The creation (of vinegar)

Hundreds of litres of home fermented cider to be turned into raw apple vinegar

---

West Berkshire, May 2024

---

Cider

What started a couple of years ago as little more than a small experiment in vinegar making, has this year gathered pace. That first autumn after the apple harvest where we bottled the juice from over one tonne of heritage apples meticulously hand-picked from the orchard here, climbing into the high branches of these magnificent trees to pick each fruit with a twist of the stem, placing the apples into large paper sacks, suspended from the boughs by loops of rope, carefully gathered one by one, supervised by the odd hornet just to keep things interesting whilst working at height, then after the pressing having kept back one container of about ten litres of the murky, raw unfiltered juice, frothing in its container, as a giant raft of sediment formed as the days ticked by. The golden juice sloshing around as I carried it from the kitchen to the silence of the cellar to let it sit undisturbed in the quiet dark for a few months.

I was almost a little envious.

This small glass vessel of heady cider, an experiment, sharp with the sweet, woozy smell of fermenting apples, left for a couple of weeks in the warm of the kitchen, pressed from the harvest of old forgotten varieties of fruit from the orchard here.

Lord Lambourne, Jupiter, Bramley, Fiesta, Beurre Hardy, Blenheim Orange, Early Transparent, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Winter Gem, Falstaff, Bountiful, Spartan, Egremont Russet, Crispin, Sunset, Newton’s Wonder, Pearl, Ouillings Golden Gage, Marjorie Seedlings, Denniston Superb, Yellow Pershore, Doyenne de Comice, and Williams.

Our heritage varieties

Words to conjure you away to a different place and time. Distant names written by hand on an old planting map of the orchard, plotting the lines of magical trees, some missing now through felling and disease over the genrations, so making sense of these complicated rows of trees is often a challenge.

Varieties reminiscent of the past.

A meadow of tall grass and wildflowers where the apple, plum and pear trees stand quietly in rows on a terrace above the lower fields that stretch away into the distance where the Highland and Galloway cattle graze along with two miniature donkeys, and a pair of young Shetlands. A pair of white geese have taken residence in a pool amongst the long sedge grass, a pond that has formed from the rain that has never really stopped here since last winter. An orchard where bees live, in their sweet cedar hives, walls and joints sticky with propolis, tall square wooden houses assembled in their respective sections, painted the colour of thick-set summer honey and then there’s the colony of wasps who live in their nest underground by the base of the trunk of a Jupiter tree, tricking the unwary who might misstep or sit down in the grass for an hour in the afternoon sun and the majestic striped hornets as large as your thumb that hide in the creeping ivy that grows on the tumbled down wall behind the hives, waiting for a chance to dive in and steal from the bees.

Somewhere that autumn, I convinced myself that I should teach myself to make cider vinegar, as that way at least firstly I shouldn’t have to buy any for a while, and secondly widening my quest to broaden my skill set, to lessen my reliance on buying ingredients and teaching myself to make things that I like.

I also am fortunate to have over a tonne or so of apples each autumn to work with. Jellies, jams, preserves, juices and vinegars are all mine to make.

One pallet of many

I have reached a point in my working life where I have stopped fiddling with ingredients and now place things down on plates for what they are rather than what I think people might like to see. I can appreciate the simplicity of two or three ingredients. I also want to make my own products. Cooking just isn’t enough any more.

I find it important as a chef to have the skill to be able to create the ingredients that I otherwise might buy, such as cheese, ferments and charcuterie. If I need pancetta for instance I can cut off a chunk from a piece I made earlier in the year, likewise with salamis. Smoked fish I make myself, smoking over wood that we cut and dry from the tree management here on the farm. Vinegar I create from different herbs, flowers and fruits, fermented slowly in jars, bottles and vessels tucked away in the cellar or into cupboards alongside salted fruits, preserved flower buds, capers and pickles from the hedgerows that grow wild here. Cheese made from local milk, pressed, wrapped in cheesecloth, brushed with lard to seal and aged in the cellar. These are things I firmly believe that I should know how to make, on whatever small scale I can. I no longer run a large brigade of chefs, I work alone and am free to create.

The last bottle

This week I used the last of my bottles of vinegar from the old harvest, hidden away, waiting for spring to be filled with petals pulled from the Rosa Rugosa from the rose garden. Letting the picked blooms steep in the golden liquid, the sharpness turning floral as the rose imparts its scent, golden through to a deep blushed pink as the days change.Then an Ox heart tomato from the South of France, blanched for ten seconds, then peeled with a small sharp knife, slipping the peel away between my fingers, seasoned with a crush of sea salt and a splash of the rose petal vinegar. Something so simple but complex in its ease.

Letting the cider turn from a simple juice into something mildly alcoholic, its heady smell taking over the small cellar where glass jars sit with their tightly covered muslin squares to cover the openings to allow exposure to the air. Pieces of cheesecloth held in place with stout rubber bands, breathing, slowly, turning to vinegar, vessels arranged in rows neatly on a shelf in a vault amongst endless foil-topped bottles and magnums of old wines and champagne, capsules, corks, racked and undisturbed. Sat on the shelf next to infusions of glorious pink vinegar made from figs grown wild in the afternoon sun, facing south on a huge fig tree that clambers up the rear of the house, pale meadowsweet and elderflowers from alongside the lake preserved in bottles some sharp some sweet, syrups and vinegar from the garden. A perry, made of the fruits from twisted, lichen-covered thin branches of a spindly Beurre Hardy pear tree, now ageing in oak barrels and then the stubbornly uncooperative red wine vinegar that I have forlornly tried to make, by crushing the small purple, thick-skinned grapes, dusted with a fine grey bloom that hang in small clusters from the old twisting vines that cover the walls of one of the great wings of the beautiful grand house here in the middle of nowhere. A vinegar that has stubbornly smelt of nail varnish remover from the first week that I put it to rest in the cellar. I know I have made a mistake with this one somewhere, but no matter how many times I fine it, strain it, sing to it, and generally try all manner of flattery to turn it into something I can use, I remain defeated.

This year’s cider has bubbled, fermented and settled over the winter, the curved airlocks popping and gurgling as the juice has fermented in its vats into a respectable cider. Now begins the process of letting nature change hundreds of litres of this farmyard scrumpy into ‘acetic acid’.

There is quite a lot of it if I’m honest.

Eight large vats to be precise, that have sat neatly on a shelf in one of our outbuildings here at the farm, weighing down the new wooden shelves that support them, bowed down in the middle under the weight of what is likely to be nearly a quarter of a tonne of liquid, the shelving hastily supported with another heavy upright prop, else a swampy mess on the floor might greet me one morning.

The vats have this last week finally been decanted, I hefted each one down from its place on the high shelf, siphoning mouthfuls of the gas given off from the vessels made me giddy as I opened them placing the siphon and sucking to start the flow, separating the clear, fragrant, amber-coloured dry cider from its lees on which it has fermented since last autumn, then meticulously cleaning the drums of any sediment that stubbornly clings to the inside before pouring back once again with much sloshing and splashing into the drum, covering the opening with squares of cheesecloth, then leaving six months of patient work to mother nature once again to begin the next stage.

Waiting for mother nature

The difference between fermenting ten litres and over two hundred has bothered me late at night on many occasions.

I have quite often been very worried about it all to be honest.

Having had the good fortune of garnering advice from Andrew Lea who is known as the go-to man for anything cider related, and to whom I have shown the extent of my general ignorance on a subject to which he has devoted the whole of his working life. He’s worked in cider’s proximity for over fifty years, and not only has he written the book on craft cider, but he’s revised it twice.

I think he has tolerated me at best with my ridiculous questioning and random emails, putting me firmly in my place when once confounded with the readings on my hydrometer, confusing AbV with SG and asking him a question which in reality had no answer as I had got myself in a terrible muddle, but I am pleased to say that at the halfway point in this story of producing more cider vinegar than I will ever have a use for, I have a very acceptable cider.

It has been sipped at and no one has died.

And I have a lot of it.

Thank you Andrew.

And with this in mind, I’m at the stage where I’m patiently waiting for nature to start converting the alcohol into acetic acid. I must take care to prevent fruit flies from finding a way past the tightly bound squares of cheesecloth that are tightly bound to the mouths of the vessels or they will lay their eggs and do the unspeakable things that fruit flies do. Each day or so I stir the liquid to allow air to circulate throughout, speeding up the reaction and with the discs of ‘vinegar mother’ now added to each drum, saved from my previous experiments in vinegar making, a ghostly veil sunk to the bottom, growing in the weird way that only cellulose and mycoderma aceti does. I have convinced myself that all will most probably work out fine.

Until next time

William

---

What you might do this week with a bottle or two of cider vinegar.

Rose petal vinegar

First, acquire yourself a bottle or two of the best cider vinegar that you can find. Raw and unfilteredis best.

At this point you should try to locate yourself either a hedge full of elderflowers or a rose garden in need of a prune.

If you were to pick a colander full of bright rose petals or heads of fragrant elderflowers, give a gentle shake to instruct any bugs that they must leave. They will likely walk out onto your table so be prepared.

For roses, simply remove any leaves or buds and fill a glass jar, topping up with vinegar to submerge, clingfilm tightly for a few days, then watch as the course change, stirring once or twice a day to submerge the flowers once again.

When it is pink, lets say a week, it can be strained and bottled

Blushing

---

Elderflower vinegar

If it’s elderfowers that you have found, snip the stems of the flower head away to keep only really the white flowers, as the stems contain cynanide inducing glycosides, so no leaves or stems please as you don’t want to take a chance on that. As I have said before, nature is often trying to find discreet ways to kill us.

Submerge the flowers as with the roses, clingfilm and place in a cool dark place for a week or so. It can then be decanted into a bottle.

Truly delightful

---