How I made traditional Herefordshire cider at county orchard

Despite being somewhat of a local cider connoisseur I’d never had a go at making the stuff for myself, so when I heard that the county was going to experience a mini-heatwave I thought I’d make the most of the good weather and try my hand at the craft.

From chats with cider-making friends, I had worked out that there were three basic parts of the process: Scratting, which means crushing the apples into a pulp, pressing and fermenting.

But before the real work could begin, I’d have to get hold of some apples.

I headed down to the Leominster community orchard with a wheelbarrow, having wassailed the orchard earlier this year, and was surprised by the sheer abundance of fruit that was there to take. Within an hour I’d gathered quite an impressive load.

The apples were sourced from Leominster community orchard (Image: Joshua Dyer)

I wasn’t a huge fan of scratting the apples. While there was something therapeutic about sitting outside and cutting the apples up into small pieces, I then had to throw those pieces into a bucket and attack them with a special scratting drill bit in order to turn them into pulp. I couldn’t quite get the hang of that bit for whatever reason, and I ended up doing more damage to the bucket than to the apples.

The apples had to be turned into pulp (Image: Joshua Dyer)

Next was the pressing, which I found to be my favourite part. I was using a small apple press I had borrowed, and seeing the amber juice come flowing out was incredibly satisfying. I finally got the sense that I was achieving something… until the juice ran dry.

The pulp then had to be pressed. (Image: Joshua Dyer)

I had expected to fill at least two demijohns but after repeating the process above about five times I had only filled five-sixths of one.

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Deciding to call it quits, I sealed in the juice with a bung and bubbler I had bought from Phillip Morris and Sons and stored it underneath my stairs to ferment.

The juice will ferment inside a demijohn (Image: Joshua Dyer)

The wild fermentation process, I am told, takes one or two weeks to complete, so I won’t know whether it was all worth it until then.

Overall, I found the procedure to be more difficult than I expected but I learned a lot and will definitely be giving it another go in the future.

I thoroughly enjoyed taking my mind off the real world and spending the day outdoors getting in touch with an important part of the county’s history.