Jan
17
In Hunt of the Cider Apples
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Unless you know about some lost, abandoned orchard in your uncle’s backyard, you will probably have a tough time making a good home-made apple cider here in BC. That’s because, according to Andrew Lea’s UK Cider page, you need the right apples. And those apples just aren’t cultivated anymore.
Think of wine. A good wine grape is too sour to eat. So too should a good cider apple be too sour to eat. Crab apples get close, but there are even more specialized varieties. Yarlington Mills or Kingston Blacks I am told are good. But I couldn’t find them. After some searching I am sad to report buying cider apples in Vancouver is next to impossible.
What I did find, though, was Derek Bisset, a hobby farmer in Langley who has a small orchard of cider trees he keeps for his own cider. A member of the BC Fruit Growers Association, he is one of the few to dedicate his time to the craft, growing a few acres on his plot on a bench just above the Fraser River. Interested in visiting him and his operation, Cohen, his roomate Jen, and I took a trip out to see it.
Taking a two hour bus trip through the burbs with a bus driver who happened to brush his teath, while driving, we got off in Maple Ridge. We rode down to the Albion Ferry, crossed the Fraser and rode past Fort Langley where we saw these massive vultures or eagles that were I swear to god some of the biggest flying creatures I have ever seen. We got to Derek’s at around noon and stepped in for some tea.
I am not sure what I was expecting in Derek. Part of me was prepared for a meandering visit that 
involved drinking a lot of cider and forgetting the finer points we had come in search of. But Derek, a retired highschool teacher who had Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought opened on the table, wasn’t prepared to let us off easily.
The first point he made was that apples don’t grow from seed. You throw that apple core in the trash heap and, assuming it grows, it only has a one in fifteen thousand chance it will produce an apple that you can eat. “You’re liable to grow something from Kazahkstan,” he said, where the wild progenitor of the modern cultivated desert apple can still be found.
The reason for this is that every apple seed carries with it a blueprint for a very different apple tree. “Heterozygosity,” I later read is what they call it. Only very rarely does an apple tree come into existence with the right kind of apple you are looking for.
The way to do it is to wait for one of these lottery-winning apples and clone it, which you do by taking clippings from the desired tree, what he calls scions, and grafting them onto some root-stock, a specialized tree that determines how large the scion grows and how early it fruits. Apparently there are only a few standardized root-stock varieties available, called weird names like M9, M26, and MM106. Don’t ask me what happens if a disease kills this limited rootstock-pool, though these people are trying to find out.
Derek’s trees come from the Merridale Cidery on Vancouver Island, which, along with Sea Cider, maintain some of the only cider apple orchards in the Province. Merridale’s founder Al Piggott got the trees originally from Herfordshire and Somerset. Derek says these varieties are “rare” and “completely unknown in North America,” adding that “there are not many places in the world where specialty apples are grown just for cider- other is Normandy.”
What followed was a crash course in cider. “Cider can be made from any apples, like wine from any grapes. We used to make wine from Thompson seedless when we were desperate. Can’t remember if it produced anything but a headache.”
Canadian cider has been equally mindless. “The Okanagan cideries make cider from any apples they can find,” he said, comparing the product to the wine made from Thompson seedless. “Making proper cider from cider apples was not something people thought about. It was’t something people thought was available. Nobody knew what it was, didn’t think there was anything else.”
The art of Cider, from what I could make out, was currently in a bit of a dark age. From the days of Johnny Appleseed through to the early 20th century, most people either had a cider orchard or had access to one. An apple was more likely to be fermented in a cider barrel than eaten. But once the temperance movement began brandishing the axe, a symbolic gesture aimed in part at the destruction of the cider-orchard, the cider-apple’s days were numbered. By the time of prohibition, apple growers focused on the sweet varieties, like the Red Delicious and Macintosh, and the bitter old varieties bound for the cider barrels fell by the wayside.
Even England, the life-blood of cider, had lost interest. Factory-made plonk like Bulmers replaced the
small cideries. Then football hooligans adopted the drink for its alcohol content. “Hooliganism,” said Bisset, “meant by the 60’s cider had a very bad reputation.”
The result of all this has been a steady deterioration of cider that has left many of us, including myself, clueless to what it was, or could be. The popular, booming varieties, even the top sellers like Strongbow mentioned in this old Globe and Mail article, weren’t it. Nor were the standard Okanagan ciders, sweet, flacid and headache inducing, doing it for me.
It took one sip of Derek’s rich yellow home-brew to understand just how far off mark we have allowed cider to come. Fermented to dryness over a year relying on natural yeast and patience, it was sharp, alcoholic, and left a pleasant taste that followed us out into the orchard, where, with the fog still hanging over us, we kicked around at a few trees, looked at some grafts, and talked about when the snow would melt so we could come back and buy some for our own nascent cider orchards.
James Steidle
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