Speaker 1: Oh Hi, it's the crusty plant you never suspected would thrive.
Speaker 1: Ali Ward, I'm here, I'm here with you. I'm here
Speaker 1: with us. Let us ologize. Okay, it's September. It's the
Speaker 1: time of year when people in Los Angeles pray for
Speaker 1: a day that dips into the sixties. So we can
Speaker 1: wear a scarf and drive ninety minutes to find an
Speaker 1: orchard to pretend fall exists. No, I've done it. I've
Speaker 1: cried looking at gords. So we're getting into the beverage
Speaker 1: that is the apple of our eyes. Cider. What is it?
Speaker 1: How old is it? Which ones are delicious heavenly nectar,
Speaker 1: and which one's tastes like butts? We have answers for you.
Speaker 1: So this guest is the leading cider expert on planet Earth,
Speaker 1: and he calls himself like accurately, the Ciderologist. He has
Speaker 1: had his hands in or around cider for over fifteen years,
Speaker 1: having brewed and judged and championed and even taught cider
Speaker 1: courses at the Beer Insider Academy of London he has
Speaker 1: at There are two books on the topic, the twenty
Speaker 1: eighteen debut Siderology From History and Heritage to the Craft
Speaker 1: Cider Revolution and just released a week ago a follow
Speaker 1: up called Modern British Cider. So he also co hosts
Speaker 1: a cider podcast, Neutral Cider Hotel, and he is lovely
Speaker 1: and passionate about cider and speaks of it with such
Speaker 1: mustachioed enthusiasm. But before we meet him, you can be
Speaker 1: a patron just fyi at patreon dot com slash Ologies
Speaker 1: a buck a month. Let's use some bit questions to
Speaker 1: experts like this for no money. You can rate us
Speaker 1: on your podcast app if you don't mind, And for
Speaker 1: my undying affection, you can leave a review because I
Speaker 1: read all of them and I prove it with a
Speaker 1: just juiced, foaming fresh ee. So this week thank you
Speaker 1: to Mohope sixteen, who wrote, recently I needed to hire
Speaker 1: an employee. My favorite ending interview question is what are
Speaker 1: you a nerd about? One of the candidates began listing
Speaker 1: topics of the most recent episodes and I asked them
Speaker 1: if they listen to Ologies and they said it's our
Speaker 1: favorite podcast. That's all I needed to know in order
Speaker 1: to hire them. Whoa mo Hope sixteen. I hope you
Speaker 1: start merch Monday's at the office ologiesmerch dot com, okay, ciderlogy.
Speaker 1: Cider comes from the Hebrew sekhar for strong drink, and
Speaker 1: this ologist is the guy When you google cider expert,
Speaker 1: he's the dude. His mustache and his book comes up,
Speaker 1: and he will happily talk to you about cider for
Speaker 1: as long as you want, which is why this interview
Speaker 1: was like pulling up to a picnic table with an
Speaker 1: old friend I had just never met. So please belly
Speaker 1: up and prepare for a crisp cup of applely knowledge
Speaker 1: from the history of cider, How wars impacted cider demand, dipping,
Speaker 1: babies in taboos, frankin trees, glass vessels, what made Queen
Speaker 1: Elizabeth scowl at him? How to diy cider, plenty of flipflam,
Speaker 1: and the best cider We've ever sipped With ciderology author,
Speaker 1: podcaster and beloved international cider ologist Gabe Cook.
Speaker 2: Hi, Hello, how are you?
Speaker 3: I am very well, Thanks Sally. How's it going with you?
Speaker 1: You sound great. It's almost as if you have your
Speaker 1: own podcast or something.
Speaker 3: That's almost as if I invested in a modest priced mic.
Speaker 1: What a professional Well, you're making my job too easy.
Speaker 1: Hardest question I'm going to ask, can you say your
Speaker 1: first and last name and then also whatever pronounce use.
Speaker 3: Yes, my name is Gabe Cook and I am he him.
Speaker 1: Cool Colban's and you're a siderologist.
Speaker 3: I am the Siderologist.
Speaker 1: Oh I didn't realize the article was so definitive, capital
Speaker 1: T capital c the siderologist as.
Speaker 3: A full time profession a little over four years.
Speaker 1: I imagine that you were a very enthusiastic dilettante before that,
Speaker 1: right I was. I.
Speaker 3: I was using siderologist as my email address for about
Speaker 3: since about oh, I think about two thousand and eight
Speaker 3: or something like that. So the idea and the concept
Speaker 3: of the ologist of cider had been around for a while,
Speaker 3: but it took a while for it to become fully
Speaker 3: fledged and for actual you know, for it to actually
Speaker 3: become a career, as it were. The Siderologist is my
Speaker 3: is my company, it's my brand name. It's trademarked in Europe.
Speaker 3: Getting hands off, nobody has tested it. That was a waste,
Speaker 3: the tune shifted, quid, wasn't it. My role within the
Speaker 3: cider industry is to be a vocal champion because you know,
Speaker 3: cider doesn't always get the love or the appreciation or
Speaker 3: the awareness of other drinks. Agreed, the entire industries based
Speaker 3: around the specialized knowledge and serving of beer and of wine.
Speaker 3: We've got Somelia's, We've got fantastic servers, We've got critics,
Speaker 3: we've got writers. I am, to my knowledge, the world's
Speaker 3: only full time independent cider advocate.
Speaker 1: Just for context, I'm team cider all the way I
Speaker 1: have been since I turned of cider sipping age, which
Speaker 1: is a debatable age, as you will find out later
Speaker 1: in the episode. But despite our twenty eighteen episode on Zimology,
Speaker 1: which is the science of beer brewing, I have finished
Speaker 1: exactly one beer in my whole life and I did
Speaker 1: not like it. I don't like beer. I'm sorry. I
Speaker 1: would be happy to appear on a debate team or
Speaker 1: a mock trial tournament representing cider. Fight me. I'm ready.
Speaker 3: Cider sits in this really interesting and unique space. First
Speaker 3: of all, you make cider like you make a wine.
Speaker 3: You do not brewsider. Brewing is the application of heats
Speaker 3: to extract something normally like sort of sugars, all these
Speaker 3: kind of characters. That's why you brew beer. It's while
Speaker 3: you brew tea and coffee. Et cetera. You make cider, okay,
Speaker 3: like you're making wine. This is taking a fruit, in
Speaker 3: this case apples rather than grapes. You're squeezing them, You're
Speaker 3: extracting the juice, which is sugar rich. Really really easily
Speaker 3: readily fermentable sugars yeast, whether they be wild juice or
Speaker 3: introduce cheese, convert that sugar into alcohol. So in the
Speaker 3: same way that the selection of the apple variety, the
Speaker 3: yeast strain, the vessel that you ferment in, how long
Speaker 3: you mature, under what conditions you you undertake all this process,
Speaker 3: that is what is going to give you this unique
Speaker 3: range of different sort of flavors and styles of cider
Speaker 3: that can exist. But the fact is that over the
Speaker 3: course of the last sort of fifty sixty years, cider
Speaker 3: has been predominantly tweaked and made and certainly packaged and
Speaker 3: presented considerably more like a beer. You know, the average
Speaker 3: alcohol content is closer to your average beer, whatever that is. Then,
Speaker 3: let's say an average wine. It's normally carbonated, it comes
Speaker 3: you know, on tap, you can have it as a pint,
Speaker 3: it comes as a single serve bottle or can. These
Speaker 3: or cues very readily associated with beer, but it is
Speaker 3: its own, unique, wonderful and amazing drink, and it's got
Speaker 3: so many awesome things going for it. Firstly, it's naturally
Speaker 3: gluten free to anybody who's who's off the gluten, you know,
Speaker 3: as a lifestyle choice or because it's been really beneficial
Speaker 3: for their health, naturally gluten free. Unlike a considerable proportion
Speaker 3: of beers and wines out there which use animal based
Speaker 3: finding agents in order to reduce so take that sort
Speaker 3: of clarity and certain like phonolic and other kind of characters.
Speaker 3: Cider is very very easily clarified and there's no need
Speaker 3: for those kind of finding agents. So it's almost to
Speaker 3: a tea will be vegan friendly as well.
Speaker 1: Wait, the stuff they used to clarify beer isn't vegan.
Speaker 1: I look this up and apparently finding agents can include
Speaker 1: you're ready for this, egg whites, milk, desicated fish bladders,
Speaker 1: and blood bottoms up. Perhaps that's a big decider for vegans.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It's just this most amazing drink there is, I say,
Speaker 3: ali a cider for everybody, and it's just trying to
Speaker 3: get people knowledgeable and enthused about it. Hello of lost.
Speaker 1: Yea so yes a Leprechaun put a curse on me
Speaker 1: via a loose my cable. So in the lull, Gabe
Speaker 1: Ciderologist cracked open a cold one as I sorted out
Speaker 1: my tectiffs. Dude is truly living his best life. Get
Speaker 1: ready for some ASMR.
Speaker 3: Now that's a good sound. Come on, that's awesome. And
Speaker 3: do you know what, I'm gonna have a sip.
Speaker 1: That's good. I think I have a loose cable.
Speaker 3: You know, even the microphone is overwhelmed by some power
Speaker 3: of the cider. Do you see who knew that cider
Speaker 3: oology was so powerful?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: My good?
Speaker 1: Okay, Mike cable fixed on we go. So to recap,
Speaker 1: cider is wine. The legal definition of wine is any
Speaker 1: alcoholic beverage obtained by the fermentation of the natural sugar
Speaker 1: content of fruits or other agricultural products like honey. So
Speaker 1: I repeat, cider is wine. Cider's wine. It's a type
Speaker 1: of wine. Really. Mc gabe had mentioned that he hails
Speaker 1: from a part of the UK that has a rich
Speaker 1: and bubbly cider history, and that geographically cider is cool
Speaker 1: because it tends to be very location based like wines,
Speaker 1: whereas beers can have hops and grain from all over
Speaker 1: the damn world. Also, did he intend to make this
Speaker 1: a beer versus sider episode. No, but that's just my
Speaker 1: transparent pro cider agenda seeping through what I love cider.
Speaker 1: Cider deserves more love.
Speaker 3: And another really crucial aspect is from a sustainability point
Speaker 3: of view, is that you know the way that you're
Speaker 3: making cider. It doesn't you know in its most basic
Speaker 3: not the most basic form, like the fantastic sider that
Speaker 3: I'm drinking and the siders that I make, insiders I've
Speaker 3: been involved with and side as I champion. You get apples,
Speaker 3: you squeeze them. It ferments, that's it, that's it. Unlike
Speaker 3: you know with the brewing process, where there's a huge
Speaker 3: amount of energy is needed to heat this liquid to
Speaker 3: get you know, the enzyme change for the for the sugars,
Speaker 3: and then obviously when you're boiling it as well, and
Speaker 3: if you're making a largae you then need to chill
Speaker 3: it right down as well. There's a lot of energy
Speaker 3: and this is an important thing for you know, consumers
Speaker 3: increasingly today. And then when it comes to the orchards,
Speaker 3: these magical, magical places, even if they are really kind
Speaker 3: of commercial and commercial orchards. They are still considerably better
Speaker 3: land uses than monocultures of wheat or maize, and they
Speaker 3: support by diversity. They are sucking carbon and locking it
Speaker 3: into the ground. They're fantastic places for people to socialize
Speaker 3: as well, whether that be for walking the dog or
Speaker 3: going for a run, or just a bit of mindfulness
Speaker 3: and peacefulness and tranquility, learning new skills, community cohesion. There's
Speaker 3: just there's just so much. It's just lush.
Speaker 4: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: I was just prepared to like shit talk beer because
Speaker 1: it tastes bad, but you're like, no, those are really
Speaker 1: bad plight.
Speaker 3: See see this is really good. You know, if if
Speaker 3: if we're being really really stereotypical here, you could say
Speaker 3: that the attitude you know, spirits and let's say whiskey
Speaker 3: become things is sort of you know, very quite sort
Speaker 3: of gentrified and set to their wing back chair and
Speaker 3: wine comes in or sort of like elegant and kind
Speaker 3: of fern and beer it's kind of like cool and
Speaker 3: brash cider. We're just we're just like the we're just
Speaker 3: the nice people in the corner. Actually often quite it's
Speaker 3: like yeah i'm beer. It's like, yeah, I'm cider, and
Speaker 3: it's because it does sort of sit as this slightly
Speaker 3: sort of not lost or forgotten drink. But you know
Speaker 3: it's not. It's just not as broadly understood. And so
Speaker 3: cider's general way, or maybe that's just my way, is
Speaker 3: that I don't need to bad talk. There's other drinks.
Speaker 3: I like beer. I used to make wine in New Zealand.
Speaker 3: They're really really cool drinks. It's just it's just giving
Speaker 3: sider this this platform that it that it can be
Speaker 3: an absolute equal to any of those drinks, all of
Speaker 3: the character, all of the attitude, all of the elegants,
Speaker 3: all of the finesse. It's yeah, trying to get past,
Speaker 3: certainly from a UK point of view, a lot of
Speaker 3: old stereotypes which are generally quite negative, associated with cider
Speaker 3: for various various reasons. You know, on your side of
Speaker 3: the pond, it's more a case of you know, what
Speaker 3: is cider or the confusion between you know, unfermented fresh
Speaker 3: press sort of farm juice, the sider versus the hard sider.
Speaker 3: But hard is the you know, the USA is the
Speaker 3: only nation in the world that uses the prefix of hard,
Speaker 3: so that, yeah, absolutely, it's all a prohibition thing.
Speaker 1: Oh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 3: There is a very very long history of cider associated
Speaker 3: with the USA, and it generally, you know, it comes
Speaker 3: with founding fathers, which isn't necessarily something that is always
Speaker 3: as boldly celebrated as it might have been once before.
Speaker 3: But it is a fact that cider really was the
Speaker 3: first commercial drink of you know, the new colony within
Speaker 3: the within the far northeast of the US, and huge
Speaker 3: amounts of cider was made made in you know, in
Speaker 3: Connecticut and in Maine and in Vermont, and then in
Speaker 3: New York and Pennsylvania. Lots of cider was made. And
Speaker 3: it was only really with the introduction the big wave
Speaker 3: in the sort of the end of the eighteenth century
Speaker 3: and into the nineteenth century of Czech and German immigrants
Speaker 3: to beer really started to come in and gain a
Speaker 3: real stronghold all across all across the States. And when
Speaker 3: prohibition came in nineteen twenty, unlike you know, beer and
Speaker 3: sort of like moonshine went underground and hidden the sheds
Speaker 3: and things like that. It's quite hard to hide an orchard.
Speaker 3: They so they got burnt, you know, a lot of
Speaker 3: them got burnt, like or chopped or burnt down, and
Speaker 3: those that were left were eating apples, because you know,
Speaker 3: those apples that were being grown then, like the apples
Speaker 3: that are grown in the western parts of England, northern
Speaker 3: parts of France and northern parts of Spain would be
Speaker 3: called cider apples by both people in those areas. These
Speaker 3: are varieties grown specifically for the sole purpose of making
Speaker 3: cider and have been done so for hundreds of years.
Speaker 3: So they got rid of all those. What that was
Speaker 3: left were there's the eating apples, which a bit of
Speaker 3: juice was made from, and so the term cider got
Speaker 3: appropriated to mean that sort of fresh preas juice. So
Speaker 3: when probition came to an end in the thirties and
Speaker 3: booze and sider, you know, fermented cider was allowed, they
Speaker 3: needed a new name, so they added the prefix of
Speaker 3: hard and hard cider, and that's how that ha come
Speaker 3: to pass. But nowhere else in the world needed or
Speaker 3: had the cultural heritage as to why that was a necessity.
Speaker 1: So yes, if you clicked on this episode and thought
Speaker 1: that it would be all about Martinelli's or cloudy apple
Speaker 1: juice from the farmer's market, blame prohibition, not me. Now,
Speaker 1: in the eighteen hundreds, cider was the most popular beverage
Speaker 1: in the US. The century before that, seventeen hundreds, people
Speaker 1: in the colonies drank on average a barrel a year each,
Speaker 1: So that's a pint a day for everyone. Everyone had
Speaker 1: pint a day, and really quick. Let's have a rundown
Speaker 1: of types of cider. So there's farmhouse sider, which is
Speaker 1: pretty much like what you could make if you were
Speaker 1: stranded on an island with just apples and jars. It's
Speaker 1: fermented juice, pretty dry because the yeast has gobbled up
Speaker 1: all the sugars, and it's not super sparkly. Now you
Speaker 1: can make a farmhouse sider with nothing but raw apple
Speaker 1: juice and about a week or two worth of patience
Speaker 1: and a lot of thirst. So draft cider is what
Speaker 1: you're used to seeing on restaurant menus. It's clear, maybe
Speaker 1: cut with juice to lower high alcohol content. It's sweet,
Speaker 1: it's sparkley. It's kind of like a soda pup. And
Speaker 1: then there's a French seed, which is a little more
Speaker 1: complex and it involves a process called kieving, which we're
Speaker 1: going to get into in a bit. It has a
Speaker 1: low alcohol content and you drink it out of a beret.
Speaker 1: That's not true. But let's back up, Well, what about
Speaker 1: before that head cider or you know, fermented apple juice
Speaker 1: existed long long before that. I mean, is it called
Speaker 1: cider if an apple just rots on the ground and
Speaker 1: it's kind of boozy. At what point did we start
Speaker 1: understanding what cider was.
Speaker 3: It's an interesting one. You know, apples as we know
Speaker 3: them for eating and making cider and cooking and all
Speaker 3: those kinds of things that the ancestor of that can
Speaker 3: be traced back to the Tienshan Mountain range, which sort
Speaker 3: of sits sort of just to the northwest of the
Speaker 3: Himalayas on the sort of Chinese Kazakh Kyrghyzstani kind of border.
Speaker 3: At the end of the ice say, last ice Age
Speaker 3: ten thousand years ago, in these valleys, in the foothills
Speaker 3: of these incredible mountains, you had then the last sort
Speaker 3: of refuges of these wild apple forests, which when the
Speaker 3: ice Age came to an end and everything got a
Speaker 3: little bit warmer, they started to flourish and grow a
Speaker 3: little bit. But it also coincided with also, you know,
Speaker 3: humans also flourishing and growing, and you know, undertaking this
Speaker 3: amazing you know, trans continental journey from the east to
Speaker 3: the west along the Silk Road. And so people and
Speaker 3: animals started to pick up these apples and take them
Speaker 3: along the way, and they'd eat and they'd poop and
Speaker 3: it would pips would go on the ground, and the
Speaker 3: sort of the apples started to get taken west and
Speaker 3: it underwent this amazing sort of you know, genetic sort
Speaker 3: of diversity, kind of like journey along the way. Because
Speaker 3: if you plant the pip of an apple of let's say,
Speaker 3: what's your favorite eating apple.
Speaker 1: Alley, Oh my gosh, I would probably say I'm going
Speaker 1: to go Grannie Smith. I'm just going to go super tart.
Speaker 1: Don't judge me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, lovely, lovely and crisp, lovely and zingy awesome.
Speaker 3: If you planted a pip from a Granny Smith into
Speaker 3: the ground, the apple variety that will pop up will
Speaker 3: be guaranteed to not be Granny Smith.
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, so this is grafting. Is this the magic
Speaker 1: of grafting? Okay?
Speaker 3: It is. It is. Imagine that the like that you've
Speaker 3: got the mother tree, that Granny Smith tree gives that
Speaker 3: fruit and it's got the pip inside, but they're not
Speaker 3: self fertile. In order to be able to produce that fruit,
Speaker 3: you have to have pollen from another variety, often brought
Speaker 3: over by pollinating insects like the wonderful bees. That's why
Speaker 3: we love bees very very much. They bring over the
Speaker 3: pollen on there lex it pollinates the blossom that turns
Speaker 3: into the apple, and the pip inside has got the
Speaker 3: genetics the DNA of both the mother tree that Granny
Speaker 3: Smith and whatever pollinated it, it won't be the variety
Speaker 3: that you've got. And so this obviously is a little
Speaker 3: bit of a problem. Yeah, if you really like Granny
Speaker 3: Smith and you want to continue. So this is when
Speaker 3: the Mesopotamians circa three something thousand years ago just somehow
Speaker 3: worked out that if you snip the end off a
Speaker 3: growing tip and you know, fuse it onto something that's
Speaker 3: already into the ground, they will hold and it will
Speaker 3: take and you can have one tree two different varieties
Speaker 3: or intended variety at the top and the rootstock at
Speaker 3: the bottom.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine if you were like, Wow, I really
Speaker 1: like my kid, but who knows what the hell kind
Speaker 1: of grind kids I might have? So then you just
Speaker 1: hacked off their limb and sewed it onto another body.
Speaker 1: Some apple rootstock trees straight off at the chopped mid trunk,
Speaker 1: and then they get a new head grafted on, which,
Speaker 1: if that's not horticultural gore fit for spooky season, I
Speaker 1: don't know what the hell is.
Speaker 3: The idea of sort of cultivating apples. It's been around
Speaker 3: for a long time, but the evidence of actually making
Speaker 3: cider is probably about two thousand years old. There's first
Speaker 3: sort of talks in sort of, you know, in the
Speaker 3: Greek literature, in the Roman literature, about about references to
Speaker 3: cider making or like the wine of apples and pears,
Speaker 3: things like that, whereas wine and you know, very strong
Speaker 3: evidence of that being made considerably further back. The primary
Speaker 3: difference is around the structure of grapes and apples. My grapes,
Speaker 3: they're lovely and small and lovely and soft, and you know,
Speaker 3: you want to extract the juice, and you could literally
Speaker 3: do that by treading them underfoot, and lots of people
Speaker 3: do still that today. You try treading some apples, and
Speaker 3: you're going to get some fairly bruised feet quite quickly,
Speaker 3: aren't you. Yeah, it's this really strong cell structure what
Speaker 3: sider still needs today. Is it's a two step pro
Speaker 3: so you don't just press apples, you have to mill
Speaker 3: the apples first.
Speaker 4: This mill can do the same amount of work that
Speaker 4: took many nights with my juicer in simply a matter
Speaker 4: of hours. The crusher works by spinning times like, grab
Speaker 4: the apples and mash them through a set of blades.
Speaker 3: And then you've got to press them. So this extra
Speaker 3: bit of technology that is needed to turn these solid
Speaker 3: apples into something mushy enough that you could then easily
Speaker 3: extract the juice from that didn't really come around until
Speaker 3: sort of olive milling technology was also developed right about
Speaker 3: two thousand years go and sort of shed into that
Speaker 3: sort of Mediterranean area around that time.
Speaker 1: Just a side note, I looked it up. Milling is
Speaker 1: just crushing up the apples any which way you can.
Speaker 1: People do this with various levels of force. Some just
Speaker 1: smash apples with mallets in what looks like a wooden bathtub,
Speaker 1: or you can bean apples with a stone wheel dragged
Speaker 1: by a horse or a donkey or something. There's also
Speaker 1: mechanical mills, and they chew the apples into a really
Speaker 1: fine pulp, and then all that apple mash has to
Speaker 1: be squeezed until it cries delicious juice. And sometimes that's
Speaker 1: done in sacks. It used to be strained through straw.
Speaker 1: No thank you. Now what happens to that giant cake
Speaker 1: of compressed apple pulp? What do you do with it?
Speaker 1: Can you sit on it like a cushion? Maybe that's
Speaker 1: not my business, but it gets fed to livestock. You
Speaker 1: can also do a second wash and make a really
Speaker 1: weak sider with it, but it's called apple mash. But
Speaker 1: it's also according to our friend Workipedia, cake math POWs
Speaker 1: mirror or homage. So who knew cider making came with
Speaker 1: such a big, frothy mugga slang? Not me, but back
Speaker 1: to history. So cider has been around for centuries because
Speaker 1: yeast and sugar are like, please, let us do our thing.
Speaker 1: If you just leave us alone for a bit, we'll
Speaker 1: get you drunk. So written history through the ages is
Speaker 1: kind of spotty, But there's evidence that Charlemagne was into
Speaker 1: orcharding as a verb. And by Charlemagne, I mean the
Speaker 1: King of the Franks and the Dark Ages, not the
Speaker 1: breakfast club radio host. Charlemagne, the god who was born
Speaker 1: Leonard McKelvey. And from what I can tell he does
Speaker 1: not mill cider apples.
Speaker 5: You gotta break it in pieces, bro, Why this.
Speaker 2: Is the fruit?
Speaker 1: Okay, back to history.
Speaker 3: It seems that the first records of sort of making
Speaker 3: cider come from the eleven hundreds, but it's really not
Speaker 3: until kind of like the fifteen hundreds and especially the
Speaker 3: sixteen hundreds, when cider reaches its zenith in the UK
Speaker 3: as a drink that is heralded as being the equal
Speaker 3: to wine and as drunk with the aristocracy and indeed
Speaker 3: at the table of kings and queens.
Speaker 1: What happened in the sixteen hundreds was did someone have
Speaker 1: like a TikTok or viral?
Speaker 5: Why?
Speaker 3: Well, as sadly not as entertaining, and that it comes
Speaker 3: down to something that is ever prevalent, which is war.
Speaker 3: Britain being pretty strong warmongers at the time, you know,
Speaker 3: fighting with Europe for basically a millennia. And yeah, in
Speaker 3: this sort of early part of the seventeenth century, Britain
Speaker 3: was at war with large parts of Europe and it
Speaker 3: prevented the importation of wine into the UK, and the
Speaker 3: aristocracy had got very thirsty and a little bit agitated
Speaker 3: that they couldn't have their fine wine and so there
Speaker 3: was a bit of a movement amongst these. They were
Speaker 3: called the Ciderists, and these were people of prominence within society,
Speaker 3: whether they be landowners, MPs, sientists, clergy people, knowledgeable people,
Speaker 3: and people with money and power basically, and so they
Speaker 3: identified that cider could be our native wine effectively, which
Speaker 3: you know it kind of is if you think about
Speaker 3: it as being something that you make like a wine.
Speaker 3: And that coincided with a chap called Lord Skewdamore. He
Speaker 3: unidentified a particular variety that was growing on as the states.
Speaker 3: It produced an apple and a cider that was just gorgeous,
Speaker 3: really intense, and it was really precocious tree and it
Speaker 3: was amazing, and it was called the Herefordshire Red Streak.
Speaker 3: And also at the same time what was happening was
Speaker 3: there was a chap not too many miles away on
Speaker 3: the banks of the River seven and the Forest of Dean,
Speaker 3: and he was into glass furnaces and making glass, and
Speaker 3: he was interested in making strength and glass. His name
Speaker 3: was Sir Kenam Digby, and he was using these extra
Speaker 3: hot furnaces by using charcoal and burning really hot, and
Speaker 3: he was making these bottles that were really thick and
Speaker 3: really strong, so strong in fact, that you you could
Speaker 3: put some of this amazing new sider that was on
Speaker 3: the scene into there, and as the record books show,
Speaker 3: adding a walnuts worth of sugar into it, putting a
Speaker 3: lid on the top, and then putting it somewhere nice
Speaker 3: and cool in the cellar, bearing it into sand, even
Speaker 3: into some little streams running into the estate. And basically
Speaker 3: what was happening was the secondary fermentation in the bottle.
Speaker 3: We are talking about the first step of the method trdisjunel,
Speaker 3: the Champagne method. Crucially, this a paper. This paper was
Speaker 3: presented to the Royal Society on the tenth of December
Speaker 3: sixteen sixty two, and this is about seven years before
Speaker 3: Don Perignon, who is thought to be, you know, the
Speaker 3: creator of the godfather of mastering the Champagne process, before
Speaker 3: he had even started his work at the winery. So
Speaker 3: what I'm basically saying is that it shouldn't be called
Speaker 3: the Champagne method. It should be called the English method.
Speaker 1: And so that secondary fermentation is you've already got a
Speaker 1: little bit of alcohol in the cider and then it
Speaker 1: kind of double ferment, and that's what causes the effervescence
Speaker 1: and the higher alcohol.
Speaker 3: That's right, You've undertaken one fermentation in a tank of barrel,
Speaker 3: You've placed it into a bottle. You've then added some
Speaker 3: extra sugar, and there will still be some yeast, you know,
Speaker 3: live yeast within that cider. Today, those people who are
Speaker 3: making you know, method traditional style ciders or indeed those
Speaker 3: wines would add some yeast back as well with the
Speaker 3: sugar and maybe even some nutrient to ensure that yes,
Speaker 3: there is indeed a second fermentation in that bottle. But
Speaker 3: of course carbon dioxide is the byproduct of fermentation. You know,
Speaker 3: sugar gets converted by yeast into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Normally,
Speaker 3: the carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. In this case,
Speaker 3: it gets trapped into the bottle and that's what provides
Speaker 3: the natural sparkle. And that's why, you know, you get
Speaker 3: these lovely little small fine bubbles, this fine mood, and
Speaker 3: it gets trapped in there, and depending upon how you're
Speaker 3: making it, you can either have it just a very
Speaker 3: light effer vescence, or you can actually create quite a
Speaker 3: strong pressure in there, which is why you need that
Speaker 3: cork and that wire to hold to hold the liquid.
Speaker 1: In what is the best glass or ball or cup
Speaker 1: of cider you've ever had in your life.
Speaker 3: Oh man, that's that's that's tough. I will certainly say
Speaker 3: that I went on. It will be nineteen years ago
Speaker 3: to the to the day almost I So I grew
Speaker 3: up in this little village called Dimmock. I always got
Speaker 3: to give a shout out to Dommo go Dimmot and
Speaker 3: which which is in Gloucestershire, And it's yeah, it's in
Speaker 3: this amazing old traditional sort of heartland area. And I
Speaker 3: grew up knowing that there was a sider thing around
Speaker 3: and it was my first drink and tried some of
Speaker 3: the mainstream siders. And then there's a biggish sider maker
Speaker 3: in the village next door called Westerns in much Mark
Speaker 3: or just next door, and went and tried their siders
Speaker 3: and visited and really tasty. And then my eldest brother
Speaker 3: and I we wanted to go and visit some of
Speaker 3: the farmhouse makers, the small traditional producers around, and so
Speaker 3: we looked on the map and there was one just
Speaker 3: a few miles away, and so we went to visit
Speaker 3: and he was driving and we turned off the main
Speaker 3: road and suddenly we're down a lane. I don't know
Speaker 3: whether you get them in the USA, but it's one
Speaker 3: of the great things about about the rural areas of
Speaker 3: the UK. You've got these old lanes and trackways that
Speaker 3: have been there for a thousand years, and they're so
Speaker 3: narrow that you're driving a longer and both wing mirrors
Speaker 3: are getting whacked by the herge at the same time,
Speaker 3: and we're like, where the fuck where are we? This
Speaker 3: is like we just turned off the main road and
Speaker 3: we're like, we're expecting Frodo to run across the road.
Speaker 3: And suddenly there's a tiny little sign that pointing to
Speaker 3: the right saying side of it, and so we follow
Speaker 3: that and we end up going up a driveway and
Speaker 3: pulling in and there's like this big white farmhouse and
Speaker 3: we sort of walk up and there's a there's a
Speaker 3: door sort of like almost like underneath the house, and
Speaker 3: there's a little chalk written sign a note on there
Speaker 3: that says Paul string for cider. And indeed there's a
Speaker 3: little bit of Baylor twine, you know, a little bit
Speaker 3: of orange string, which we duly give a bit of
Speaker 3: a yankon and so leading ling the bell goes and
Speaker 3: this very cheery, genial sort of looking at chap Pop
Speaker 3: popes his head and says, hello, I'll come down and
Speaker 3: serve you now. And his name is Mike, Mike Johnson,
Speaker 3: the proprietor of the Ross and Weisider and Perry Company.
Speaker 3: And he opens the door and we're looking into the
Speaker 3: old cellar of this seventeenth century farmhouse with giant stone
Speaker 3: flags on the ground and these barrels racked up, and
Speaker 3: the smell that comes out is also, you know, earthy
Speaker 3: and musty, and it feels like it's been there for forever.
Speaker 3: And we go in and he goes to one of
Speaker 3: the barrels which has got a tap on it, and
Speaker 3: he gives it a paw and he hands it to
Speaker 3: me and goes, here you go. This is a dry cider. Enjoy.
Speaker 3: And I can remember the sensation of tasting that, even
Speaker 3: if I can't quite remember the taste, the sensation of
Speaker 3: just going I've never tasted anything like this. I like
Speaker 3: it quite a lot. This is just fermented apple juice,
Speaker 3: but in this not just formented apple juice. There's care,
Speaker 3: there's attension. You could almost taste you know, the the age,
Speaker 3: the antiquity, it was a little bit of the stars
Speaker 3: of lining moment and realized that cider could brought together
Speaker 3: all the things that I was interested in. I was
Speaker 3: interested in local history, interested in in wildlife, interested in
Speaker 3: local culture, quite enjoyed booze as well, and that cider
Speaker 3: was able to just bring all these things together. So
Speaker 3: that was a that was a pretty critical cider to taste.
Speaker 1: I would say, have you been back or is it
Speaker 1: something that you want to exist only in memory?
Speaker 3: No, it was only the start. I actually ended up
Speaker 3: working there. That was what really kick started by sider journey.
Speaker 3: I spent about the best part of nine months or
Speaker 3: so living on the farm quite literally in a shed
Speaker 3: in the garden. Wow. And and I learned the sort
Speaker 3: of the craft of making traditional Western County style of
Speaker 3: cider and learning about these varieties. I was tak about
Speaker 3: the different characters, the acidity, the tannin so the astringency,
Speaker 3: the bitterness, the mouthfield, the texture, the fruitiness, the potential
Speaker 3: faults that could come through. This was just sort of
Speaker 3: just learnt through drinking and talking and sharing an amazing
Speaker 3: and a privileged experience.
Speaker 1: Yes, I look this up and I want to live there.
Speaker 3: Please.
Speaker 1: It's called Broom Farm. And it's this white brick farmhouse
Speaker 1: in rural England. Is also set up as a bed
Speaker 1: and breakfast, so you can stay in the orchard Suite
Speaker 1: or the Cider Suite, and according to their website, they
Speaker 1: love visitors and they will quote happily take you on
Speaker 1: a detailed tour of the orchards and then give you
Speaker 1: a toured cider tasting, introducing you to our enormous range
Speaker 1: of bottled cider and perry. I'll put a link on
Speaker 1: my website in case you want to go to heaven
Speaker 1: without having to die first.
Speaker 3: And that I was camping in the orchard there three
Speaker 3: days ago. So it's still a very important part of
Speaker 3: my life. And Mike's son, Albert, he's come into the
Speaker 3: business and he's taking it onto the next step. But
Speaker 3: they really are one of the they're one of the
Speaker 3: they're one of the goodies. So so no, it's still
Speaker 3: very much an important part of my life. And and yeah,
Speaker 3: it kickstarted my career insider. I went to work for Westerns,
Speaker 3: who today are the fifth biggest producer in the UK.
Speaker 3: So I went from making cider in you know, two
Speaker 3: hundred liter oak fats to two hundred thousand liters stainless
Speaker 3: steel tanks, which is terrifying, especially when you know when
Speaker 3: when you dribble a bit down the side of the barrel,
Speaker 3: you know no bother when you dribble a bit down
Speaker 3: the side of a you know, a fifty foot tank
Speaker 3: and your boss is calling, is like, heay, why is cider,
Speaker 3: you know, spurting out at the top of this tank
Speaker 3: in a bit of a fountain fashion. I don't have
Speaker 3: such a good reput to that. So I took what
Speaker 3: I learned from the small farm and applied it to
Speaker 3: the big scale and it really and it set me
Speaker 3: fair and I'm really proud of the siders that I
Speaker 3: made and what I achieved. But I did come to
Speaker 3: realize I was better at talking aboutsider rather than making it.
Speaker 3: And so I got a job with the world's biggest
Speaker 3: sider maker, Bollomers. And yeah, I was there side of
Speaker 3: communications manager for nih on three years, which was really cool.
Speaker 3: I got to do awesome stuff with local community and
Speaker 3: the highlight was in twenty twelve I got to present
Speaker 3: a bottle of cider to her majesty.
Speaker 1: Come again, what did you wear? Did you wear your mustache?
Speaker 1: Number one?
Speaker 3: It was pre mustache actually I was. I was young
Speaker 3: and clean shaven back then. I had on I had,
Speaker 3: I say, the best suit of the only suit that
Speaker 3: I had. I was quite a count I missed that
Speaker 3: I'm a bit of a country bunking, but I was
Speaker 3: especially country bunking, a bit like a shaved monkey in
Speaker 3: a suit. To be fair, it's a bit awkward. Hello,
Speaker 3: your majesty, And somebody took some photos very kindly. I
Speaker 3: gave him my camera and there's that two or three
Speaker 3: great photos and I literally had about twenty seconds to
Speaker 3: present her with a special commemorative bottle of cider. And
Speaker 3: it was all linked in that it was her diamond jubilee,
Speaker 3: her sixty years, and it was the Bourneers one hundred
Speaker 3: and twenty fifth anniversary, and would you believe in the
Speaker 3: year that the company was started, that was Queen Victoria's
Speaker 3: golden jubilee as well. And I was telling this story
Speaker 3: and the photo of me presenting it to her her
Speaker 3: Majesty's face. I don't know, she looks like I've said
Speaker 3: something really offensive, or like I've done a poo on
Speaker 3: a shoe or something like that. She's not giving me
Speaker 3: a great look. I think she said thank you, very much,
Speaker 3: and that was about it. So your majesty, if you're listening,
Speaker 3: I really apologize. I didn't mean to offend you. I
Speaker 3: know that you're more of a sort of a mooth
Speaker 3: than you know, maybe Martini, but you know, give cider
Speaker 3: her a gho sometimes.
Speaker 1: You have it Charlo. Of course I found this photo,
Speaker 1: and I will confirm she does have an expression as
Speaker 1: if she has received a poo on her shoe. But
Speaker 1: being the good little Google gobblin that I am, I
Speaker 1: found another shot of their encounter, taken probably a millisecond
Speaker 1: later by the same photographer, and her majesty is smiling grandly.
Speaker 1: So I am surmising that she was just listening intently.
Speaker 1: But yes, she is known to drink Bulmer's cider. In addition,
Speaker 1: I found this out today she drinks Bacardi, which I
Speaker 1: hope she enjoys via room temperature shots followed by a
Speaker 1: diet pepsi chaser or something just equally hideous in appalling. So,
Speaker 1: speaking of shot glasses, there are very specific glasses for
Speaker 1: different wines and different martinis and even different beers. And
Speaker 1: I've always wondered, I think some of my most memorable
Speaker 1: sider I've had out of bowls in France. I think
Speaker 1: was the first time I had a good sider. It
Speaker 1: tasted like a tiger lily, and I had been up
Speaker 1: on that. I had just taken a red Eye in
Speaker 1: to Paris, and then the first and only time I've
Speaker 1: been and had crepes and a bowl of this really
Speaker 1: floral tasting cider. But what is the proper vessel? How
Speaker 1: should we be drinking cider?
Speaker 3: That is a bit of a difficult one. There are
Speaker 3: some traditional vessels very closely linked to those kind of
Speaker 3: regional things you talked about. The bullet, which is very
Speaker 3: closely associated with Brittany, especially in the western part of
Speaker 3: May and Hessen. They use a glass called the gripta,
Speaker 3: which has got all these sort of criss crosses on them.
Speaker 3: In in Asturias and in the Basque country northern Spain
Speaker 3: is that they use particular kind of very broad brimmed glasses.
Speaker 3: Forgive me, I've forgotten the name, but there's really really
Speaker 3: thin glass.
Speaker 1: Just look up Spanish cider glass. I think they're just
Speaker 1: called seed drug glasses. That's Spanish for cider. And in
Speaker 1: northern Spain they pour the cider from over their heads
Speaker 1: down into the glass. It's like a human fountain does
Speaker 1: look a little like p but yes, elegant, wide mouthed,
Speaker 1: thin walled seed drug glasses, that is.
Speaker 5: What they're called.
Speaker 3: Well, when you're doing this amazing high side of pouring,
Speaker 3: side of throwing into the glass is a really important
Speaker 3: cultural thing in Britain. In certain parts we would have
Speaker 3: the earthen wear two handled mug. Generally the larger the better.
Speaker 3: I suspect to you get more cider in, but cider doesn't.
Speaker 3: It's what this is. One of the challenges and potentially
Speaker 3: opportunities that sider finds itself in right now is that
Speaker 3: cider hasn't had any of the lexicon, any of the
Speaker 3: language that wine and beer have had. Everyone knows different
Speaker 3: you know, styles of beer, everyone can talk about ipa
Speaker 3: or a snout or a sayson or something like that.
Speaker 3: And in terms of wine, you all know whether it
Speaker 3: be particular sort of like Regions Bordeaux or Kiante or
Speaker 3: something like that.
Speaker 1: Gabe says that in modern culture it's common to rattle
Speaker 1: off all kinds of varieties of other beverages and just
Speaker 1: like how different beers and wines call for different kind
Speaker 1: of vessels, cider could use those as well, but people
Speaker 1: don't care, and they should because cider is just sitting
Speaker 1: in the corner. It's being chill and cool, like your
Speaker 1: friend who's so awesome but somehow single because they're shy.
Speaker 1: Everyone is sleeping on how complex and interesting cider is,
Speaker 1: and Gabe is its most charming and vocal wing man.
Speaker 3: These are all things that are entirely new, and I
Speaker 3: really hope that somebody sees an opportunity to create these
Speaker 3: kind of sider glasses and to do that research, because
Speaker 3: it's just all all adding to the kind of professionalism
Speaker 3: associated with cider and trying to get it really really
Speaker 3: well known and respected and loved.
Speaker 1: So there's glassmakers out there, come on, do it. I
Speaker 1: love the I also love the idea of an earthenware mug,
Speaker 1: I mean, come on. But I have also some questions
Speaker 1: about just the tech specs, right, So what are the
Speaker 1: tech specs of cider? Does it have to be apple
Speaker 1: or can it be pear or raspberry or whatever? And
Speaker 1: also how much alcohol by volume does it have to
Speaker 1: be to be a cider versus a pressed or a
Speaker 1: fresh squeezed apple juice that you might get, you know,
Speaker 1: on a crisp fall day at an orchard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so cider really is the where, you know, a
Speaker 3: drink that is where the alcohol is derived from the
Speaker 3: fermentation of apple juice. In terms of the fermented pair
Speaker 3: that the traditional name for that where I'm from it
Speaker 3: is called perry, or if you're in France it would
Speaker 3: be poire No pear cider as a term in the
Speaker 3: UK that is a synonym for perry in the USA,
Speaker 3: that is a fermented apple drink with pear juice added
Speaker 3: as a flavoring. So there we go. But like a
Speaker 3: fermented pair drink really should be kind of could be
Speaker 3: called perry in the UK, pair siders used. Some people
Speaker 3: like it, some people don't. I'm not too kind of
Speaker 3: hung up on it. The most important thing is that
Speaker 3: you've got to have this fermented apple or potentially fermented pair.
Speaker 3: You can't ferment a raspberry and call it a raspberry cider.
Speaker 3: You can't ferment a rhubarb or a potato or bark
Speaker 3: and you know, call it anything X cider that isn't cider.
Speaker 3: And it is one of the things that sider needs
Speaker 3: to kind of try and protect. You know, there's been
Speaker 3: an incredible proliferation of flavored ciders over the course of
Speaker 3: the last fifteen years in the UK, but that they
Speaker 3: are fermented apple juice with the addition of flavors of
Speaker 3: other things, predominantly fruits, you know, berries, especially hopped siders
Speaker 3: is definitely something that is growing in popularity and in
Speaker 3: the in the USA, especially where it's been driven from,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of Pacific Northwest beer scene that you
Speaker 3: can put like elder flowers and the kind of things
Speaker 3: in there in there too. A lot of people are
Speaker 3: really anti flavored cider because they don't think them that
Speaker 3: they're real or proper, or it doesn't sit into like
Speaker 3: an old cultural heritage. I don't hold the same opinion
Speaker 3: as people. I'm not anti flavored sider. I'm anti shit sider.
Speaker 3: And it's just that the majority of flavored sider is available.
Speaker 3: Certainly in a UK very broad commercially. Aren't great siders.
Speaker 3: They're just not kind of great drinks and they don't
Speaker 3: uphold the integrity for me of what kind of sider
Speaker 3: it is. There are some spectacular siders being made with
Speaker 3: the addition of other things to them in the UK
Speaker 3: and in the USA. Some of the best drinks you
Speaker 3: can get and they're fun and they're playful and they're creative.
Speaker 3: But the fermination of apple juice is at the absolute
Speaker 3: heart of this. And this I think goes on to
Speaker 3: and see the second point about you know, when what's
Speaker 3: the average alcohol content? I mean, the average alcohol content
Speaker 3: is determined by how much sugar there is within the
Speaker 3: apples in the first place, which is determined by the
Speaker 3: variety where you are in the world, and you know
Speaker 3: what's happening with the weather that kind of year as well.
Speaker 3: So the sugar that can build up with an apple,
Speaker 3: depending upon those three factors, generally is somewhere between about
Speaker 3: four and a half percent alcohol and about eight and
Speaker 3: a half percent alcohol. That's the broader kind of range.
Speaker 1: Okay, So side note, the higher the alcohol, usually the
Speaker 1: drier the sider, because the yeast has just gone to
Speaker 1: town eating the sugar and leaving you with alcohol as
Speaker 1: a metabolite. So sweet cider tends to be less than
Speaker 1: three percent alcohol. There's semi dry, and then there's fruit
Speaker 1: or dry, which is four percent alcohol or higher. But
Speaker 1: of course more sugar can be added for a second fermentation,
Speaker 1: or it can be made pretty strong and then diluted
Speaker 1: with more juice. Now, what about hot spiked cider?
Speaker 2: Is that a thing?
Speaker 1: Sure, it's just called whatsiale and it's a spicy, appley,
Speaker 1: boozy winter beverage. Also, it's not coincidentally what you are
Speaker 1: to exclaim during a toast. But just don't call cider
Speaker 1: cider if it's not a little boozy. That's literally just
Speaker 1: apple juice falst up.
Speaker 3: In order for something called it a non alcoholic cider.
Speaker 3: Cider is a fermented drink, so there has to be
Speaker 3: some form of fermented character in there, so you know,
Speaker 3: low alcohol siders are achieved normally by like diluting a
Speaker 3: fully formed cider with water and juice to take the
Speaker 3: alcohol level back down, or you can use clever technology
Speaker 3: such as reverse osmosis or cool distillation to take away
Speaker 3: the alcohol kind of content. But they started their life
Speaker 3: as a cider. Apple juice is a great drink, but
Speaker 3: it is kind of juice. That's sort of the the
Speaker 3: sure content and the aromatic and flavor characters that you
Speaker 3: get from juice. So it's something that you don't get
Speaker 3: insider because those sugars and those characters have been converted
Speaker 3: to alcohol.
Speaker 1: Well, what then is apple cider vinegar. Is that apple
Speaker 1: cider that has just gone past the sippy stage or
Speaker 1: is that a completely different beast altogether.
Speaker 3: No, absolutely right, So it's the it's the potential next
Speaker 3: stage of kind of cider, I suppose, and is the
Speaker 3: logical journey that, if just completely left to its own devices,
Speaker 3: what the juice would want to do. So you start
Speaker 3: off with unfermented juice, you've pressed it. Yeast will convert
Speaker 3: those sugars into alcohol once that fermentation has finished, if
Speaker 3: you kind of leave it and allow air exposure. There's
Speaker 3: all sorts of different kinds of bacteria that live all around,
Speaker 3: and one of them is called Aceta bacter and it
Speaker 3: converts the alcohol into acetic acid into vinegar. This may
Speaker 3: or may not be something that you desire, although there
Speaker 3: are some sort of traditional parts of the Southwest whereby
Speaker 3: that old farmerhouse heritage, there was no sort of great
Speaker 3: care and attention, you know, put onto these kind of drinks,
Speaker 3: and they they would be referred to as scrumpy sort
Speaker 3: of rough, raw, scratchy at the back of your throat
Speaker 3: kind of cider. But if you do just allow all
Speaker 3: the air to get to your cider, eventually the considerable
Speaker 3: majority of the alcohol that was in there does get
Speaker 3: converted into a seated acid into vinegar and it takes
Speaker 3: on a whole, you know, new life of its own.
Speaker 3: And you know, certainly it is. It's a massively popular
Speaker 3: thing from having all the health benefits and how you
Speaker 3: use it within sort of cooking and cuisine as well,
Speaker 3: and it's it's brilliant. I've got a Google alert for
Speaker 3: the word cider. I like to keep up to date
Speaker 3: what's happening in the world of cider, and what generally
Speaker 3: happens is about five hundred apple cider vinegar kind of
Speaker 3: articles come up, and then right down the bottom will
Speaker 3: be you know, a headline from a local newspaper, you know,
Speaker 3: the Southampton Chronicles saying, you know, man arrested for drinking
Speaker 3: nineteen liters of cider and trying to drive tractor into
Speaker 3: football stadium or something like that. You know, it's like, ah,
Speaker 3: come on, sider, you can do this.
Speaker 1: You definitely need to Google alert for scrumpy because there
Speaker 1: can't be too many articles with that work.
Speaker 3: I do not. I'm going to try it, and I
Speaker 3: will let you know. I'll give you an update. I'll
Speaker 3: also do siderology and see what crops up as well.
Speaker 1: Please do I have a feeling that just you will
Speaker 1: come up for both of those things? Maybe I have
Speaker 1: so many questions from patrons. Can I lightning around you?
Speaker 1: But before we strike gold with a lightning round, we
Speaker 1: will quickly give away some money to a cause of
Speaker 1: the ologist choosing. And this week Gabe asked that it'd
Speaker 1: be made to Tiny Changes Foundation, and he says this
Speaker 1: was set up in memory of Scott Hutchinson, brother of
Speaker 1: my friend and fellow podcast host Grant, who sadly took
Speaker 1: his life three years ago, so that would mean a lot.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Gabe said. Tiny Changes is a mental health
Speaker 1: charity started in memory of the Frightened Rabbit musician Scott
Speaker 1: Hutches and it aims to offer mental health resources and support.
Speaker 1: So we're happy to make that donation in your name, Gabe.
Speaker 1: That donation was made possible by sponsors on the show,
Speaker 1: who you may hear about. Now, Okay, let's stop milling
Speaker 1: about and press on with your questions.
Speaker 3: Let's go.
Speaker 1: Okay, we're going to answer as many of these as possible.
Speaker 1: All Right, I'm ready, you got this, Okay. Maria Joroveva
Speaker 1: Catherine Gilbert and Celia Labant all wanted to know. Are
Speaker 1: ice sighters or sighters made from the apple picked in
Speaker 1: winter a true thing or is it just marketing?
Speaker 3: No, it's absolutely a true thing. It was originated in
Speaker 3: Quebec in about nineteen eighty eight nineteen eighty nine and
Speaker 3: takes its influence from the German ice wine making. And yeah,
Speaker 3: you take frozen fruit, or in sort of warmer places
Speaker 3: thankfully like the UK, you freeze the juice and what
Speaker 3: happens is when you thaw the juice or when you
Speaker 3: when you press those frozen apples, the majority of the
Speaker 3: water component is bound up as ice crystals and this
Speaker 3: hyper sugar concentrated liquid that comes off, which you then
Speaker 3: ferment up to ten eleven twelve percent alcohol, but there's
Speaker 3: still huge amounts of unfermented sugar. So it's a really rich,
Speaker 3: viscous drink, just like an ice wine, just like a
Speaker 3: dessert wine. Absolutely amazing as a djsdef poured all over
Speaker 3: your chocolate pudding.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, that's so good to know. I will have
Speaker 1: to get them so many patrons. I will list their
Speaker 1: name in an aside. Oh hey, Claire Casticky Bonnie page,
Speaker 1: Alan Cohn, Earl ofve Gramalkin, Miranda Panda, Dean Dryden, Jackie Silverman,
Speaker 1: and R. J. Deutsche want to know what is the
Speaker 1: best kind of apple to make cider from.
Speaker 3: That's an impossible question to ask because every single apple,
Speaker 3: every single apple has its own unique flavors, properties, and characteristics.
Speaker 3: The thing is to understand what kind of flavor profile
Speaker 3: do you want? You know, if you're going to be
Speaker 3: a wine maker, it's like, I really like big chewy wines.
Speaker 3: You should be planting, you know, malbek or something like that.
Speaker 3: If you plant Suvinion blanc, you're going to be really
Speaker 3: really disappointed. And it's the same. It's like, if you
Speaker 3: want to have a lovely, fresh and crisp cider, then
Speaker 3: make it from Granny Smith. If if you want to
Speaker 3: have something that's really sort of rich and texted, use
Speaker 3: a classic English variety like Yarhlasin ta mill. If you
Speaker 3: want to have something that is amazingly you know, herbal
Speaker 3: and aromatic, use like a Golden Russet or something like that,
Speaker 3: or a Newtown Pippot and these amazing apples from from
Speaker 3: the northeast of the US. So you kind of work
Speaker 3: backwards as to like what kind of drink do I
Speaker 3: want to have, and therefore try to seek you know
Speaker 3: what kind of apple variety and makers, especially in the
Speaker 3: USA or you know, you're ahead of the game compared
Speaker 3: to where they are in the UK celebrating the variety
Speaker 3: and celebrating the process they're putting it on the packaging.
Speaker 3: So the opportunity to be a more discerning consumer is
Speaker 3: better than it's ever been before.
Speaker 1: Ah okay, I love the notion of like reverse engineering
Speaker 1: based on what you want. Absolutely, Alexandra and Castro Navara
Speaker 1: wants you know it's the strangest tasting sider you've ever had,
Speaker 1: And Kelly Pavlovitch asked, what's the weirdest cider flavor or
Speaker 1: ingredient that you've tried or made or used? Any weird
Speaker 1: ones that stick out in your ciderology brain.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the weirdest one is actually a perry that I
Speaker 3: made a few years ago, absolutely not by design, but
Speaker 3: by bad perry making. Tasted like sausages. Tasted it tasted
Speaker 3: like sausages, and it also had a little bit of
Speaker 3: like a sort of sulfidey thing, which is like an
Speaker 3: egg character. I basically had like sausages and eggs. I
Speaker 3: had a fried breakfast in liquid.
Speaker 1: Form meat farts.
Speaker 3: It wasn't as pleasant as I had endeavored to achieve.
Speaker 3: So that was probably like the weirdest sort of just
Speaker 3: no natural flavors that came out of something. In terms
Speaker 3: of like an actual intended flavored cider, there's a USA
Speaker 3: producer who recently made a tom Yum soup flavored cider.
Speaker 3: I think they had gone they'd gone to Thailand, they'd
Speaker 3: had all the good food and they and they'd come
Speaker 3: back and they put that in the cider. Now, my
Speaker 3: my co host of a podcast that I run. I
Speaker 3: should probably name at this point the neutral Cider Hotel.
Speaker 3: Go check it out, available on all good platforms. Do
Speaker 3: you check out neutral side hotel dot com? Thank you
Speaker 3: very much, Lovely Grant, he's he's less of a fan
Speaker 3: of the flavored ciders. He gets in a bit of
Speaker 3: a rage whenever he and he nearly sort of flew off.
Speaker 3: He nearly flew off the handle on this one. He
Speaker 3: was he was human, but then he gets a bit
Speaker 3: grumpy back things like that anyway, So so yeah, the
Speaker 3: Tommyum flavored sider the most amazing and lovely experience I
Speaker 3: ever had was that I lived in I lived in
Speaker 3: New Zealand for a bit and an in Wellington, capital city.
Speaker 3: I lived in an area called Mount Victoria and just
Speaker 3: behind there's all these woodlands. Fact, it was one of
Speaker 3: the places where they filmed for Lord of the Rings
Speaker 3: when in the first movie when all the little Hobbits
Speaker 3: are having to hide from the Ring Wraith and they're
Speaker 3: hiding underneath the roots of the tree for the Lord
Speaker 3: of the Rings nerds out there, and so I used
Speaker 3: to go like walk around there and run around there.
Speaker 3: And when I left, but then I came back to
Speaker 3: New Zealand for to go to a festival and the
Speaker 3: cider maker gave me a cider and I smelt it
Speaker 3: and I was like, oh my god, I've got the
Speaker 3: sensation of being back in that city and that time
Speaker 3: in that place. And I didn't realize that the cider
Speaker 3: had been flavored with maple and pine needles, and the
Speaker 3: pine needles had come from those trees on Mount Victoria. Wow,
Speaker 3: And it was a direct line to that time in
Speaker 3: that place. You know, these these sensory characters they tap
Speaker 3: into into our limbic system. It's all about memory formation,
Speaker 3: and like a motive state. And yeah, that just took
Speaker 3: me straight back to that time in place, So that
Speaker 3: was pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 1: Okay, So if you'd like to hear someone who really
Speaker 1: knows noses, there is a rhinology episode which I will
Speaker 1: link on my website. But just to recap it, a
Speaker 1: lot of your taste is actually smells traveling up your snooter,
Speaker 1: which leads to your olfactory bulb in the front of
Speaker 1: your brain, which takes that information and sends it just
Speaker 1: directly to your olympic system, including parts of it called
Speaker 1: the hippocampus and the amygdala. They deal with memory and emotions,
Speaker 1: which is why I think about a bowl of cider
Speaker 1: I had a few decades ago, and I still want
Speaker 1: to cry bittersweet tears.
Speaker 5: Oh.
Speaker 1: On that topic, a lot of people, Diana Burgess and MOFO,
Speaker 1: they both wanted to know, how are some ciders dry
Speaker 1: versus sweet? Why is there such a wide variety, and
Speaker 1: what's the process to get a sweet versus a dry cider.
Speaker 3: That's a really good question, and this is one of
Speaker 3: the big misnomers about cider is that you know, cider
Speaker 3: is a sweet drink and the fundamental nature of it
Speaker 3: is that ostensibly, every single cider in the world will
Speaker 3: start its life as a bone dry cider, no sugar
Speaker 3: left at all, because the fermentation process is the yease
Speaker 3: converting that sugar into alcohol, and the cider will stop
Speaker 3: fermenting when there is no more sugar for the yeast
Speaker 3: to ferment. So that's that's how cider starts its life.
Speaker 3: It's just that the majority of consumers don't want dry
Speaker 3: cider and in condition that they don't want that, so sugar,
Speaker 3: generally sugar sometimes it could be juice is added back
Speaker 3: post fermentation and then the cider is stabilized via pasteurization
Speaker 3: or you know, a sterile filtration process that removes all
Speaker 3: the yeast, so there's no opportunity for that sugar to
Speaker 3: be re fermented. And that's the sweetness that you've got,
Speaker 3: So you can have bone dry cider because that's how
Speaker 3: that's how patro Mamma wanted it intended. That is nature
Speaker 3: taking its course. If you want to have a fermented
Speaker 3: sider that is that has some sugar in there, you've
Speaker 3: either got an added pack or you can do a
Speaker 3: couple of really fiddly processes to try and retain a
Speaker 3: residual natural sweetness, the primary one being called key, which
Speaker 3: is what the French classically do, and there's lots of
Speaker 3: history of it happening in the UK as well, which
Speaker 3: is a slightly convoluted process whereby you remove the yeast
Speaker 3: and the nutrient from the juice at the beginning of
Speaker 3: the process, and the resultant sider ferments very kind of
Speaker 3: slowly and develops quite rich flavors, and then you can
Speaker 3: sort of control it and place it into a bottle
Speaker 3: where it finishes a little bit of fermentation. But the
Speaker 3: yeast is so weak and there's so little of it,
Speaker 3: and it's so hungry because there's no nutrient that that
Speaker 3: little bit of carbon dioxide that's built up in the
Speaker 3: bottle is enough to sort of, you know, make the
Speaker 3: yeast wave a little white flag, and it stops fermenting
Speaker 3: before all of the sugar has been converted into alcohols,
Speaker 3: so you get a naturally sweeter, naturally lower ABV, and
Speaker 3: naturally sparkling drink.
Speaker 6: Ah.
Speaker 3: That's how they do it, That's how did it. So
Speaker 3: that's why you said that the cider that you had
Speaker 3: in the Bodley in Paris it smelted. What did you.
Speaker 1: Say it kind of like tiger lilies.
Speaker 3: Oddly tiger lilies amazing but really rich, oily intent and serrematic,
Speaker 3: some sort of spicy characters, some really juicy Just yeah,
Speaker 3: they're wonderful drinks. And you know, if you have the
Speaker 3: opportunity to see any sort of classic Breton and Norman
Speaker 3: Duas cidro, you should give it a go. There are
Speaker 3: a number of producers, especially in the Pacific Northwest, who
Speaker 3: did like a like a research trip over to over
Speaker 3: to Brittainy and Normandy a few years ago. You know
Speaker 3: that there are producers in the USA who are making
Speaker 3: who are making keef drinks. And also a big shout
Speaker 3: out to the Waldensider House in the Hudson Valley, which
Speaker 3: is where Angry Orchard, who are the USA's largest producer.
Speaker 3: This is where they get to make all their amazing, fun, creative,
Speaker 3: experimentational stuff. My friend Ryan Burke is the headsider maker,
Speaker 3: and you know they've produced sensational key siders over the
Speaker 3: years that have been of one competitions. I'm a big
Speaker 3: fan of us Sider. I'm drinking one right now. It's
Speaker 3: called It's from the Artifact Sider Project, who are in Massachusetts.
Speaker 3: It's called wolf at the Door, which is a really
Speaker 3: mega kind of hazy juice bomb with some sort of
Speaker 3: character in there.
Speaker 1: So yes, this French style side aka cedra bouchet is
Speaker 1: sold in corked bottles like champagne is, and it's the
Speaker 1: result of kieving allowing the cider's pectins and calcium to
Speaker 1: form a brown cap at the top and that clarifies
Speaker 1: the juice and develops a nice slow fermentation and a sparkle.
Speaker 1: The process in French, by the way, is known as defecation, which,
Speaker 1: let me tell you, do not google French defecation no
Speaker 1: matter how any accents you copy and paste over the ease,
Speaker 1: just don't google it. Don't google it. Keieving's fine, let's
Speaker 1: change the subject. Can I toss a couple more questions
Speaker 1: at you?
Speaker 3: Keep them coming?
Speaker 1: Okay? Ali vessels. First time question asker says, can you
Speaker 1: homebrew apple cider? Is it harder or easier than brewing
Speaker 1: something like beer or mead? And Celia Labante says, one
Speaker 1: of my favorite things in the fall is to pick
Speaker 1: up some local, fresh pressed, unpasteurized, local cider and forget
Speaker 1: about it in the back of my fridge until it
Speaker 1: gets fizzy. It always ends up tasting better than anything
Speaker 1: I can find in stores. Is my fridge magic or
Speaker 1: is there something about the fermentation process or is there
Speaker 1: just something about home fermentation. Can you diy cider or
Speaker 1: is it best left to professionals?
Speaker 3: You can do eyesider. The tricky bit, as we talked
Speaker 3: about it before, it's the same thing that people had
Speaker 3: three or four thousand years ago, is converting your apples
Speaker 3: into the juice. You need this bit of sort of
Speaker 3: kit and technology, you know, a mill and a press,
Speaker 3: and you can, and it has been done, basically, whack
Speaker 3: the apples with a very big pole in a bucket
Speaker 3: until they kind of go a bit mushy. And then
Speaker 3: you can buy these little sort of home presses like
Speaker 3: you would for making apple juice. And they're good fun,
Speaker 3: especially if you've got big family or like a little
Speaker 3: sort of community group or neighborhood kind of thing. They're
Speaker 3: really really good fun because you get everybody to bring
Speaker 3: the apples and you do it in one big go
Speaker 3: and it's kind of easy. But if you don't want
Speaker 3: to invest in the equipment, then you know, you do
Speaker 3: have all these fantastic farms where you can purchase the unpasteurized,
Speaker 3: the still raw, live juice, which, as your caller Industry described,
Speaker 3: I don't think it was the magic of the fridge.
Speaker 3: It's the magic of fermentation converted this juice into cider
Speaker 3: in maybe not in the most controlled kind of way,
Speaker 3: but obviously, hey, it kind of works. And you know,
Speaker 3: let's talk about juice content. The reason why it tastes
Speaker 3: amazing probably is because it tasted had a real intensity
Speaker 3: of flavor profile. Not all ciders that you get around
Speaker 3: the world are made from just apple juice. The majority
Speaker 3: of your mainstream siders, big kind of store board siders,
Speaker 3: they will have you know, there'll be fermented apple juice.
Speaker 3: But what often happens is that extra sugar gets added
Speaker 3: into the juice prior to fermentation. Remember it's the sugar
Speaker 3: content that equates to the potential alcohol content. If you
Speaker 3: add some extra sugar into your juice, you're going to
Speaker 3: get potential higher alcohol let's say ten or twelve percent ABV.
Speaker 3: And what happens then is you could then dilute that
Speaker 3: that's base cider with water, and hey, presto, you could
Speaker 3: double the literal volume of cider that you've produced at
Speaker 3: the same alcohol level as what you would have had
Speaker 3: naturally for the sow, some sugar and some water, and
Speaker 3: why do that? Of course, it's all about the dollar, right,
Speaker 3: This is all about This is a very efficient way
Speaker 3: of making cider and a very cheaper way of making cider.
Speaker 3: And I'm not puritanical on this. I'm not holding a
Speaker 3: pitchfork and saying that every single sider must be made
Speaker 3: from just one hundred percent apples. You know, nothing else
Speaker 3: could be done. That's not the attitude and approach that
Speaker 3: I have. But certainly in the UK, the minimum juice
Speaker 3: content insider sits at thirty five percent, so the majority
Speaker 3: of the cider can be water, and for me, that's
Speaker 3: too far down the line. If the first ingredient on
Speaker 3: your list is not apple juice, is that a cider
Speaker 3: and I would say for me, no. In the USA,
Speaker 3: it's fifty percent, and that's the level that I would
Speaker 3: advocate it being at. You know that you've got some
Speaker 3: integrity in there, So it just depends on what your
Speaker 3: kind of flavor profile is. For me, the most important
Speaker 3: thing is enabling the consumer to understand what's in the drink,
Speaker 3: how's it made, and let them make the decision on
Speaker 3: what kind of drink they're after.
Speaker 1: M hm, that makes tons of sense. Yes or no?
Speaker 1: Question from m Ross? Are there bug bits in my cider?
Speaker 3: Probably bug bits well as in bits of bugs.
Speaker 1: Bits of bugs, you know. I'm thinking yes, there's gonna
Speaker 1: be a couple of little tiny bugs in there.
Speaker 3: It depends on whether you're getting from your you know,
Speaker 3: your your professional cider maker, or you're going to see
Speaker 3: old farmer Brown down the lane who's making old leg
Speaker 3: bender you.
Speaker 1: Know, hmm, don't worry about it. Gareth ASKI asked, is
Speaker 1: cloudy apple cider the cider equivalent of orange juice with bits?
Speaker 1: Different types of bits? But why is some cider cloudy?
Speaker 1: Is that the mother?
Speaker 3: First of all, I want to addres the fact that
Speaker 3: his name is Gareth Aske. Who's asking a questions. That's
Speaker 3: a brilliant name, mister ask You keep asking away, ask
Speaker 3: all the questions. I've thoroughly enjoyed that you've asked. Post fermentation,
Speaker 3: yeast and large chunks of apple bits will drop to
Speaker 3: the bottom, but you will still have it within suspension.
Speaker 3: Some bits of pecked in and some just like natural
Speaker 3: apply bits, a bit like natural bits from orange juice.
Speaker 3: What majority of makers will then do, but they'll put
Speaker 3: it through a filter, you know, we just put it
Speaker 3: through something that just like sieves out like the chunkier
Speaker 3: bits of apple constituents. So the vast majority of side
Speaker 3: as you get in the marketplace are like crystal clear.
Speaker 3: It's very easy to put through a filter. I've got
Speaker 3: nothing wrong with that. I don't think it's a bad
Speaker 3: thing at all. What I find interesting is when makers
Speaker 3: choose not to do that. Again, it's very much a
Speaker 3: modern thing of the last fifty years, the idea of
Speaker 3: instilling the clarity in there as a probably as a
Speaker 3: market of sort of quality and cleanliness and professionalism, moving
Speaker 3: away from that sort of more rustic and traditional kind
Speaker 3: of viewpoint. Certainly there's been a bit of a driver
Speaker 3: again from a sort of commercial point of view, makers
Speaker 3: using that as a way of bringing like a new
Speaker 3: product into the marketplace. Right, we've got a cider which
Speaker 3: is just you know, fuzzy, and then we've got like
Speaker 3: the sweeter version. What do we do now, let's do
Speaker 3: the cloud eversion. Yes, come on, you know, this is
Speaker 3: all part of the amazing diversity that exists for cider
Speaker 3: that you know, different ciders, different fruit, different varieties, different
Speaker 3: filmentation processes, vessels for different consumers on different occasions.
Speaker 1: Ah well, I'm hoping from a little bit of filtration
Speaker 1: to flim flam. Robin Cohen wants to know. I was
Speaker 1: recently told that in times before refrigeration and indoor water,
Speaker 1: hard cider was given to the kids to drink. Is
Speaker 1: this flim flam?
Speaker 3: It's true, It is absolutely true, you know, in the
Speaker 3: in the same way that in various parts of certainly
Speaker 3: British history, that the beer was considerably safer than the
Speaker 3: drinking water. You know, we think about the state of
Speaker 3: the sewerage system or lack of sewage system, especially as
Speaker 3: the population as cities started to growing. The fermentation process
Speaker 3: is amazing at killing off bugs and beasts, so even
Speaker 3: at relatively low alcohol levels. So no, it is genuinely true.
Speaker 3: In fact, I'll have to remember the year. I think
Speaker 3: it's in the fifteenth century, maybe the thirteenth century. There
Speaker 3: is a record of babies being baptized inside it in
Speaker 3: the UK because the water quality was so poor. Actually
Speaker 3: that was from last week now, It's yeah, so you
Speaker 3: know that's that is absolutely true.
Speaker 1: Okay, two more questions Sarah Tully says, I'm a cider girl,
Speaker 1: born and raised English by birth, and I now live
Speaker 1: in Canada, where luckily the cider industry has boomed in
Speaker 1: the last ten years, probably because of video Gabe. She says,
Speaker 1: I've drank many a can of cider, but once in
Speaker 1: a blue moon, I get one that well smells like
Speaker 1: a fart or rotten egg paste, almost as bad and
Speaker 1: is flat. Why does this happen? What is going on?
Speaker 3: So the the egginess is those are those are the
Speaker 3: characters of these sulfide compounds, and so these these are
Speaker 3: natural compounds that are released by by yeast when they
Speaker 3: are not very happy stressed yeast. So this is normally
Speaker 3: a food issue. So they haven't got so that the
Speaker 3: yeast is converting the sugar into alcohol. But yeast has
Speaker 3: got to eat as well, right, so it needs to
Speaker 3: have these nutrients. It needs to have some nitrogen, It
Speaker 3: needs to have some B vitamins in order to easily
Speaker 3: function properly and convert all that sugar into alcohol. If
Speaker 3: it hasn't got that, sometimes there's a bit of a
Speaker 3: break down. Sometimes if if it's too hot and then
Speaker 3: the process it gets all a bit too much to
Speaker 3: the yeast and you know, just throws a bit bit
Speaker 3: of a dirty protest basically, or sometimes if the temperature
Speaker 3: goes kind of like too cold, like partway through the fermentation,
Speaker 3: it can stop and these sulfide characters can remain. It
Speaker 3: is a bit of an issue. It doesn't need to happen.
Speaker 3: It's one of those things like like having vinegar. You know,
Speaker 3: within your side. It's something that is easily averted. It
Speaker 3: doesn't need to happen. But but but it is something
Speaker 3: that does that does come around.
Speaker 1: Maybe if it happens, you should just treat it like
Speaker 1: it was supposed to happen, make a wish, crack open
Speaker 1: a different bottle, you know.
Speaker 3: You could do that. You know. One of the things
Speaker 3: is that if if that was a beer, consumers and
Speaker 3: the drinks trade have the confidence to know that's not right. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, we'd get in touch with the with the
Speaker 3: brewery or they take it back to the bar. People
Speaker 3: don't know like is the cider supposed to and so
Speaker 3: if they end up thinking, oh, I think that is
Speaker 3: how it's supposed to taste. Man, cider smells of farts.
Speaker 3: That's bad. I Therefore I don't like cider. That's a really,
Speaker 3: really bad thing. So if you smell that, take it
Speaker 3: back to it and get another one. But make a wish,
Speaker 3: and make a wish and make ah.
Speaker 1: Obviously consider it lucky. Sarah Hoover wants to know if
Speaker 1: I were to go to a store looking for the
Speaker 1: best possible cider. Again, I'm going to editorialize that and say,
Speaker 1: I know it's objective, but what should Sarah look for?
Speaker 1: Any hidden info we should know about.
Speaker 3: So what I would say is just check out your
Speaker 3: local producers. There are there is over a thousand makers
Speaker 3: in the USA today and in being made in basically
Speaker 3: every single state. Maybe not Alaska, I'm going to say, possibly,
Speaker 3: but everywhere else you know cider. Please prove me wrong, somebody,
Speaker 3: there is cider being made everywhere. Just go and seek
Speaker 3: how go and seek out your local but there are
Speaker 3: some of the best side of makers in the world
Speaker 3: within the USA. You're you're based in California, right, alle
Speaker 3: Is that correct? So you need to check out you know,
Speaker 3: people like Tannerky Cider who in Santa Cruz, people like
Speaker 3: Tilted Shed who are in Sonoma. Absolutely fantastic. You know
Speaker 3: maker's there. And then as you get into the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 3: people like Reverend Nats, and then you sort of get
Speaker 3: into Michigan or people like Uncle John's Hard Cider. In Pennsylvania,
Speaker 3: you've got Big Hills sider Works and Plowman Cider. And
Speaker 3: you know, New York Eves and Eden, we so Eves
Speaker 3: are in a sort of fingerlegs area, Eden and Vermont.
Speaker 3: You know, we're talking about drinks that are exuding all
Speaker 3: of the quality and elegance of wine. There's just there's
Speaker 3: just so many fantastic producers out there. So just go
Speaker 3: to the store and drink loads of cider. I think
Speaker 3: that's what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 1: I will post links on my website, you sweet thirsty people.
Speaker 1: Or here's an idea. You could put on clothes and
Speaker 1: you could leave the house.
Speaker 3: You've got side of bars. We don't really have side
Speaker 3: of bars over it, but almost every single city has
Speaker 3: got a side of bar. And you've got one oh
Speaker 3: one tap house in LA. You've got the San Francisco
Speaker 3: Cider House. Portland's got like five sider houses alone. It's crazy.
Speaker 3: If you're in DC, do head to Ancho. It's one
Speaker 3: of the best sider experiences that you'll have you know,
Speaker 3: anywhere anywhere in the world. So it's not just that
Speaker 3: sort of at home thing. It's like getting out there
Speaker 3: and sort of seeking in any city that you are.
Speaker 3: It's an awesome experience.
Speaker 1: What about the last questions? I always ask, what about
Speaker 1: the worst thing? Ab outsider? It can't all be roses.
Speaker 5: What sucks ah that that there is amongst maybe amongst
Speaker 5: the amongst the community, a feeling of whether it be
Speaker 5: inferiority to other drinks or maybe in some instance there's
Speaker 5: a little bit of gatekeeping around, like cider can only
Speaker 5: be this and we can never kind of change.
Speaker 3: It's like, you know, come on, people, like just be
Speaker 3: open to the opportunity. And I really I use the
Speaker 3: word opportunity a lot because because I see it and
Speaker 3: that there are so many consumers today who who are
Speaker 3: interested in so many different types of drinks. We're less
Speaker 3: sort of like siloed in terms of well, I'm just
Speaker 3: to be a drink or I'm just a one drink,
Speaker 3: I'm just spirits drinkers, Like I know, you could be
Speaker 3: interested in interesting drinks, and cider very much sits within
Speaker 3: that sort of spectrum and with that opportunity, and so
Speaker 3: the thing that annoys me the most is that sided
Speaker 3: doesn't have the reputation or the standing that I think
Speaker 3: it deserves. But I have considerable faith that we will
Speaker 3: get there.
Speaker 1: I think that you are doing all of the work
Speaker 1: to get us there. I'm Colin and now cider's Cider's it, man.
Speaker 4: That's hot.
Speaker 1: What about your favorite favorite thing about cider? Can you
Speaker 1: even name one thing?
Speaker 3: I suppose there's two things, which I know is not
Speaker 3: one thing, but partly it's the it's the people, it's
Speaker 3: the community element there is that there is a community
Speaker 3: of cider people. And in the UK context, we got
Speaker 3: together for the first time just at the weekend for
Speaker 3: this event called the Bristol Cider Salon, which is which
Speaker 3: I sort of helped helped the co organized along with
Speaker 3: the wonderful Martin Barkla from Pilton Cider and Tom Oliver
Speaker 3: from Oliver Cider and Perry. And it was in the
Speaker 3: city of Bristol, which is which I live just outside
Speaker 3: of in the southwest of England, real Heartland area. And
Speaker 3: it was yeah, makers, enthusiasts and drinkers all getting together
Speaker 3: sharing some drinks and it's a really cool thing. It's
Speaker 3: something that we all sort of share. It's something that
Speaker 3: we're passionate about inside of people are just like quite
Speaker 3: nice people and and interesting people. So there's definitely this
Speaker 3: there's this community, whether it be side, but also again
Speaker 3: coming back to the censor place and that the geographical community.
Speaker 3: I love. I love the fact that there's you know,
Speaker 3: makers in the area that I'm from, and you know,
Speaker 3: there's there's a apple variety called the Democrat, a side
Speaker 3: of apple variety. And you know, I made ten liters
Speaker 3: of dimmot read not last year, two years ago, and
Speaker 3: I think it tastes all right, it's a little bit.
Speaker 3: It's a little little bit farm me on the nose,
Speaker 3: entered it into a competition, didn't get a medal. Not
Speaker 3: not bitter, not bitter much. But you know, ultimately I
Speaker 3: don't it doesn't matter. I just feel so grateful that
Speaker 3: here is something that apple variety was being recorded as
Speaker 3: being an awesome apple five hundred years ago. And I
Speaker 3: know that that like my granddad used to make you know,
Speaker 3: Sid and Perry on on this on this this farm
Speaker 3: where my mum grew up, and too it's not in
Speaker 3: the family anymore, but but you know, I made a
Speaker 3: Perry from the same tree that I know that he
Speaker 3: would have done, and he died before I was born,
Speaker 3: And there's nothing sad about this other than just like,
Speaker 3: it's just awesome that I have this, have this connection
Speaker 3: through this, through this action, I feel slightly responsible, but
Speaker 3: more just kind of celebratory. So it's just it's just
Speaker 3: something that really gets into your bones.
Speaker 1: I think, Wow, that's really amazing. You give so much
Speaker 1: context to cider, and I love that that is one
Speaker 1: way for other people to appreciate it as well. It's
Speaker 1: not just something that tastes good that you sit around
Speaker 1: a drink, or if you've had a hard day and
Speaker 1: you absolutely need this too unwind. It's not it's not
Speaker 1: about that, and I love that That's kind of the
Speaker 1: message that you're spreading is that cider really is an
Speaker 1: art to be enjoyed.
Speaker 6: You know, absolutely absolutely, So ask dry experts scrumpy questions,
Speaker 6: because earnestly, they are just bubbly fonts of knowledge and passion,
Speaker 6: and one day we're all going to be eaten by
Speaker 6: worms anyway, So do whatever you want, learn what you want.
Speaker 1: Find out more about Gabe Cook at the siderologist dot com. Naturally,
Speaker 1: you can look for him on social media as the Siderologist.
Speaker 1: Pick up his books. Siderology is his first one and
Speaker 1: then he just released Modern British Ciders and his podcast
Speaker 1: is Neutral Cider Hotel. A donation went to Tiny Changes.
Speaker 1: All those links are in the show notes. If you
Speaker 1: liked this episode, send it to a friend. There are
Speaker 1: a bunch more links at aliboard dot com, slash ologies,
Speaker 1: slash Siderology. We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker 1: I'm at ali ward just one l in my name
Speaker 1: on Instagram and Twitter. Come be our friends. Thank you
Speaker 1: to longtime friend Aaron Talbert, who is the admin on
Speaker 1: the Ologies podcast Facebook group full of great people. Ologiesmerch
Speaker 1: dot com is where to go to get t shirts
Speaker 1: and totes and hoodies and masks and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: And that is handled by sisters Bondie Dutch and Shannon
Speaker 1: Faltis of the comedy podcast You Are That. Emily White
Speaker 1: of the Wardery makes all of our transcripts. She's great.
Speaker 1: She's available for hire if you need transcripts or anything.
Speaker 1: Bleeping is done by Caleb Patten and Bleeped episodes and
Speaker 1: transcripts are available at aliwar dot com slash ologiestash extras
Speaker 1: there's no link in the show notes. Thank you, of
Speaker 1: course to Noel Dilworth and Susan Hale for the Ologies
Speaker 1: business they do behind the scenes and social media help.
Speaker 1: And of course to the incomparable Jared Sleeper, who is
Speaker 1: both sweet and dry and a bit scrumpy. And to
Speaker 1: Zeke Rodriguez Thomas and Stephen Ray Morris who both helped
Speaker 1: with Smologies episodes. More of those are coming soon. Thank
Speaker 1: you to Nick Thorburn who wrote and performed the theme music.
Speaker 1: And happy belated birthday to doctor Mike Natter. Also, it
Speaker 1: was my pop's birthday last week. If you stick around,
Speaker 1: I burden you with a secret from my dark soul. Okay,
Speaker 1: this week's secret was I was out of underwear because
Speaker 1: laundry just does not do itself and it's been a
Speaker 1: busy week. And then I found a new pack of
Speaker 1: undies in the linen closet and I was like, yes,
Speaker 1: I totally forgot I bought them. And I'm going to
Speaker 1: tell you something. I don't always wash things before I
Speaker 1: wear them. Jared is horrified at this. He washes everything
Speaker 1: before touches his body. But I'm like, it's not like
Speaker 1: someone in the factory, wore them around all day. I
Speaker 1: was like, you know, I don't care. I don't care.
Speaker 1: I don't know if wearing clothes without washing them first
Speaker 1: is like cool and chill of me because I don't care,
Speaker 1: or if it's repulsive. But it hasn't killed me yet,
Speaker 1: and I've got bigger fish to fry.
Speaker 2: Okay for bye.
Speaker 1: Pacaderman College, mommeology, crypto zoology, lithology, dechnology, meteorologyology, napology, seriology.
Speaker 2: Mmmm it, it's a whiskey drinking.
Speaker 3: He needs a longer drinking.
Speaker 2: It's a long drinking.
Speaker 3: You know, decided to drinking.
Speaker 2: You think the songs remind him over the good times,
Speaker 2: and he sinks the songs that remind him over the
Speaker 2: best times.