The cider year

Harvest and pressing dominate the calendar because they cannot be moved. Cider fruit ripens across a window running from September to November depending on cultivar, and much of it is gathered from the ground after it falls rather than picked from the tree, which means the timing is set by the fruit and not by the maker. Late cultivars extend the season into November; in some traditions fruit is deliberately held in heaps to soften before milling, which extends it further.

Everything about the working week changes in these weeks. Fruit arriving must be milled and pressed before it spoils, which imposes a daily rhythm that continues until the last load is through. In the farm era this was also the period of maximum labour on the holding, and it is the reason harvest custom clusters here.

Juice pressed in October ferments through the cold months. In a traditional unheated store this is slow, which is not a defect: a long cool ferment is one of the mechanisms by which traditional cider retains aroma, and the ambient temperature of a stone building in an English winter does the job that a modern maker does with a chiller.

While the cider works, the orchard is dormant and available. Winter is pruning season for apples, and it is when planting is done, gaps replanted, guards repaired and grazing stock managed under the trees. On a mixed holding this is also the quietest period for other enterprises, which is precisely why orchard work was scheduled into it.

Twelfth Night falls in the middle of this window. An orchard custom held in early or middle January occurs at the one moment when the fruit is committed, the cider is fermenting and cannot be hurried, and the trees are bare and accessible. Whatever meaning is later ascribed to the timing, the agricultural logic of it is not obscure.

Grafting is done in late winter and early spring, when scionwood cut in the dormant season is worked onto rootstocks or onto established frames. This is the practical mechanism by which named cultivars moved between farms and parishes, and it is worth noting that the movement of a variety and the movement of the people who grafted it are the same event.

Racking — drawing the cider off its lees into a clean vessel — begins as the primary ferment finishes and continues through spring. Malolactic conversion, where it happens, generally proceeds in the warming months, softening acidity and altering aroma. In traditional practice these things happen when they happen; in modern practice they are scheduled.

Blossom comes in late April and May, and with it the year’s only irreducible weather risk. A frost during flowering can remove a crop that six months of work has already been invested in, and the difference between a full year and an empty one is often decided in a single night.

Summer is maturation, blending, packaging and — in the farm tradition — the point at which the previous autumn’s cider is actually consumed, in the fields, during the longest working days of the year. The drink being poured in June was pressed the previous October, and the fruit for the next batch is on the tree overhead. That two-season overlap is the structural feature of the cider year and the thing that most distinguishes it from brewing.

For a modern producer the summer months carry a different load: keg and bottle sales run at their peak while tank space has to be cleared before the next harvest arrives, which is a scheduling problem rather than a customary one. The underlying constraint is the same one the farm faced. Fruit arrives once a year, and everything else in the calendar is arranged around that fact.