ravaged post-industrial slumpland into a vibrant, exciting tourist destination that has stunning scenery and great food and drink at its heart.

Take the Abergavenny Food Festival – for one weekend every September, the whole of this beautiful market town is taken over by a riot of food and drink producers chefs, writers, beer tents and the occasional random performance artist for a joyous appreciation of food and drink. It might be lazy to refer to it as ‘The Glastonbury of food festivals’, as some journos have, but it’s not inaccurate.

Abergavenny also sits at the heart of Welsh cider country. Monmouthshire shares climate and geography with neighbouring Herefordshire – one of England’s two great cider making regions. And the last fifteen years have seen an extraordinary revival of a Welsh cider making tradition that had all but disappeared by the 1970s.
In 2000, two Welsh cider makers founded the Welsh Perry and Cider Society to promote what was then an embryonic re-birth. Now, the society has over forty producer members, from people who make a few gallons in their sheds for competitions, to large brands such as Gwynt Y Ddraig, which has nationwide listings in ‘Spoons among others. By the mid-noughties, Welsh ciders were winning more than their fair share of awards in national competitions, and today, from virtually nowhere, Wales is one of the most important cider making regions in the UK.
Last year the WPCS invited people to tender to write the Guide to Welsh Perry and Cider. Bill Bradshaw and I won the pitch. 
The Guide is now available. Self-published by the Society, it’s not as widely available as a book via an established publisher would be, but if you are interested in cider I’d humbly suggest it’s worth tracking down. 
The job of the book is to give details of everyone who makes cider commercially in Wales, as well as details of pubs that serve good cider, and festivals and events where you can try a decent range. I wanted to make this entertaining as well as informative, to capture some of the personalities and a sense of place. Bill’s excellent photography more than delivers on that. Like any great cider making region, Wales has a good smattering of eccentrics and visionaries with stories to tell. Wherever cider is drunk, an element of joyful anarchy is loosed, and it doesn’t hurt that you’re surrounded by some of the most stunning scenery in the UK. 
The book is available through Amazon here, and will be selling at events and in Welsh bookshops and tourist centres.
Talking of events, I will hopefully be doing something around the book at the Green Man Festival next month, which has a fully fledged Welsh beer and cider festival within it this year. (I’m already confirmed to do a beer and music matching event on the Literature Stage at 2pm on the Sunday). And Bill and I will be talking about the book and doing a tutored cider tasting at this year’s Abergavenny Food Festival – by which time, our World’s Best Cider book may also be available…
Iechydd da!

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World’s Best Cider now available for pre-order on Amazon!

One of my favourite points in the birth of a book is when it first appears on Amazon – it’s the point where it becomes real, out there as opposed to being just part of the author’s world. It’s also when we get to show off about the cover! (Yes, I’d prefer it to be bought for real bookshops that pay their taxes, but Amazon is the place where you can get it most easily.)

World’s Best Cider is a departure from my previous books in that:

a) It’s co-authored – on this occasion with Bill Bradshaw, AKA IAMCIDER in the blogosphere.

b) It has a simultaneous release in both the UK and the USA.

c) It’s more of a typical, illustrated coffee table type book rather than being narrative-led like my previous ones. When Bill and I decided to work together on cider we were looking at doing some kind of illustrated ‘Three Sheets‘-style travel caper. But when we realise that no one had ever given cider the ‘world guide’ treatment that beer got from the likes of Michael Jackson and, more recently, Ben McFarland and Steve Beaumont and Tim Webb, we just had to jump in there and do it. I’m glad we did. We’ve tried to minimise the number of pages that are just bottle shots and tasting notes – although we’ve still given that treatment to around 250 ciders from around the world – and give a flavour of cider based on its history, regional styles, terroir, and most importantly, the characters who make it. So as well as looking great, we hope it’s a book people will enjoy reading cover to cover.

Publication dates are 1st October in the US and 17th October in the UK – just in time for Apple Day!

So anyway, here’s the cover of the UK version:

And here’s the US version:

Which do you prefer?

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Cider, Cheese, Bluegrass and Mayhem: The Gower Cider and Cheese Festival

Long blog post alert!

In two weeks’ time the Welsh Perry and Cider Guide, co-authored by me and cider photographer Bill Bradshaw, will be launched. We were commissioned to write it by the Welsh Perry and Cider Society, and spent much of last year touring Wales to research it. The highlight of our research, for me, was the Gower Cider and Cheese Weekend. It didn’t look that great on paper, but like all the best drinking occasions, its charm snuck up on us and captured us before we knew what was happening. 


For many reasons, some of which will be obvious if you read on, much of my write-up was completely unsuitable for an informative guidebook. So here’s the long version of the brief, restrained account that features in the Guide. 


The Welsh Perry and Cider Guide will be officially launched at the Welsh Perry and Cider Festival which runs from Friday 24th to Monday 27th May, and will eventually be available via Amazon and through Welsh bookshops and tourist centres. Photos below are copyright Bill Bradshaw – see more of his brilliant work at his blog, IAMCIDER.


The festival is happening again this weekend, Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th May. If you can go, I urge you to do so. 



If you time it wrong, driving through Swansea can be a dispiriting trudge past endless TGI Fridays and Premier Inns, the kind of urban crawl where, to relieve the tedium, your brain wanders off to dream up creative new methods of suicide. This is followed by an eternal limbo of endless suburban streets that only make sudden appearance of the magical playground that is the Gower Peninsula all the more surprising. At the end of another dull road you duck under some trees and instantly you’re in a dreamy, alien landscape of dunes and grassy outcrops, and winding roads that curve around cute pubs and swoop down dips and through copses, and steer you gently but firmly into conversations about scouting and woodcraft.

Fifteen minutes later we descend into a broad, shallow natural bowl ringed with trees, and arrive at the Gower Heritage Centre. This self-styled ‘vibrant crafts and rural life museum’ advertises itself as ‘a superb day out for all the family’, situated only 20 minutes walk from the spectacular Three Cliffs bay, ‘as seen on ITV’s “Britain’s Favourite View” with Katherine Jenkins’.

My accomplice Bill Bradshaw and I need no further encouragement to settle in for the day.

Built around a watermill that resembles a friendly giant, the centre is a real world manifestation of Toy Town or Hobbiton, an eccentric complex of brightly painted shacks, shops and workshops that tumble over each other to create a maze of narrow corridors and tempting doorways that assault the senses like Dorothy’s first glimpse of Technicolor Oz. Past the dairy, the puppet theatre, the ancient games arcade and village shop, all roads eventually converge on a red-tiled courtyard, roofed against the rain. On one side stands a tea-room, on the other, a pen full of small, rideable plastic tractors.

I’m trying not to say it, because it’s clichéd and lazy, but at this point I crumble. I’m only human.

“Ooh, isn’t it quaint?”

We grab a cuppa while we wait for Richie, our busy host. I browse the tea shop’s information stand: today’s event is part of a busy summer that includes Pirate Week, Viking Week, and a Medieval Fun Week where you can meet a knight and learn how to slay a dragon.

That’s it – I want to live here.

At first, I’m not so sure about the festival itself though. I’m used to beer and cider festivals with long lines of trestle tables with endless casks on stillage. Here there’s one stall with bag-in-box ciders piled three-high, and one long table selling a huge array of Welsh cheeses that all seem to be the same type of cheddar.

“It’s quiet, isn’t it?” I say to Bill. “We can probably get what we need here in a couple of hours and then go and see some more of the Gower.”

On reflection, my naiveté about cider back then was staggering.

Richie finally bounds into view and introduces himself. Impish and hyperactive, he appears to be dressed in my old school uniform of grey shirt, grey v-necked jumper and red tie. He welcomes us in a lilting, music accent and introduces us to Shaun, a local man selling his cider here for the first time, and then he’s off on another errand. We seem to have started drinking cider, and it’s nearly midday, so we take a seat and decide to do a bit of product sampling.


The centre makes its own cider on an old press rescued from a farm in Pembrokeshire. The overflow car park is an orchard with geese snoozing under trees that are only now coming into blossom, weeks late thanks to the incessant rain. Today – on the first day of the year that you actually dare to hope for summer – the produce of last year’s last year’s crop is a deep russet red, a good, honest cider at 7.4% that’s sweet and sharp with a mouth-watering metallic hint.

We’re trying to drink halves because we want to be able to sample as many as possible. Gwatkin’s Kingston Black is tart with hints of smoke and sherry. Blaengawney Blindfold has loads of structure, a real journey from acidic to dry with a hint of bubblegum before a full, pure apple flavour opens out. Two Trees Perry is clean and clear like unfermented pear juice with no trace of its 6% alcohol until it’s far too late.

By lunchtime a mellow, family-friendly vibe permeates the courtyard. There’s folk music on the stage, and the smell of barbecuing burgers and sausages in the air. The queue at the cider bar gets longer, until it snakes around the courtyard, and we decide it would be far more efficient and practical to switch to pints.

We’re sitting by the cheese stall. A chubby black Labrador, obviously the inspiration behind the invention of the hover floor cleaner, makes sure any spillage is swiftly dealt with. I love Welsh cheddar. It’s hard and strong but it melts in your mouth, seducing you unexpectedly.

I suddenly notice that I’ve been eating Snowdonia Black Bomber for some time. I wanted to see if I could find a perfect cider and cheese pairing, but that seems to have gone by the wayside. Instead, I start to imagine that the cheese can speak, and it’s saying to me in a very pleasant, reasonable South Wales accent:

“Alright mate? All it is, right, what I’m going to do, is I’m going to destroy all your willpower and any defences you have, and I’m going to come in there, and there’s going to be nothing you can do about it.  You’re going to carry on eating me, and I’m going to fill up your arteries, and then fill up your heart with cheese, and I’m going to kill you, alright? And you’re gonna love it. Anyway, enough talking, open wide.”

Gwynt Y Draig’s Black Dragon is a real crowd pleaser, open and golden with all the fruit you want before a dry tannic finish. And I suddenly realise I can’t remember how much we’ve had. The folk music onstage is sounding better and better as the afternoon progresses. The Baggy Rinkles – a Swansea sea shanty band – tell us they enjoy singing traditional drinking songs but the influence of the chapel meant they had to go to England to find them. The people waving the ancient Welsh yellow cross on a black field – somehow more terrifying than the modern dragon flag – don’t seem to mind. Give us the punch ladle, we all roar, and we’ll fathom the bowl.

A teenage boy walks past wearing a hearing aid and a Guns and Roses T-shirt, a combination which amuses me enormously for some reason. Two young couples have liberated an old Buckaroo game from the village shop, and are becoming steadily worse at playing it.

By five o’ clock, there is a very slow, mellow vibe in the air. Folk singer Ian Jones complains from the stage that his cider has run out, and one of the Buckaroo girls comes up and pours the dregs of her glass into his. Some people are wearing wellies, others flip flops. There are trilbies and deer stalker hats, and the writing in my notebook is starting to look strange.

We decide we need to sober up a bit so we pop out to walk the short distance to Three Cliffs Bay (as seen on ITV’s “Britain’s Favourite View” with Katherine Jenkins’, remember.) Folk music follows us through the woods and down the valley, echoing off the hills until we’re half way there.

When we get back to the centre, the atmosphere has changed. It’s quite a lot looser and giddier. One of the Buckaroo girls is now slumped with a hood over her face like someone waiting to be hanged. People are playing mandolins and flutes. One of the bands that was on stage earlier has now invaded the children’s little plastic tractor enclosure. While the kids charge around gleefully crashing their tractors into each other, the musicians proceed slowly and extremely carefully around the pen, as if trying to ensure they don’t get pulled over for driving under the influence.

Richie, having rakishly discarded his grey jumper and loosened his tie a little, jumps onto the stage to announce that he’s had to send up the motorway for some more cider, that they’re meeting Gwynt Y Draig half way, and this raises a loud cheer. He jumps back off the stage and starts collecting glasses and clearing up litter, seemingly a one-man festival staff operation.


My notebook is looking really odd now. I’m pushing letters uphill onto the page. I have no idea what that means, but I write it down anyway. Something is happening to me that has only happened once before.

When I drink, my handwriting generally becomes messier the more we go on, but when I decipher the scribble later I’m usually pleasantly surprised to find that I was writing some good stuff. But once I found an absinthe bar in a seedy backstreet in Barcelona, and got inside-out drunk: the more the absinthe hit my system, the neater my handwriting became. But the stuff I wrote made no sense whatsoever, and was quite disturbing in places.

Now, here on the Gower, my handwriting gets neater, then messier, then neater again as my drunken self makes an extra special effort to send messages to the sober me who will read this notebook the next morning. Or the following week. Or six months later, only days before I need to make sense of these notes for a reading at the Abergavenny Food Festival, having left it to the last minute.

At some point, I write:

“This is what my handwriting looks like when I’m a bit drunk and concentrating harder on making it look neat than on what I’m saying.” 

We drink some Gwatkin Yarlington Mill, a smouldering glass in which a candy sweetness meets a grainy, spicy dryness.

And then I write:

“It gets harder and harder to feel like this, the older we get. We’re just trying to recapture joy. We’re trying to achieve transcendence, run from boredom and mediocrity that we can’t endure. Sobriety is an illness to us, an awful state of self-doubt and awareness.” 

There’s still a family thing going on in the courtyard, but it’s wrapped around a vitality running through the place, as if it’s on a ley line. I’m conscious that I’m missing the final of Britain’s Got Talent, but I think I’ve got the better deal. In fact, I think I’m watching next year’s winner. A teenage boy is on stage singing and playing guitar, and a semi-circle of cider-drunk women seem to be closing in on him, the intense look in their eyes making it clear how keen they would be to help him grow up a little. Then he plays the Jungle Book’s ‘Bear Necessities’ for an encore. If there were any hearts in the place not won over, they are now.

I drink some more cider.

And I write: 

“Lascivious Flautism.” 
Up The Creek, a Swansea Bluegrass band, have taken the stage. And I learn that Bluegrass pulls everything in and makes you its own. I’ve written a lot about pairing the right music with the right beverage recently, and pairing cider with bluegrass is like dropping a packet of Mentos into a fizzy bottle of Coke, or a magnesium strip into water. Anything you’re holding flies into the air. Banjo and fiddle tear the corrugated plastic roof off the courtyard and fling it into space. I have no idea where Bill is. Everyone is going absolutely insane, surfing a wave of pure joy. Richie is grinning, having finally stopped working. He catches my eye, and gestures to the band. Everything about this festival, this weird little place, now makes perfect sense.


I drink some more cider. And decide it’s probably time I put my notebook away and focus on the music.
This is the first of various posts I intend to write in the drunken travel theme of my second book, Three Sheets to the Wind. If you enjoy this aspect of my writing, look out for the label ‘Four Sheets’ as I document more of my recent tipsy journeys.

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A bit of an update

I’d like to apologise to anyone out there who actually reads this blog for pleasure – if you exist, I’ve been letting you down of late, with whole months passing between posts.

Thing is, I’ve been massively busy with stuff, including a lot of other writing – the old-fashioned kind that (just about) pays the mortgage.  At one point a few weeks ago I did my To Do list on Monday morning and realised I had thirteen deadlines all theoretically due that week.

Anyway, I’ve cleared them all now, so I thought I might do a catch-up post to fill in any remaining readers on the bits of busy-ness you might be interested in.

SHAKESPEARE

My new book, Shakespeare’s Local, is all done bar the shouting.  It’s coming out on 8th November as a selfless, humanitarian gesture to help you or those close to you make some tricky Christmas gift decisions much easier.  With a hardback cover featuring a silver embossed design it certainly looks like a proper present.  I’ve been trying out a few readings from it at the Latitude and Port Eliot festivals, and I’ll be working this into an audio-visual one hour talk that I’ll be doing at the Ilkley Literary festival on October 9th, and then a residency at the George Inn in Southwark, with one event a week from launch date till Christmas.  Hopefully there will be many more events around the country too – several are currently in the planning stages.

FOOD…

I wrote here a few weeks ago about how I’ve been judging beer and cider in broader food and drink competitions, where it sits alongside everything else and is evaluated by people from across the spectrum of food and drink rather than just beer people.

I think there is room for both kinds of competitions – you want to be judged by your peers to establish and reward technical excellence and superior brewing craftsmanship, but these broader competitions allow beer to play on a wider stage and be recognised more broadly.

First up were the Great Taste Awards, which had categories for both bottled beer and bottled cider.  Great Taste was set up as an antidote to supermarket ‘Finest’ and ‘Taste the Difference’ ranges, as an independent hallmark of great quality.  Some great beers were recognised in these awards – so much so that the Great Taste people invited me and food writer (and ardent beer fan) Charles Campion to put together a showcase menu at London’s swanky Cadogan Hotel. The info on this website is in imminent need of updating, but on Tuesday 14th August our menu using an award-winning beer in every course, created with chef Oliver Lesnik, goes live for a media launch.  I’ve matched beers with each dish, and there’s also going to be a beer and cheese matching menu in the afternoons.  The menu will run in the Cadogan’s restaurant, at a very reasonable £28 for three courses, for a couple of months.  I’ll write about how the press launch goes – if it goes well…  

… AND FARMING
Next up is the BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards.  I’ve been asked to judge the drinks category along with wine writer Victoria Moore.  The Beeb want to inject a bit of drama this year by pitching beer and cider against wine.  Interestingly, a brewery has won the drinks category for the last two years, but this year English wine has finally started getting the international recognition it deserves – is it time for wine to strike back?  I’ve seen the first lot of nominations and the brewers are certainly the most enthusiastic again – if there’s a drinks maker of any description you’d like to see entered, find out more at the link above.  But hurry – nominations close on 12th August.  

APPLES AND PAIRS

One of Bill’s best cider images

I’ve been hinting at various adventures in cider over the last year or so, and things have finally come to fruition (sorry) on that score.  The whole Magner’s thing has led to revived interest in quality cider, and craft cider around the world at the moment is in a similar place to craft beer twenty years ago.  I’m working on cider with Bill Bradshaw – ace photographer and cider fanatic.  His beautifully shot cider blog is here.  Together, Bill and I are currently hard at work on the Guide to Welsh Perry and Cider, for the Welsh Perry and Cider Society.  This guidebook is going to be published in spring 2013 and maps for the first time the unsung hero of British cider (after Somerset and Herefordshire).  It is ridiculously good fun to research.

Mad Asturian bloke ‘throwing’ cider

At the same time, we’ve just signed the deal on the first ever world guide to cider – provisionally entitled World’s Best Ciders.  Hugh Johnson did it for wine, then Michel Jackson did it for beer.  We’re enormously proud to be doing a smilar job for cider, from the established classic regions like Somerset and Normandy, to the explosion that’s now happening in the US, to the ice wines of Canada, the eccentricity and tradition in Asturiàs, northern Spain, and emerging scenes such as Australia and Japan.  Sadly budget doesn’t allow us to travel to every single country, but we’ve already had various adventures, some of which will be in the book, some of which will emerge elsewhere.

CASK
Quite a few people have asked me if there’s going to be another Cask Report this year.  The answer is yes, sort of, but not quite.  We’re doing something called ‘Cask Matters’ instead this year, which is a monthly section in the Publican’s Morning Advertiser aiming to give more practical hands-on advice to publicans, and allow the flexibility to be topical.  There have been three so far, that can all be downloaded as PDFs from the PMA’s website:

We will also be producing a much shorter annual summary report which will detail how cask is doing, who’s drinking it, why you should stock it and so on.  This will be launched to coincide with Cask Ale Week at the end of September.

WORDS
I’ve also been writing tons of columns and a few pieces for national press.  You can see my regular Publican’s Morning Advertiser columns here; my stuff for London Loves Business here, and my stuff for Just Drinks (you  may need a password) here.  And here is a nice piece I got to do for Shortlist Magazine about the rise of craft beer.

Sorry this is such a busy, listy post – I’ve been meaning to write properly about all these things individually and ended up with a huge pile-up, which this post has now hopefully cleared.  From now on I’ll try to post a bit more regularly again.  On top of all the above I’ve been doing loads of travelling, and have some great stories about getting drunk in Ukraine, visiting hop farms in Slovenia, learning more about lager in Ceske Budejovice, and stacks more, so there’s so much to write about if I can find the time!

Thanks for reading.
  

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First ever International Cider Festival – this weekend in Wales!

It seems odd writing about drink the day after the city I live in descended into anarchy.  But having just got back in after going to help clean up the streets of Hackney a mile down the road, I found a crowd of 500 people had had the same idea, and all of us had been beaten to it by the awesome council street cleaners.  We passed burned out cars being taken away, shops with the shutters down unable to clean up until the police had checked the scene, but the streets were clean and showing next to no evidence of rioting.

In other words: extraordinary times.  But life goes on, and should go on as normal.

Walking home I felt conflicting emotions: overwhelming pride at being part of a community which is starting to fight back agains thuggery, coupled with an overwhelming desire to get out of town and go to a festival or something.

And then I remembered I’m doing exactly that.

This weekend is the first International Craft Cider Festival, and it’s happening in Caerphilly, South Wales, from 12th to 14th August.

I’m particularly intrigued by it because it’s a real festival – it’s over a weekend, there are various venues, bands playing, and we’ll be camping.  It looks like it’s going to be amazing.

And the other part of it is that it truly is an international festival.  I’m currently working on a book about cider with ace photographer Bill Bradshaw, and we’re discovering small cider making communities all around the world who are only just starting to realise they’re not alone.  This is one of the first events in the world that will offer some kind of international perspective, from the Apfelwein culture around Frankfurt to the flamboyant sidra performance pouring of Asturias in northern Spain.

There will be tasting masterclasses on tasting and cooking with cider, three cider bars – England, Wales and International, food and that, and a bustling marketplace.

Oh, and Bill and I will be giving an illustrated talk: ‘The Secret Stories of Cider: A journey around the world’s most misunderstood drink’.  It’s going to be an update of where we’ve got to, the adventures we’ve had so far.  As such, it’s an absolutely exclusive opportunity to hear extracts form one of my next books months, if not a year or more, before publication – I’ve never done this before.  But better than that, it’ll be illustrated by Bill’s wonderful photography, which I’m really not doing justice to here:

There are day and weekend tickets available – day tickets only £10 a day, weekend tix £25.  You pay for talks and tastings on top of that, but our talk is a mere £2.50.

Hope to see you there.  Looking forward to – well, maybe normality might not turn out to be the right word, but life-affirming, optimistic and joyous – I think they’re good words, and we could all do with a bit of them just now.

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So I drank some Stella Cidre…

It’s here…

Analytics suggest that my post ridiculing AB-Inbev’s launch of Stella Cidre is the most popular thing I’ve written on this blog in 2011 so far.  Long time readers will know that among the multinational brewers, I reserve particular ire for AB-Inbev because their relentless focus on cost-cutting is destroying some once decent brands, and because they keep bringing out new ‘innovations’ that are nothing of the sort.

It was therefore with a hint of nervousness that I spied Stuart Macfarlane across the room at the annual Publican Awards a couple of weeks ago.  Stuart and I used to work together, but with the piss-taking I’ve subjected him to on here recently, I wondered if we were in for a bout of fisticuffs.  Especially when, the second he saw me, he got up from his table and made a beeline straight towards me…

We had a good conversation.  Stuart’s actions suggest that he is not passionate about beer itself, but you only have to be in the same room as him to realise he is certainly passionate about the brands he’s responsible for.  (I would argue that you cannot be truly passionate about beer brands if you’re not passionate about the beer itself, but that’s a whole other blog post.)  He reads this and other blogs regularly, and he doesn’t like the criticism.

“Well just make better beer then!” I hear you scream in frustration.  But in the strange world of multinational brands, it’s not as simple as that.

Once we’d established that I wasn’t simply criticising AB-Inbev because they were big, but specifically because of their actions, Stuart challenged me to try some Stella Cidra. I said I didn’t have a problem doing so, because at the end of my blog post on it, I did say that when I saw it I would try it, and that if it was nice, I would say so.  I’m not pushing agendas here – if it’s a good product, I have no reason for saying it’s not.

Fair play to Stuart, at lunch time the next day, there was a knock at the door and a case of Stella Cidre, with a note from Stuart saying how much he’d enjoyed our chat.

Stuart asked me to judge the product against its peers – “the two big yellow ones” as he described them – and one quality ‘premium’ cider.  I chose Aspalls, because I like it, and because it’s probably the first ‘premium’ cider many Magners/Bulmers drinkers would see/try.

Mmmm…

If you’re a craft cider purist, look away now – you’re going to say it’s not cider because it’s not 100% apple juice, and that at least three of these four brands are tasteless abominations.  I’m not about to say anything that will convince you otherwise.
But I’m fairly relaxed about cider.  On a hot day, I like a pint of Aspalls or Addlestones, I LOVE Badger’s Applewood cider made for them by Thatchers.  Not because it’s layered and complex and structured – it’s not.  But because it has a moussy mouthfeel and a clean, dry crispness, with just a hint of satisfying tart tingle, that’s refreshing without the bloating gassiness of lager.  I’ll even happily drink a bottle of Magner’s over ice if I’m in the right mood and the wrong pub.  So I’m not judging Cidre by the standards of farmhouse cider – there’s no point.
Side by side then:
These are poured in the same order as the bottles above.  You can see that in terms of colour, Stella Cidre has gone toe-to-toe with Magner’s and tried to match it exactly.  Bulmer’s is more lager coloured, which is interesting – looking more for that lager-cider pint crossover I guess – while Aspall’s resembles a glass of white wine.  
I should also point out that, according to the labels, Stella Cidre is made from 50% apple juice.  Not much if you’re a purist, but significantly above the 35% minimum you must now have if you want to call your product cider.  Aspall’s is made from 100% apple juice.  Neither Bulmer’s nor Magner’s disclose this information on their labels.
None of them apart from Aspall’s really had much of an aroma – although this may be due to the temperature.
Bulmer’s was simply a monotone, a fizzy, flavourless thing that, if served truly blind, you would simply have no way of guessing was a cider.  No apple taste or character whatsoever.  Not unpleasant at all – you’d have to find fizzy water unpleasant to be able to say that – just…nothing.
So Stella Cidre then: after the vacuum of Bulmers, there’s a bit more of a fruity flavour up front here, followed by an acidity that makes my mouth water.  A bit of a chemical hint, and then, nothing.  It’s amazing how quickly it disappears, leaving you unsure whether you’ve drunk it at all.  Again, not unpleasant – I think – but odd.  
Magner’s has more discernible apple aroma, a bit more of that moussy mouthfeel – Stella was more watery – less fruit, a little more of that tartness, and a slightly longer finish.  It’s very similar, but fits together a little better and leaves you more certain that you’ve just had some cider.
Finally, Aspall’s was quite different.  It clearly tasted of apples, had a nice aroma, was more structured and had a long, dry finish.
Stella Cidre – judged by the standards relevant to it and its competitors – is not a bad product.  It’s certainly nothing like the abomination that is Stella Black.  Both in appearance and flavour profile it seems to be trying to match Magner’s.  The interesting thing is that people perceive Magner’s and Bulmer’s to be the same thing, and they’re quite different, as this tasting shows.  I might have a Stella Cidre instead of a Magner’s if Magner’s wasn’t around.  But Magner’s would remain my first choice – it has the edge in terms of aroma and overall product delivery, and just feels slightly better made.  Stella Cidre strikes me as being a little bit like the monsters from this weekend’s Doctor Who – as soon as you’re not looking at them any more, you forget you ever saw them.  As soon as Stella Cidre is no longer in your mouth, you forget you’ve drunk it.
I believe it will do well where it’s sold, and people in the mainstream cider market will like it.
The product, then, is not a disaster.
But.
The marketing launched last week as well.  The image at the top of this blog is one of the posters currently up everywhere.  I won’t offer my own comment on this, I’ll just share a response to it from a more creatively minded friend of mine:

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