Traditional Cider and Cider Apples
Contents Updated: Thursday, 26 October 2006
Disappearing Cider Apple Varieties
The old varieties of apple are disappearing.
Searching out a Bloody Turk, a White Norman, a Goddard or maybe even a Sheep's Nose is no easy business. If you’re going to do it, the best time of year is the autumn. But as farmers begin to harvest the cider apples in Somersetshire and Herefordshire—the traditional cider counties of England—few people will be paying any regard to varieties of apple that were once household names, but have long since gone out of fashion.
The traditional bittersharp apple varieties with their higher tannin contents—and many of the bittersweet varieties with a low yield, too—have gone out of favour. Names like Greasey Pippin, Sheep’s Nose and Court Royal, which only a generation ago would have been well known to many a Herefordshire farmer, have fallen by the wayside. Small orchards and odd trees scattered here and there on countless farms, have long since disappeared. Farmers have cashed in on better and more reliable returns from cereals.
There are so many varieties of cider apple that their names alone could fill a page. Some, like the Kingston Black or Eggleton Styre, commemorate the places where they were first found or cultivated. Some are named after their finders or those who made them popular, like Breakwell’s Seeling or Tom Putt—an apple named after Sir Thomas Putt, a land owner from Devon in the 18th century.
The family of apples called Norman—of which there are at least a dozen, include Strawberry Norman and White Norman—are thought to have come from Normandy, where there is still a rural industry for cider. Coccagee, which means "goose turd" in Irish, was brought to Somerset from Ireland in the 18th century. But many of these old varieties, each of which can produce a cider with slightly different charactersttics, will simply never be found again. Dunkerton’s Cider Company, a traditional cider maker at Pembridge in Herefordshire, is one of a few small companies reviving near extinct varieties of cider apple. Each of their ciders is made from an individual variety—Kingston Black, Court Royal, Breakwell’s Seedling, Dabinett, Yarlington Mill and Foxwhelp—to impart its own flavour.
Cider
The English and Welsh still drink hundreds of millions of litres of cider each year. Cider is classless in terms of the socioeconomic classes. The top AB group drinks 20 per cent of it while the DE group drinks 28 per cent of it, and the rest is divided among the C groups in between.
Though an estimated 190,000 licensed premises in Britain sell cider, we drink far less than we once did. At the turn of the century, almost every farm in counties like Somerset and Hereford made cider from its own apples. Travelling cider makers did much of the milling to break up the apples, and pressing to squeeze the juice out, passing the juice into oak casks to ferment on the farm.
Every labourer was given a daily allowance of cider as part of the weekly wage. Farmers sometimes doubled the daily ration—about half a gallon—at harvest and haymaking—both thirsty times. Many farmers even rated their labourers by the volume they knocked back—a “two gallon a day man” was worth the extra, but the farmer made the hired labourer’s cider a bit more dilute than his own, at least until the harvest feast. Farms relied less on machinery than they do today, but a slip with a scythe could do nasty damage to a wrongly positioned leg. Victorian temperance reformers said cider was affecting the intelligence of the labouring classes, a real consequence of channelling the acidic pressed apple juice through lead gutters into the vats.
Farm cider-making, and the travelling cider maker, have been largely exchanged for mass produced, blended cider made in factories, from just a few varieties of apples that yield many fruits on each tree. The preference is for bittersweet varieties of apple—the ones with less tannin. These lack the strong, dry and astringent taste of many of the more traditional ciders. But the larger producers often use concentrated apple juices, sometimes imported, and make up their own concentrate for fermentation outside the autumn season.
The Goddard, a bittersweet variety, went out of fashion and two trees known to the Dunkerton’s Hereford cider makers in the eighties were grubbed out. So far, a search for Sheep’s Nose has yielded just three trees. “Anyone know where they can still be found?” asks Malcolm Smith, a biologist and science writer, living in North Wales wrote this—he wants to know, and so do we!
From L Price
On 16 Jan 2001—Leslie Price e-mailed us to say he thought he had one!
Are you still looking for the elusive “Sheep’s Nose” apple? I have a couple of trees known as “Early Sheep’s Nose” Would this be the same apple?” Does anyone know whether it is the same? If so please e-mail Leslie at Mount Vernon.
From S R Blair
On 4 Jan 2004—Your article on “Traditional Cider” asks where Sheep’s Nose apples can be found. In the mid-eighties I planted one in Dorchester, Massachusetts. It received very little care but managed some years to produce very large, very beautiful, dark red ( almost black ) fruit with delicious flavour. I purchased it and other “rare and choice” varieties as semi-dwarves from:
Henry Leuthardt Nurseries, Inc., Montauk Highway, Box 666, East Moriches, Long Island, N.Y. 11940-0666 , phone: (631) 878-1387, fax: (631) 874-0707.
It’s also known as Black Gilliflower. I hope, some day, to plant more specimens of it, replacing at least some of the Red Delicious, a variety I could live without and which is too abundant in my present orchard, here in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. This is historically very serious apple country, the next town over, Leominster, being the purported birthplace of Johnny Appleseed. Shaker communities were also very active in developing and popularizing new varieties, especially the nearby community at Shirley which used the shape of an apple as a sort of logo on many of their manufactures. There is now a lot of interest locally in discovering and rescuing dissappearing apple varieties with various societies dedicated to just this, the “holy grail” being a variety called, I believe, Shirley Foundling or perhaps Shaker Foundling.
Moses and Exodus
