We recently caught up with Jez Taylor, head of Daylesford’s market garden, who admits he can happily talk about his passion for apples and cider “until the cows come home”.
In the late 1970s, Jez’s parents took over an old farm shop and five acres with a glasshouse and orchard in the Vale of Evesham, Worcestershire. He remembers always taking apples to school, even in April, when he’d be eating a late variety that stores well, such as Newton Wonder.
When he was nine-years-old, they took some of their harvest to a local juice maker, and so began his fascination with processing apples. They ended up with about 20 large plastic containers of apple juice, which were left in the shed for about three weeks. “We didn’t pasteurise any, so it went on this journey to becoming fizzy apple juice and cider,” he explains.
“Having free access to all this sweet juice was amazing – such free abundance! The alchemy of taking apples, which I’d always taken for granted, and turning them into something like that was nothing short of a miracle.”
After leaving university Jez became a small-scale market gardener on the outskirts of Reading. But every weekend in autumn he’d return to his parents’ village to make cider. He found that it worked well with growing veg, as by September most of that work is done, where the apple harvest season is just beginning.
Developing a taste for cider
Realising he had a lot of spare apples and didn’t need to pay duty on less than 7000 litres of cider, Jez spent the next eight years perfecting his cider making skills. “It was mostly dual purpose fruit, so quite tart – Bramleys, Newton Wonders, Elizabeth Anne, all sorts of odd ones,” he explains.
As a nod to the village he grew up in, Cleeve Prior, Jez named his first cider Prior’s Tipple. He then sold it alongside his produce at farmer’s markets. “For me, the art of making cider initially came from having access to spare fruit. I would enthuse about it, drink it, share it.”
Jez experimented with several different varieties from old abandoned orchards, but they were eating apples such as Spartan and Golden Delicious, which didn’t have a lot of character. “Occasionally I would acquire some outgrade Russets from a fruit packing station and that made amazing, thick juice; a lovely cider. I came to like the tartness of cooking apples post-summer malolactic fermentation.
“But I didn’t want to use more than half cooking apples, because if it’s too tart, people notice and won’t drink it. When everything was bottled up I’d sweeten it to 1008 specific gravity. And when it’s in that format, people thought it was great, because it wasn’t diluted. In the early noughties it was still a novelty to have full strength cider that hadn’t been messed with.”
New opportunities for experimentation
In 2008, he started working at Daylesford and discovered a nearby orchard which had been planted in the late 80s. The new owners had no interest in the apples, so he struck a deal to manage it in exchange for the harvest. “I’d always wanted some bitter sweet cider apples to mix with my cooking apples,” he says. “It gives more flavour to the cider without having to wait a year for the malolactic fermentation to mellow it out.”
The orchard has ten different varieties, some really strong and bittersweet. Jez’s specific varietal blend of cider changes each year due to the biennial bearing nature of the trees, but two firm favourites are Brown’s Apple and Sweet Coppin. “I’m always looking for something which is two-thirds to a half culinary and then a half to a third bittersweet,” he explains.
“You can dilute the flavour down, but I view cider as like wine – a palette cleanser, without too much sugar, on the dry side.”
Apples: so much more than just fruit to eat
For many small-scale operators in the apple industry, cider making is a fringe activity. It’s worth growing dessert varieties: a tonne of decent grade eating apples is worth at least £1k, but for outgrades, it’s more like £120. So if you’re growing fruit, it’s important to also have a processing arm – such as cider, apple juice, cider vinegar – or you’ll end up with a lot of waste that could be making money.
“Two years ago, there was so much fruit in this orchard that I got a cider maker to take it, but I could’ve used 40 tonnes more fruit,” says Jez. “I started thinking we could make apple juice concentrate and sell it like maple syrup – our own honest sweetener, a sugar source from this bio region. Those are the conversations I want to have – about what’s here already that we can make the most of.”
Perfecting the art of cider making
Those who make cider know that there’s a fair amount of trial and error before you get it right, so what’s Jez’s biggest mistake? Where most people go wrong, he says, is not paying attention to keeping oxygen out.
Jez knows this first hand, after thinking he could leave cider in wooden casks for over 12 months. “A cask loses five percent ‘to the angels’ every year, so over the course of a season, you’ll lose about three inches to evaporation,” he explains. “That’s replaced with oxygen; the film yeast takes over; and you lose that clarity of flavour you had in May, when the October pressing has finished fermenting and it’s settled. It hasn’t started the malolactic yet, but it’s quite pure and clean flavour.
“When you get oxidation and film yeast comes in, it starts to change a bit, and you lose that magic. It’s a shame, because then you’ve got to blend this with something good because you can’t sell it like that. You can cheer up a cider that’s lost its best bits by sweetening it a bit and carving it up, but it’s not the same.”
Jez never uses sulphites or added yeast, and filters it because he prefers a sterile filtration over a pasteurisation.
“There’s something about cider that hasn’t been messed around with that works on another level,” he says. “I always think that cider is much better for a party than beer, because beer is basically soporific; you just want to go to sleep. You can’t buy the kind of high you get from cider!”
A rosy future for UK cider?
Jez feels the future for the UK cider industry is pretty positive. “There’s lots of newcomers like Ripe Cider and Little Pomana taking this niche world of cider seriously and that’s just brilliant,” he says. “The more we can get people to engage with good cider, the better.”
Recipe idea to try: Jez’s favourite simple alcoholic drink
Take any culinary cider, place in a bottle in April with a teaspoon of sugar, and leave for at least a year. (It conditions in the bottle, where the malolactic fermentation happens).
It’s ready to drink the following summer, and because it’s been bottle conditioned for a year, the sediment consolidates and it doesn’t become cloudy when poured, so you don’t get that yeasty flavour.
“It’s a drink with such a simple flavour profile, from the easiest fruit in the world to pick,” says Jez. “I’ve even got my parents drinking it with Creme de Cassis – they call it Kir Rurale!”
by Sarah Cossom, Communications Manager
Daylesford Organic is a corporate partner of The Orchard Project, donating profits from a selection of their hampers towards our work. Find out more about the partnership.