Wildling

I’ve been making cider for years but this is my second year of selling on to pubs. I live in London but source apples down in Devon, pressing and fermenting at my in-laws’ house just outside Newton Abbot. This year I doubled down on production. I fermented 450 litres of cider from apples donated by farmers who had no use for them, a paltry amount by commercial standards but a fair bit of hard graft for me.  Most of the trees I picked from were old, scattered around ancient fields.   None of the farmers really knew the types of trees they had so I collected by taste, looking for the mouth-puckering tannins and balancing with the sweeter varieties and some cookers from a friend’s garden (I’m no expert but learning!). A few days of picking was followed a couple of weeks later by three days of pressing in late October 2015, a really mild dry period. In the spring I racked off a few bottles and started stalking the streets. It’s hard to sell cider in London,