Apple cider is everywhere this time of year—a mainstay of farmers markets and festivals. An adult version of the popular drink can also be ordered at the bar. This boozy cider is actually truest to the drink's earliest form, with roots dating back millennia. In fact, they were often too bitter to just munch on.
Instead, for thousands of years, people would press them for the juice and leave it to ferment, letting it bubble away until it turned into boozy hard cider, according to the National Apple Museum. S cider definitions into alignment with international standards, raising the allowable levels of carbonation and alcohol content and including pears as well as apples in the definition of hard cider. The first recorded references to cider date back to Roman times; in 55 BCE Julius Caesar found the Celtic Britons fermenting cider from native crabapples.
The people of northern Spain were making sidra before the birth of Christ. The Norman Conquest of England in resulted in the introduction of many apple varieties from France and cider soon became the most popular drink after ale. Cider began to be used to pay tithes and rents — a custom that continued later in America. Cider is still very popular in England, which has the highest per capita consumption as well as the largest cider producing companies in the world.
Cider is also traditional in western Europe, including Brittany and Normandy in France. Only 9 years after first landing at Plymouth in , European colonists planted apple trees in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
In Colonial America, cider was the most common beverage, and even children drank it in a diluted form. The weather this year has meant… Continue reading.
Wintertime Posted by bigbear. The work we are doing ensures that… Continue reading. The End of Abstinence? Cider at Christmas Posted by bigbear. We sell The Big Bear mulled cider at… Continue reading. Recent posts No need for Carbon Off Setting at Wintertime 27th February Comments Off on Wintertime. There are poor quality iterations of all alcoholic drinks but people do not denigrate the entire category of other libations the way they often do with cider.
I am an accredited Pommelier cider sommelier and I am in a group of cider advocates intent on encouraging people to rethink cider. If only Queen Elizabeth II was a cider drinker, then cider would regain its past glory and be borne the respect it deserves. There is evidence that Celts in Britain made cider from crab apples as long ago as BCE, but the Roman invasion introduced apple cultivars and orcharding techniques to England.
After the end of Roman occupation and once the Dark Ages began there is little information about cider in Britain, although cider-drinking Vikings and Anglo-Saxons colonised in this period so we can assume although there is no proof that apples were still being pressed and the juice fermented. After the Normans invaded in they improved cider-making in this land forever by introducing tannic and acidic cider apples.
They planted orchards and very importantly brought advanced pressing technology with them to make the extraction of juice from apples more efficient. Norman means 'North Man', and many of them were Vikings that had moved south from Scandinavia in the early ninth century.
Vikings were keen cider drinkers and this explains why in France, a land dominated by wine, there is a proud tradition of cider in Normandy which exists to this day. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, cider was being made in almost every county in England as far north as Yorkshire. As agriculture and market gardening increased during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so did orcharding and cider-making on a commercial basis.
Soil conditions and climates in counties such as Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Somerset suited apple cultivation perfectly, and even today the West Country is the leading cider-producing region. Apples can survive cooler temperatures whereas grapes need a warmer climate, and so began a golden age for cider at the expense of wine.
Two political factors had a major impact. War with France and Spain interrupted wine, brandy and sherry imports into England, while the English Civil War and subsequent execution of King Charles I in made aristocratic courtiers redundant. They retired to their country estates and some of them started experimenting with cider, cross-pollination of apple cultivars, glassware and corks.
The significance of this is that they were doing it before the man widely credited as inventing Champagne, Dom Perignon, was born.
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