Wonders of Wine and Food

 

Cider

Cider has a delightfully ancient and globe-trotting history. Its roots stretch back thousands of years, with the earliest known references dating to around 55 BCE, when Julius Caesar encountered the Celts in Britain fermenting crabapples into a cider-like drink.

The word “cider” itself likely comes from the Hebrew shekar, meaning a strong drink, and made its way into English via Old French. While apples were often too bitter to eat raw in ancient times, people discovered that pressing and fermenting the juice created a pleasantly boozy beverage.

Cider gained popularity across Europe, especially in regions like Normandy, Brittany, and the West Country of England, where apple orchards thrived. When European colonists arrived in North America, they brought cider-making traditions with them. Apples grew easily in the New World, and cider quickly became a staple drink—often safer than water and more accessible than beer.

Cider is an alcoholic beverage made mainly from the fermented juice of apples, though pears can also be used; in the UK, pear cider is known as perry. In the US and parts of Canada, the term cider almost exclusively refers to nonalcoholic apple juice (apple cider). The phrase hard cider is used to denote the fermented version. 

Real cider is fermented apple juice, pure and simple. Traditionally, it is made with bittersweet and bitter-sharp apples, which have the tannins and acidity required to make a quality product. While dessert apples, such as Granny Smith or MacIntosh, are used by large commercial cider makers, these common varieties often require the addition of modifiers such as concentrates and synthetic flavourings.

Common varieties include: Golden Delicious, Johngold, Macoun, Gala, Fuji, Braeburn, and Honeycrisp. Ontario McIntosh, Ida Red, Spy, Gala, Paula Red, and Russet are commonly used.

Defining the fruit (from National Association of Cidemakers)

Cider apple varieties are divided into four categories according to the relative proportion of acidity and tannin:

Sweet varieties are the blandest of the four categories, being low in both components. They are useful to blend with ciders from the more strongly flavoured varieties, which, by themselves, would be too extreme in taste and aroma to be palatable. Typical examples of sweet apples are Sweet Coppin, in use to a small extent, and Court Royal which was used extensively at one time but rarely used nowadays.

Bittersweet apples impart the characteristic flavour of English ciders; as the name implies, they are low in acid and high in tannin. The latter is responsible for two sensations on the palate - astringency and bitterness. In the bittersweet apple, there is a whole range of combinations of these two characteristics, varying from little astringency coupled with intense bitterness to very marked astringency coupled with mild bitterness. Typical bittersweets are Dabinett, Yarlington Mill and Tremlett’s Bitter.

Sharp varieties, so called because the predominant characteristic is that of acidity, are encountered less frequently today, possibly because culinary fruit, which has a similar flavour balance, can be substituted for this class. There are, however, recognized full sharp cider varieties, two of which are Crimson King and Brown’s Apple.

Bitter-sharp is the fourth class of cider apple. These are fairly high in acid and tannin, although the latter component does not show the wide range of flavours exhibited by the bittersweet. Stoke Red is a good example.

Cider apples were traditionally grown on ‘Standard’ trees in orchards grazed by livestock. About 40 trees would be planted per acre (100 per hectare).

Cider has a long and fascinating history in the UK. Although it had been assumed that cider was introduced after the Norman Conquest, it is now thought to have been here long before that.

Apple trees were growing in the UK well before the Romans came but it was they who introduced organised cultivation. It is likely that the wandering peoples, who travelled through the countries which we now know as Spain and Northern France, introduced their ‘shekar’ (a word of Hebrew origin for strong drink) to the early Britons. 

However, it is true to say that the Normans had the most positive effect on the history of cider making. Northern France was renowned for the volume and quality of its orchards and vineyards, as indeed was Southern England, but owing to climatic changes these areas became less suitable for the growing of grapes. Gradually cider began to replace wine.

In the UK and France, cider apples tended to be grown towards the western extremities because the climatic and soil conditions were most suitable. Under the influence of the Gulf Stream, the weather was relatively mild and the areas concerned had a fairly heavy annual rainfall. 

These combined factors of climate and history established the cider producing areas of England as we know them today.

After their conquest of England in 1066, the Normans introduced many changes - perhaps the drinking of cider was one of the best! The popularity of cider grew steadily; new varieties of apples were introduced, and cider began to figure in the tax records. 

It became the drink of the people, and production spread rapidly. By 1300, there were references to cider production in the counties now known as Buckinghamshire, Devonshire, Essex, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Kent, Norfolk, Somerset, Suffolk, Surrey and Sussex and in most other counties as far north as Yorkshire. 

Cider was produced in substantial quantities on farms; every farm would have a few cider apple trees as well as cooking and dessert apple trees in the orchard, and it became customary in the 18th Century to pay part of a farm labourer’s wage in cider. A typical allowance on a farm would be 3 - 4 pints per day. Labourers were rated by the amount they drank; one comment was that a 2 gallon a day man was worth the extra he drank! In the western counties of England in particular, a farm worker could receive perhaps one-fifth of his wage in cider. In the latter part of the 19th Century, a campaign to stop payment in the form of alcoholic beverages brought about the addition of a clause to the Truck Act of 1887 which prohibited the payment of wages in this way.

In Canada the history of cider could be traced back to explores like Captain Cook and the Hudson Bay Company. Cider was used to help prevent Scurvy. It may have been the British that first brought Cider to Canada but production flourished in Quebec.

The honour of planting the first apple tree in the history of Quebec goes to Louis Hébert, apothecary from Paris and New France's first settler. He did so around 1617 on the site where Quebec City was founded in 1608. A good number of the first French settlers to the colony were Normans who brought over the apple cider craft. Sizable orchards developed in the region of New France, particularly on Île d'Orléans.