 All right. Welcome to stage C and we are running a little bit behind time, but we're hoping to catch it up as we go along throughout the day. It's my very great pleasure to present to you, Jenny List, who's going to present on making, understanding, and appreciating cider. Thank you very much. Hello everybody. Thank you very much for all turning up today early on in the camp and I hope I hope you all have a wonderful camp. OK, I'm Jenny List. Some of you may know me because I write for Hackaday. I also write for Hack Space Magazine. This is a slightly older version of the presentation, so it's got oxhack.org and hackaday.com. I'm also a member of Milton Keynes Makerspace, so that's mkmakerspace.org.uk. So without further ado, inter. OK, making a quality cider is simple. You just take some apple juice and wait, which is not far from the truth. You press apples in about September, October, and you leave it over winter somewhere quiet, and next year you have cider. Obviously there's a bit more to it than that, which I'll go into, but that's where I always start with this talk. This is based on my background. I'm an electronic engineer and technical journalist, but I grew up on a small farm in Oxfordshire, and my parents tried to do the self-sufficiency thing in the 1970s, and they planted a large orchard, which had all sorts of apple trees, and of course by the 1980s and 1990s, it had far too many apples, far more apples than any normal Oxfordshire family could eat in ten years, let alone a year. So I ended up with all these apples to play with, and my parents were great because I realised afterwards this was them introducing me to alcohol. Other people, it's like behind the bike sheds with vodka and coke or something. With me, they reckoned the safest thing to do was if I could make it, I could drink it. So there is almost nothing that grows in North Oxfordshire that I haven't tried to make alcohol out of. But we're talking about apples today anyway. OK, so next slide. Right, the traditional cider making process. This is probably universal to most cider making regions of the world. So in the UK it's mostly the west of England, sort of where we are now, sort of a belt from sort of here, bit of Wales down through Somerset into the west country. But it's actually across a lot of the country. You'll find eastern county ciders. There's a bit of cider made in my part of the world commercially. I'm not a commercial producer, but there's a bit of cider made. But you'll find it across most of the southern half of the UK. There are more here. You'll find it in Normandy. You'll find it in the north of Spain. They each have their own very individual and distinctive cider styles, which I'll touch on a bit later. Anyway, apples, obviously they grow over summer. My apple growing year begins around Christmas. I prune apple trees. Ours is a traditional sort of eating apple orchard. The trees need to be kept in check, so you're cutting off stray branches and stuff like that. This is, well, this frost on the ground around Christmas. The leaves come out sort of April-May, blossom time in May, small fruit forming through June, July, August. In September, late September early October, I'm harvesting apples, and then I'm pressing them to make the juice. That's in October. Then, as I said earlier, they sit there, they ferment. The yeast does its job over winter. With beers, some beers, particularly ales, with the higher temperature yeast, they will ferment quite quickly at a higher temperature. You have to heat them. With ciders, the slower the better, and the colder the better. You leave them over winter. I mean, real cider makers will often leave them out in a barn. I've heard tales of big vats of apple juice fermenting and having ice on the top from the frost, for instance. You leave it to ferment slowly all over winter, because the flavours, the complex flavours, come from the slow fermentation. If you have a very fast fermentation, then you might not have as technically good as cider. It will be a good cider, and it might have some of the extra flavour notes. In March, you rack the cider. What's happened by then is the fermentation's mostly completed. The yeast has died off. It's insisted because the alcohol has got to the point where it can't do any more work. It's dropped out. You've got a loader cider, and at the bottom you've got a layer of dead yeast, a thick layer of dead yeast. You don't want that yeast getting in your cider, and it's the stuff that gives you headaches. If you've ever had bad cider, it probably had yeast floating in it. It was cloudy. You rack it. You very carefully, in my case, you siphon off the cider and leave behind the yeast, throw away the yeast, and you end up with a load of clear cider. Then you end up with your clear cider sitting there for a few more months till May, June, when any yeast that's still in suspension has settled out. Then you bottle it. You bottle it in May. Traditionally, on West Country farms, they said that you would give last year's cider to the workers at harvest time. For instance, you would give them August, September. You'd give it a few months' maturing in the old stone flagons or whatever. In terms of my cider, I would mature it six months to a year. I would usually crack open my first cider at Christmas. It would be a year and a month or two old at that point. I find with my cider, it just gets better and better the longer you leave it. It's like a fine wine. I've got ciders that are about 10, 15 years old. You open a bottle. I rarely open a bottle of the oldest ones. I haven't got many left, but it's still good. It's still really nice. It's just got better with age. Anyway, the most important thing that tells you what cider you're going to have comes from the apples that you choose. There are basically three types of flavor note inside apples. There's acid, which, as you probably guess, is the sour taste. There's sugar, yet again the sweet taste. You're probably used to both of these from the apples that you'll buy in the supermarket. A cooking apple will have a load of acid in it. If you pick a crab apple from the hedge, it's probably mouth-puckeringly sour. That's the acid. Sugar, if you've ever eaten a golden delicious or something like that, that's full-on sugar. Lovely and sweet. Tannin, if you're used to west countrysideers, you'll know the tannin flavor, but it's that sort of dryness on the tongue flavor. If you ever picked a slow off a hedge in autumn, that's the same tannin. I believe there are tannins in stewed tea as well, but it's a kind of a different flavor, but the tannin is what gives west countrysideers their flavor. Not all ciders have tannin. West countrysideers traditionally have tannin, but certainly most British ciders, unless they're specifically not a tannin kind of cider, will endeavour to have some tannins, some tannin apples in there. Generally, they're more tannic this side of the country, and eastern countrysideers are less tannic. If you get a cider like Aspals, for instance, which you can buy in British supermarkets, it's a mass market cider. It's from Suffolk, and it's almost no tannin at all. I notice somebody's got a western's flag end down at the front here. If you eat westerns and compare it alongside of Aspals, you'll instantly see the difference between tannin and not tannin. It's just the style of the region. Ciders don't have to have tannic or cider apples. You can make cider with any apples. It just tells what the kind of thing comes out. Now, if you look at apples, you can represent any given apple on this triangle. Each of your different types of flavor at different corners of the triangle, and any given apple, you can say, this has got so much sugar, this has got so much tannin, this has got so much acid, and just put it anywhere on this triangle. At the top, for instance, for sweet, I've got golden delicious. Personally, I find golden delicious a very insipid apple. It's a dessert apple. It's just sweet, it's just mush. I'm not a great fan of golden delicious, but it is very sweet. You're probably all familiar, if you're Brits at least, with Cox's Orange Pippin. I don't know how far for you people who aren't British, how far Cox's Orange Pippin has gone beyond the UK, because Cox's Orange Pippin is your classic sweet with a bit of flavor kind of apple. That's about halfway between sweet and sharp. If you're used to British cooking apples, Bramley seedling, that's quite sour when you taste it. Bramley actually has quite a lot of sugar in it. It makes brilliant drinking juice. If you've got a Bramley tree, never make cider with it because it's far too sour. Your cider will be rather unappetising. For God's sake, if you've got some Bramleys, press them, pasteurise the juice, it makes great drinking juice. I put the hedgerow crab apple in the corner. Usually hedgerow crab apples are very sour. I always try one when I see one, because occasionally you find one that's tannic or sweet, but it's about one in 20. The ones on the right are all different cider apples. Here's where the magic of the cider maker's craft comes. They want to make the perfect balanced juice not much acid, but a bit of acid for interesting flavour. Enough sugar to have lots and lots of fermentation, but lots of tannin to give that tannic bite to their cider. Dabinett, halfway at the right-hand side, that's the classic cider apple. Well-balanced, a mixture of sweet and bitter tannin. I can eat a dabinett straight off the tree. Some people hate them. I love them. They're sweet and tanninated. A good sweet cider should. I like them. Dabinett's well-balanced enough. You can make a single varietal out of it, and you make a good single varietal as well, with just one type of apple. There are other types of cider apple. I've put down the Yarlington Mills a bit more bitter. Stoke reds are bitter. Prims and King is a so-called bitter-sharp, so not my sugar, but midway between acid and tannin. Usually a given cider farm will have a mixture of all these apples, and they will blend them together in the pressing to get the juice they want. If you have apple varieties, see where you can put them when you taste them on this triangle. Anyway, move on. Hang on, just take a bit of it. Sorry, all this talking. There are two processes involved. Now, in a minute I've got videos. I hope the videos work. My apologies if they don't. My apologies if the videos don't work. But there are two processes. First of all, you crush the apples to make a porridge-like pulp. If you just press apples as they are, you don't get much juice. You have to open up the apples to let the juice be able to flow out. Traditionally, this is from Wikipedia. This is a picture of an apple crusher in Normandy. You'll often see these in old cider farms. They don't tend to be used much, but they're very much symbolic. The millwheel going round with a horse crushing. What should come out of this is like a porridge of mashed-up apples. Now, a lot of more commercial people use a rotary-scratter. It's like a massive industrial grater. My scratter, my dad made it for me. It's a spinning stainless steel blade. It's more of a chopper, but it does the same thing. Pressing, as you might guess, just squeezes the stuff out of the apples. The one in the picture is a... just a straightforward up-and-down press where the apple pulp is put in so-called cheeses. It's wrapped in muslin and has boards between them. A whole load of them are stacked on top of the other. The idea is the boards allow channels for the apple juice to come out. My press is quite a small one, so it's actually a big round drum. You'll see it on a video if the video works. Either way, you just squeeze the apple pulp and out comes the juice. Anyway, let's see if the video works. First of all, we'll be scratching. I did it in the dark, as you can see. My apologies. It seems the video isn't working in PowerPoint. It's just a picture of my scratch chopping up apples, apple pulp coming out of the bottom. Similarly, pressing the pulp. Yes, again, it doesn't work. A picture of my press, me going round and round and round and lots of brown apple juice coming out of the bottom into a stainless steel bowl. OK? What do you do when you've got a load of juice? You've got a load of juice. It's straight out the orchard. I'm afraid apples in the orchard get all sorts of dirt on them and stuff. You've got animals and all sorts. I wash my apples. I run them through a big tin bath, but even so, if you drink the apple juice that comes straight out of the press, you will get a runny tummy. Don't ask me how I know this. OK? I and most commercial cider makers will add a bit of sulphite. It's sodium metamide sulphite. It reacts with, I believe, the acid to make sulph dioxide. Now, the sulphid oxide kills bacteria. Just harmful bugs. It's driven off in the fermentation. So you make a bit of SO2, then something comes along and blasts loads of CO2 through the cider and the SO2 is gone. If you pick up a bottle of cider and it says may contain sulphites, if it's been properly fermented, it won't contain any sulphites. They're long gone because the CO2 has blasted it off. They have to say it because they added them. It's not much. That's what they may contain sulphites mean. Now, in my case, you can use just the natural yeast on the apples. It's a bit variable. I cheat slightly. I use a cultured yeast. I think the yeast I use is actually a champagne yeast. Because you get a more uniform result. If you use the natural yeast on the apples, sometimes you get an amazing cider. Sometimes you get an awful cider. I like amazing cider. I also add a nutrient. Now, that's basically a fertilizer. The reason for that is my parents planted our orchards in the 1970s and I've tried to put manure on the trees, but the fact is the trees are a little deficient in nutrients. Now, this comes through in the juice. So the juice hasn't got much nutrients. The yeast is a bit starved and it starts looking wherever it can. Now, wherever it can means, believe it or not, it picks up sulphurous compounds from the DNA of the apple juice cell, the cells from the apples, and it makes it smell of bad eggs. When you've thrown away a batch of cider because it stinks of bad eggs, you use yeast nutrient next time. So, yes, I cheat slightly with a culture and nutrient. Then, you basically stop nasties getting in. I mean, I use an airlock with a bit of water. Commercial cider makers wouldn't use an airlock. Too much CO2. They just use a filter to stop particles getting in. There's enough CO2 coming off that it's not going to allow any bugs back in. And they leave it over winter. I leave it in a cold room and it just ferments. I tell you what I use to ferment in. I use big plastic gerry cans like caravaners use for water. In this small to medium size farm cider making industry, they use, I think they're called IBCs, industrial bulk carriers. Great big plastic drums, usually with a metal sort of cage around them. And we come back to what I said earlier about racking. Taking the cider off the dead yeast. Transfer into sterilised bottles. You certainly wash your bottles properly. Sterilise them with camden tablets if you can. That kills off the bacteria. You don't want to go through all that hard work. Only find the bacteria, take your cider away from you or you make vinegar. Vinegar is great but you don't want vinegar when you really want cider. So, sterilise your bottles. Now, in terms of alcohol by volume you get between five and seven percent and that really comes into how much sugar was in the apples. You can add sugar. You can get above five or seven percent if you want. You can use a yeast that will take more alcohol but if you want a real cider, natural cider, you just go with what sugar is in the apples. In my case it's usually five to six percent because summers in Oxford shouldn't make that much sugar but that's good enough for me. So anyway, what I've just described is how you make a full juice real cider. Now, I'm going to talk about the stuff you buy in the supermarket. Now, there's a whole load of different ciders in the supermarket and they're all pretending to be the real McCoy, the authentic stuff and, you know, marketing redolent of farmers and brewery. I'm a soda drinker and all that kind of stuff and the trouble is you don't know what you're getting. I mean, on this page, you've got a whole load of different brands. You've got Stellaratra, Cedra, you've got Bulmers, you've got Recorderlig, Strongbone, Magnus, Dry Blackforn, Hinnies, Weston's, Gwyntodraig and who knows what you got, you know? And you've also got the word scrumpy. Now, scrumpy is a great word. For the Oxford dictionaries, for quite a few years, here's another thing with scrumpy on it, right? Scrumpy comes from a West Country dialect word scrump with an apple and it's become a bit of a shorthand for, oh, this be the real stuff, oh, I've gone into pirate there, yar. And as a result, you'll find all sorts of things sold as scrumpy and it doesn't mean anything. In fact, it's often a little clue that what you're getting is the crap they don't drink themselves that they're selling to the tourists. So, I look for real cider. I look for the kind of things that I would look if I were looking for a fine wine. You want a cider that is enjoyable and lovely to drink. You don't want something that's challenging or sour or a bit off. And if somebody said, oh, that have had rats in it, no mistake, then walk away. There's a lot of marketing rubbish about cider. The only one on this page that is actually being absolutely truthful is Stella Archway in the bottom right hand corner. Because they're dead right, it's not cider. I mean, actually on this page there are some ciders that I would consider to be real ciders. Hennies, for instance. OK, they're a mass-market cider now, but they stayed with their roots as far as cider. Westerns, it's made from what's the word, concentrated juice. But it is a proper made from juice cider. Gwynethraig Os Pobolshaira Cymraigmar Anybody speak Welsh here? That's a coolest name for a cider ever. It's Dragon's Breath. Gwynethraig, it's a fantastic cider. If you can get Gwynethraig, the double D is the in Welsh, if you can get Gwynethraig try it, it's a really good cider. So anyway, we're going to talk about how this, the sort of nasty end of the commercial market is made. So we're talking the sort of strong bows, white lightnings, dry black thorns, and dare I say it the Bulmer's Magners and Stella Archway. And many more regrettable ciders. I mean, come on, look at Magners. Nothing, nothing that luminous shade of orange is natural. Okay, sorry, I've probably gone into already covered some of this. There are various different types of mass markets, strong bow, woodpecker, white lightning. So-called premium ciders that have exploded onto the market in the last decade. They're basically the same as the mass market ciders, but in a fancier bottle. So Magners Boulders Recorder Lig, Stella Archway, blah, blah, blah. Real ciders, and yet again you see I've named a few, Westerns Orchard Pig, Hennies, Hogan's, Gwynta Thryg. There are a whole load more appearing now. They tend to be more sort of smaller bottling made from juice. Tend to be a bit more expensive. And then you get the speciality ciders. Small producer exemption. There's a tax exemption that you can produce cider in this company in this country without having to pay tax to the revenue. But you have to register with them and you have to register under 70 hectiliters. That's 7 cubic metres of cider a year. There are a lot of small producer exemption cider makers. Some of them are godawful, we sell scrummy to the Tars coin of paces. And others are some of the most amazing ciders you will ever drink. Seek them out if you're in the West Country. They are worth it. I've mentioned Normandy ciders here. The Normandy ciders makers have a wonderful process called keving where they kill off the pectin to mean that it stops fermentation before all the sugar is used. So you make a naturally sparkling cider that is also naturally sweet. All those other ciders, if they're sweet, they've had sweetener added. So anyway, you want to break into the commercial side of business. You want to make magners or white lightning or something like that. You start with imported apple juice. I put China there. China produces vast amounts of imported apple juice. You want a million litres of imported apple juice? No problem. Loads and loads of container tanks will come on our ship. Job done. You need some sugar because there isn't enough sugar in the concentrated apple juice. Hydrolyzed wheat starch, yet again bulk carrier from China. You take a yeast culture. You don't take the same yeast culture I use. No, you use a yeast culture that's been engineered to ferment up to 20% or 30% alcohol. You want something really strong. And you put it into a fermentation plant. That's a factory. And you end up with a cider. It's over 20% alcohol. You wouldn't drink it. You want to sell it at 4% or 5%. So you dilute it with water. But it isn't sweet enough. So, and it needs to be fizzy because the customers expect fizziness. And also it probably comes out looking a little dull. So make it nice and glowing orange. So you have lots of chemicals. So you'll add something like CO2 to make it fizzy. Colour probably ammonia caramel. That's burnt hydrocarbons, not burnt sugar. And sweeteners. That's probably sucralose nowadays because it tastes a bit like sugar. And you end up with a bottle of 5% alcohol sweet sparkling cider. That is actually less than 30% apple juice. Welcome to Magnus Country. I hope I've given you a good impression of the kind of things to look out for insider and to find good-siders. We are inside a country here. I suggest you, if you're interested, have a Google look for local cider farms or local cider mills. You're about the time of year when cider farms are starting to sell their stuff. I'm afraid I should have done some research. I don't quite know the local ones in this part of the world. They will be there. It'll be interesting to have a look and take a while during the camp and drive and find some. They will be there. They will sell you it there and then on the farm. More information. I will point you at Andrew Lee. Andrew Lee is retired now. He is a cider scientist. He used to work at, when the government had a cider industry research laboratory, he was one of their scientists. What he doesn't know outsider isn't worth knowing. He's published a book. Get his book. His book is great. I've got his book. It taught me a lot about cider and I've already made cider for quite a few years when I got it. Sider workshops. Sider workshops an online mailing list. You will find cider makers like me who do it. You'll find professional cider makers. They're all enthusiastic and knowledgeable about cider and they will help anybody at any level. Anyway, that's cider. Enjoy your cider. I should say wassail. Enjoy your cider. It's good stuff. Thank you very much. Do we have time for questions or not? It's Dominic here. I can take questions as he's setting up. Does anybody have any questions? How do you make a naturally sweet cider and stop it from minting dry and strong? We're touching on the keving, the technique the Normandy cider makers use. They traditionally used a bacterial culture to which would precipitate out the pectin. Now pectin is the stuff that makes jam into jelly. They would precipitate out the pectin and the pectin was the food the yeast needs to ferment. So with no pectin to live off the yeast would then stop fermenting and would leave some sugar behind. Nowadays you can actually buy the enzyme that the bacteria makes as a powder and just add it. Keving is notoriously difficult. I have never done it. I know plenty of people who've tried and failed horribly. I know one or two people who've keyed beautiful ciders. I've drunk beautiful keyed Normandy ciders which is why I keep saying if you go to Normandy have some of the local cider it's amazing. Anyway, anyone like any others? Is there anything useful you can do such as forms of cooking with the pulp once you've got the juice out of it? Bloody good question. You probably could make apple pie particularly if your pressing isn't very good. I mean to be honest my press isn't very efficient. So yes you probably could. I have to say I compost it. So I'm probably not the person to ask. Now I reckon we've got one more. Was there one down it? Oh god there's several. We'll try and get a couple lady over there too. So can I taste your cider? I've spat in this point. Find me on the Hackaday village. I've got some more. Okay. Not all of you. I haven't got that much. Is there any good here on EMF camp? Any good cider in the bar? Yes there is. I haven't seen what it is. Always look on a bar. Not for a pump or a fizzy like gas pump. Look for a bag in box. It's basically literally a plastic bag in a box full of cider. That's normally from a local producer or similar. Because it doesn't keep that well. It's normally got a 30 day shelf life. So you've seen one of those at EMF in there for long. Awesums. This man has a list of local ciders. So I did notice some bagging boxes on the bar. So go and try them. I don't know what they are because I haven't had time. At food hacking base today at 10 o'clock in the evening it's next to the hardware hacking area of Mitch Altman and the others Belgium village. There will be a cider tasting. So there are still some spots on. So if you check the cider tasting 10 o'clock today, 10 o'clock also tomorrow so you can come and taste the event is scheduled. So you can check. Food hacking base. Awesums. Okay, well thank you very much everybody. I better hand the microphone over.