April Apple Bashing – The art of Cidermaking

Gathered in a rare and beautiful oasis in the midst of Cihangir, İstanbul with a view of the Bosphorous and the minarets of the Blue Mosque, a table laden with fresh pumpkin cake and homemade breads, cold potato and lentil salads, cumin spiced humus and copious amounts of grilled, smoky chicken and cold beer – the weather could not have been more perfect, the location more ideal, the company more charming for a bit of April apple bashing!

Cider, made from fermented apple juice, can be made from a variety of apples. The Pilgrims drank cider as they sailed to America aboard the Mayflower. John Adams had a glass of cider every morning with breakfast. After a long day in the bush, Ernest Hemingway liked to kick back beside the campfire with a glass of cider. And Robert Frost saluted his favourite beverage with a poem titled “In A Glass of Cider”. Neck and neck with turning water into wine, is the resurgence of turning fruit into hard core alcohol! Armed with a few hundred organic apples, a couple of plastic buckets of various colours and depths, two logs for pestles, a wooden press and an army of hands and knives, the process began. Ah, I forgot to mention – and an English and an Irishman at the helm! A recipe for disaster?
Most likely…

Once the apples are washed and cut into pieces, they are, to use laymen terms ‘bashed’ into what the professionals would call a pommage, but what we affectionately called “mung”. This used to be done by horse-drawn cider mills. We opted for two heavy logs (probably zapped from the massive fig tree overhead) and a lot of man-power! The “mung” is then transferred to the cider press – in our case, a rather small and unsteady looking wooden barrel flown over as hand luggage via Stratford upon Avon.

Traditionally the method for extracting the apple juice is made from a complex structure of ten or twelve layers of blocks known as cheeses and strained into a coarse hair (probably horse) sieve. Our method was not that much  different. After a lot of screwing and turning and f***ing , the “mung” spurting out the sides left, right and centre, a brown, formidable juice finally started to drip into a plastic Tupperware, apple bits and all ( “sieve, what sieve?”) and finally funnelled into large 5 litre bottles waiting patiently on the grass.

With regards to fermentation… well, that remains to be seen. We’ve given it three months but whether that respects temperature, acetic bacteria, carbonation and the rest of it, is still a waiting time bomb… if all else fails, there will be enough apple vinegar to go round!

Words and Photos by Daniela Citi