Don't waste all those windfalls, make your own cider, writes Anne Shooter as she enjoys a glass of her homemade cider



Hot and sunny spells combined with heavy rainfall brought a bumper crop of apples

Cider-making is a wonderful way to use up apples - no need to worry about bruises which put you off eating them fresh

The basic rule is you need four times the volume of apples for the volume of cider you hope to make

Any apples will do, but best cider is made from a mixture of sweet, eating and sour varieties

Oh, how I wish I could say that the first time I drank cider I was lying on a haystack wearing a floral frock, flushed from dancing with a local lad at the village fete and watching the Somerset sun setting as the apple-flavoured bubbles cooled my throat.

Sadly, the reality was rather less romantic.

I was 16 years old and travelling on a British Rail train from my home in Essex to Liverpool Street in London, heading to a boys’ school disco and drinking from a large plastic bottle of Strongbow a friend had pinched from her older brother’s bedroom.

Cheers: Anne Shooter enjoys a glass of her homemade cider

It was not remotely reminiscent of Laurie Lee’s idyllic novel Cider With Rosie, and there wasn’t a West Country accent to be heard for miles.

We swigged our bounty, giggling naughtily, en route to the disco. I thought it quite delicious, got rather tiddly and ended up kissing a very handsome sixth-former at the disco, who laughed and said I was ‘all appley’ but never called.

While our romance might have been fleeting, my love of cider has endured (although I plump for more upmarket varieties than Strongbow these days).



So I was thrilled when this year’s weather — hot and sunny spells combined with heavy rainfall — brought a bumper crop of apples, and with it the promise of homemade cider.

With cider-making kits flying off the shelves at Lakeland, I decided to roll up my sleeves and have a go — determined to see if I could turn my leftover apples into liquid gold.

Basic rule: you need four times the volume of apples for the volume of cider you hope to make STAGE ONE: Source your apples

I have two apple trees in my garden, one with cooking apples and the other with sweeter fruit. I hate to see the windfalls on the lawn turning brown and going to waste, yet there are only so many crumbles and jars of chutney a girl can make.

But it turns out that cider-making is a wonderful way to use up a lot of apples, with no need to worry about the bruises which put you off eating them fresh.

Anne Shooter decided to roll up her sleeves and have a go at making her own cider

Near my house in leafy Pinner, there are apple trees overhanging the roads and fallen fruit — called wildlings — just waiting for someone to snap it up.

If a fresh stash is not so readily available near you (though I bet you have a neighbour who’d be only too delighted to give you their apples in return for a bottle or two of cider), try hitting the supermarket. Waitrose is selling bags of ‘weather blemished’ apples for £2 for a bag of seven or eight; Tesco has British apples, £1 for a minimum of five; and Sainsbury’s sells cooking apples for 37p each.

The basic rule is that you need four times the volume of apples for the volume of cider you hope to make. So if you fill a 22-litre (5-gallon) bin with apples, you are likely to get around five or so litres of cider.

You can use any apples, but the best cider is made from a mixture of sweet, eating and sour varieties. People spend years working out the right blends, but I used approximately two-thirds sweet apples to one third cooking apples, with a few handfuls of crab apples thrown in.



STAGE TWO: Juice the apples

To make cider, you need to crush some apples, and let the juice ferment — i.e go off a bit — until it becomes fizzy and alcoholic. It’s that simple.

But to make it well, and not have a larder full of exploding bottles, or a cider so acidic you can’t actually drink it, you need to follow a few rules and buy some basic equipment.

My equipment came mainly from Lakeland, but you can buy some of it from Tesco, in a local homebrew shop or on Amazon, too. Most of it isn’t terribly expensive and it is suitable for re-use. The most pricey item, the juicer, is something I use anyway.

The most pricey item when making cider is the juicer. Pictured: the Sage by Heston Nutri Juicer

Cider and beer making kits such as this one have been flying off the shelves of Lakeland

Traditionalists use a wooden press to squeeze juice from apple pulp, but speed was more important than authenticity for me so I used an electric juicer, the Sage by Heston Nutri Juicer (£149.95 from John Lewis or Lakeland).

I simply fed the apples down the tube and juice came flooding out of the other end into a container.

I had to clean the machine out three or four times while juicing my apples to remove the discarded flesh, but it still took me only half an hour to get through my 25kg of apples.

STAGE THREE: Decant your juice

You need to decant your juice into a sterilized container as you go along. I used the plastic barrel from the Lakeland Beer Makers Equipment Kit (£49.99) but you could simply use a normal bucket. Just make sure you sterilize everything first with a food-grade sterilizer — again, easy to find online and you just swish it around your containers to make them super-hygienic.



STAGE FOUR: Fermentation

Once you have your juice, you need to strain it — either through muslin, or a double layer of catering-quality J-cloth that you have used to line a fine sieve — into a demijohn (a large glass bottle with a narrow neck used for brewing).

Pickers gather the year's cider apples during harvest at a traditional cider orchard in Devon, UK

The best cider is made from a mixture of sweet, eating and sour varieties. Anne Shooter used approximately two-thirds sweet apples to one third cooking apples, with a few handfuls of crab apples thrown in

Add a crushed Campden tablet: used by home brewers to kill bacteria, they are available from any home brewing specialist or Lakeland.

Then, you leave the juice in the demijohn with the lid loosely closed. You can add special brewing yeast to get the fermentation going, but I didn’t have any so I just left it. The natural yeasts in the air meant that, within a couple of days, I had a frothing mixture.

After a week — by which point the frothing had slowed right down — I strained the liquid into a fresh demijohn, and within another week I had a beautifully sparkling, slightly cloudy drink.

Could it really be this simple? I tasted it. Cider! And not just any cider! Delicious, lightly fizzing, very-fruity-but-not-too-sweet, knock-your-socks-off-and-don’t-dare-drive-after-even-half-a-glass cider.

STAGE FIVE: Bottling

You should always let cider ferment for two weeks before you bottle it — that way the fermentation will have reached an end and you don’t have bottles explode on opening.

You’ll be able to see that the bubbles are forming very slowly as opposed to fizzing, and the cider will taste dry.



I popped in another Campden tablet, too, which is also supposed to help ensure fermentation is complete, and then I bottled my golden nectar, again through a muslin-lined funnel, and used a capper (Lakeland, £13.99) to seal the bottles.

STAGE SIX: Drinking

Now I have my beautiful bottles of cider — possibly the most fun and exciting things to have come out of my recent kitchen experiments — stashed in my garage.

I should probably wait until there are no more apples around before I open them, to let the cider mature and improve the flavour, but I’m not sure I can hold out that long. Instead, I’d rather open them soon and celebrate this sudden, glorious autumn.

The first time Anne Shooter drank cider was not remotely reminiscent of film scenes from Laurie Lee's idyllic novel Cider With Rosie, set between 1917 and 1934 in the heart of the Gloucestershire countryside, as pictured here - but now at least she has her own bottles of cider



