MAN: The easiest way to tell if an apple is ready
is to basically cut it across the middle...
..and then stick the two pieces back together...
..pick it up by its stem,
and if it sticks together, then it's pretty much ripe.
MILLIE: Michael Henry certainly knows his apples,
and he should - he's a master cider-maker, horticulturalist
and the boss at his family's cider business at Harcourt
in Victoria's Central Highlands.
Tell me about this little valley. It's renown for apple-growing.
Yes, it's been growing apples for quite some time.
Back in the mid-1800s,
the gold rush happened in this area,
and they needed to supply water to the sluices so they could find gold.
But the people who actually really struck on gold
were the people who decided to put in vegetables and fruit trees
to supply all the miners.
And is that because of the soil here? Basically, yeah.
It's really good soil, well-draining,
so the apples really love that sort of condition.
How many trees are you growing here on the property?
Currently on our property we have about 4,500 trees,
predominantly all apples.
We grow three varieties of eating apples
and 43 varieties of cider apples.
There are 43 varieties of cider apples in Australia?!
There's 49 varieties of cider apples in Australia,
we just happen to only grow 43 of them.
We train our trees to the Tatura system,
a little system that was developed in the town of Tatura.
Basically we pull the trees back to a 20-degree angle to the vertical.
This promotes better apple set and growth.
And then on the wires, we fan the apples out into a flat fan,
so it's a nice flat surface.
So it's like a flat espalier...
A flat espalier sitting on a slight angle.
And the best reason for that is we get better light penetration,
so you get better fruit scent, better fruit quality.
And it is also a lot easier to pick apples off a flat tree -
you just step up to them and pick.
Whereas, if you're dealing with the big open bars,
you've actually gotta reach into the insides of the tree,
fighting against all the leaves and the scratchy twigs and everything.
Real cider is basically made from pure juice.
So you take an apple, you crush it, you extract all the juice,
and then using 100% juice, you ferment it, same as a wine.
So the basic cider is made from a really familiar apple?
Yes, our pink lady, which we're actually picking today.
This is an Aussie apple.
Yeah, it was created back in the '50s
from a cross between a Lady Williams and a Golden Delicious.
It makes a very clean, crisp cider.
Am I allowed to try? Ooh, yes, by all means.
So this is the original cider.
It's a very quick, sharp, palate-cleansing cider
that is very, very refreshing.
Yeah, I could see me drinking that after a hard day in the garden.
Easily. (LAUGHS)
Sugars are what create the alcohol. It's not what creates the flavour.
What actually creates the flavour for you
are the tannins and the acids found in the apples.
Most eating apples - things like these pink ladies -
they have a tannin count of around about 0.01%, so practically nothing.
But cider apples have a tannin content
of around about 0.6%, so very tannic.
And so a tannic apple will go dark as soon as you bite it...
Correct.
..turn your face inside out.
Correct. (BOTH LAUGH)
If you wish to step up from something like the pink lady cider,
you then need to move to something
where we use all of the apples that we grow on the property.
So this is our orchard representation.
It is roughly half pink lady apples,
the other half a hodgepodge collection of all 43 varieties,
depending on what the season has produced.
So these are the cider apples truly.
You couldn't eat them straight off the tree.
Well, you are welcome to have a bite,
but they are not necessarily what you would call palatable.
Think of a teabag and chewing on it.
I'm not doing that twice. (LAUGHS)
Alright. You don't want to eat these guys.
BUT you do want to drink them.
So the flavour of that is... Is represented in there.
This is more towards what you would expect
of a traditional English-style cider, or scrumpy.
The ciders are not sweet
because we do a secondary fermentation to get the sparkle
and we don't add any chemicals or sulphurs.
According to Michael,
cider-making at home isn't too challenging.
And I wanted to find out if it's true.
You can't use a juicer
because that combines the pulp and juice together.
You can get through that
by just chopping them up or running them through a food processor.
But the trick is to just get a small bit of pulp.
What variety are we gonna juice today?
What we're juicing today is our Brown Snout.
A very rare apple, indeed.
Brown... It's going brown really quickly, isn't it?
That would be from those tannins that I mentioned earlier
about that's where all of our flavour comes from.
And this is actually part of the process,
is to allow that oxidation to occur for a small amount of time
just to build those flavours up.
So we need to get the juice out of this pulp now,
and the easiest way to do that would be to just grab a handful of this,
throw it in a small pillowcase, spread it out
and then wring the pillowcase out, catching everything into a bucket.
But if you want, we can move onto something like
this little basket press that we have here.
The bag in there is to stop the fine pulp coming through to the boards
and keep all the pulp inside and just let the juice flow.
If you grab that circular dish, you put it on top.
And then grab those boards,
they go in there.
And then the pressing plate.
And away we go.
Now we're starting to get some juice flow.
There you go. Try that.
Oh, that is completely delicious.
Thank you. It is full of sugars.
Full of sugars, and it will produce
quite a high-alcoholic cider when we get around to it,
but full of flavour.
So next step.
Next step is we need to add some yeast to this juice
so it turns into cider.
Predominantly within cider-making we use a champagne yeast,
which can be bought at any good wine-making shop.
It's a strong, clean fermenting yeast
that doesn't produce too much hydrogen sulphide,
and it will ferment up to 17% alcohol.
So you're not measuring that.
You don't really need to measure it.
There are measurements that you can follow,
but the yeast is a live product
and it will grow to suit the environment in which it's been put.
So if there's too much yeast, it just won't survive.
If there's too little, it'll take longer to do the job.
Exactly.
What we also do is we add a little bit of sugar
just to give the young yeast
something to feed on before we put it in the cider.
And in about 15 to 20 minutes,
we'll have a nice, creamy head on top of that
and it'll be ready to add to the cider.
Oh, OK. This is looking good.
We've got a nice crema on top, so the yeast seems to have worked.
So what we need to do now is give this a quick stir...
..throw it in the juice,
and there we go - we're done, we've just made cider.
Really? That's it? That's it. That simple.
Now, it will take around about two to four weeks
for the full fermentation to occur,
and at that stage you'll have a nice, dry cider,
which you can just pour into a glass and enjoy as is.
Well, that seems pretty simple.
Even a humble old gardener could have a go.
It is very simple and anyone can have a go and it's good fun.
Well, thank you very much for showing us how easy it is
to do something else with the fruits of our labour.
Pleasure. Absolute pleasure.