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"The art of distilling has been revived in the orchards of Somerset..." Western Morning News - 10th February 2007 Liquid Gold The alchemy of brandy making NEW CIDER BRANDY IS FOR SIPPING WITH RELISH Julian Temperley takes a sniff of the amber liquid in his glass and gives a sigh of satisfaction. All those years of waiting have been worth it. His 15-year-old cider brandy has a finesse to rival a vintage Calvados, but with a je ne sais quoi which is all Somerset.At £37 a bottle, Somerset Cider Brandy Company's Alchemy brandy is hardly cheap, reflecting all the time and effort to transform it from freshly pressed apple juice to smooth spirit. The price tag has not put off the customers, though, and orders have been flying out of Pass Vale Farm since its release in October. Worth waiting for - Julian Temperley admires his 10-year-old cider brandy "People are re-ordering and sending e-mails to say they are really chuffed with their bottle," says Julian, in his office under wooden beams overlooking the orchards which stretch south from the farm. "It is in the same category, we feel, as malt whisky." Julian and his wife Diana were already making cider from the 40 varieties of old cider apples on their land on the edge of the Somerset Levels when they became enthused with the idea of creating cider brandy. At that time the only cider brandy being distilled in England was at the Hereford Cider Museum in Hereford, a small-scale demonstration of an art which died out in Britain several centuries ago, when duty was introduced on spirits. While cider folklore has it that brandy went on being distilled on the quiet in many a traditional orchard, no one had, up until that point in the early 1980s, been brave or cussed enough to revive the art commercially. Julian, though, had done a lot of reading of old cider almanacs, and thought it ought to be possible to create a quality appley spirit "which could go on middle class dinner tables". "I think most likely the reason was vanity," he says. "We wanted to do it. What we didn't realise was that it would become a total obsession and it has been a total obsession ever since. It was a quest rather than a business decision. The whole thing has to be a dream, you can't start off too carefully." It took Julian some time to convince Customs and Excise that he was serious, much to his frustration. He was eventually granted a commercial licence to distil in 1989. The Temperleys were in for a long slog before their faith in their ability to create the brandy would be rewarded. First the apples are crushed and blended, then fermented for six months to create cider. This is then distilled in stills on the farm to remove all the colour and produce a condensed, pure alcohol known as eau de vie. The eau de vie is matured in barrels for at least three years to allow the tannin in the oak barrels to colour and flavour the alcohol. The content of the barrels is so valuable to the taxman that it has to be kept under lock, key and alarm while it matures. "When the brandy goes in, it is worth £6,000 to Customs," Julian said. "If it comes out in five years' time a third of the alcohol will have gone through the wood, and that is the angels' share, so it sits in bond maturing, ageing, becoming smoother. The Customs have to put up with that fact." Julian trades on the bucolic image of the rustic cider maker, and Pass Vale Farm is how you would imagine a small Somerset cider farm would be. Outhouses and barns house the packing operation, the shop, the press and two venerable stills - called Josephine and Fifi in a nod to their past lives distilling Calvados in northern France. In the yard, empty bottles of apple juice are stopping up barrels in which apple juice is slowly fermenting. In the autumn the yard will be piled up with strongly-flavoured cider apples, Dabinett, Kingston Black, Stoke Red, Yarlington Mill and Harry Masters. The Temperleys' famous eldest daughter Alice, the fashion designer, loves to tell the glossy magazines about her bucolic childhood growing up with her two sisters and brother on the family cider farm. Alice's model friend Jodie Kidd added some celebrity glamour when she helped pull pints of cider in the Temperleys' trailer at the Glastonbury Festival last summer. Alice is designing the new label for the Alchemy brandy. It can only be good for his business, Julian says, that all things rustic are in fashion, and that people are intrigued by the artisan passion which Julian exemplifies, poring over his Herefordshire Pomona, an 1885 glossary of apple varieties which cost him thousands of pounds at a sale, an amount he repeats sotto voce lest his wife should hear. "Years ago when people would come to the Westcountry they had an incontinent dog and there was usually something wrong with them, and they would be in a caravan," he says. "Now people will spend more on a night in a hotel than in a week in a caravan. "I think mystique is part of all local food and drink and that is what really we are selling. We need to be able to say the juice comes from our orchards. Our customers want to know they are apples, not concentrate. We have got to do something different." The obvious comparison for the Somerset Cider Brandy is the Normandy Calvados, but Julian is at pains to stress that it has its own character. "We don't look at ourselves as a copy of Calvados, we are certainly not, but we look at ourselves as a cousin of Calvados," he says. "We are complementary to Calvados. There's brilliant Calvados on the market and then there is cider brandy. People will buy a Somerset cider brandy because they like the idea of Somerset brandy and Somerset orchards." Cider apples are picked later than eaters; the season starts in October and goes right up to Christmas. The later picking varieties are the ones which make the best apple brandy, because they have strong flavours. Different varieties offer notes of sharpness, bitterness or sweetness which complement each other in the mix. The juice is blended before it is fermented. "You blend the apples so the fermentation happens correctly," says Julian. "If you don't have enough sharp apples you end up with problems. Dabinett is a very important apple. Cider apples are very regional in their origin. "Dabinett was first discovered in a hedge half a mile away from here by Mr Dabinett, and is possibly the single most important variety of commercial apple." The Westcountry specialist apples have a high tannin content, which would be extremely bitter to eat but which make brilliant cider. Many of them come from within a stone's throw of Pass Hill Farm. Kingston Black, another important variety which gives its name to the Temperley aperitif, comes from Kingston St Mary, near Taunton. This is a mixture of juice pressed from Kingston Black apple juice, mixed with cider brandy. The apples ferment in barrels for four months and are then distilled in the spring. "Thirty thousand gallons will be distilled this year, which is a relatively small year," says Julian. "We need to be finished by the end of May. The French would say you had better not distil when the April blossom is out. "When you get into the science of the matter there is a good reason why they say it. If you leave the cider too long you get a malolactic second fermentation, which can give a bitter taste." The job performed by the stills Josephine and Fifi - "very clever, sophisticated girls" as distiller Tim Edwards calls them, is to extract the pure spirit from the cider by heating it, and then siphoning off components as they vapourise. This process condenses the apple flavour as well as the alcohol, resulting in a superbly perfumed fire water known as eau de vie. Tim says: "Distilling is a bit like cooking - unless you use the very finest ingredients your meal isn't going to be as good as it could be." Julian is proud that the cider brandy was snapped up by chef Jamie Oliver for his new restaurant, Fifteen, at Watergate Bay near Newquay, and at many smart restaurants across the country. He doesn't think he'll "go further" in developing a 20-year-old brandy. "The 15-year-old is everything we hoped for," he says. "The reception is everything we have ever dreamed of."