The 
CPW sales team (Chris, Catherine, Claire, Nicky and John O’Keeffe, aided and abetted by Fiona and John Earle) recently visited Julian Temperley at Somerset Cider Brandy in … wait for it…Somerset! Some of the team had been to Burrow Hill before but this trip had a specific purpose as their ‘alembic’ stills were in operation. As a group, we clock up a lot of experience in the grog business but none of us had previously seen ‘continuous distillation’ in operation.
Burrow Hill is in deepest, darkest hill-billy country (even Julian would have to admit this) so Sat Navs are of limited use. If you have trouble with maps, best to ask a friendly local (not one with a ‘thousand yard stare’, wasted on crystal meth and brandishing a pump action shotgun loaded with OO) for directions to the farm. It’s important to use the word ‘farm’ because that’s exactly what it is…a working, busy, muddy, held together by bailing twine and chewing gum, sort of farm. It’s not a sanitised tourist destination, thank goodness, but it is quite an experience!
Before I start on the events of the day, Burrow Hill was (is?) better known as the original ‘Cider Bus’, so long a fixture at Glastonbury and music festivals all over the country. If you visit Youtube, you can find a selection of clips honouring this magnificent institution and, unfortunately, some of the madcap behaviour that it has been responsible for. Burrow Hill cider does seem to have a remarkable ability to induce ‘cross-dressing’ and mass outbreaks of Dad dancing!
The tour started with Julian giving an overview of the history of cider whilst we stood in the car park, freezing our appendages off as a wickedly cold North-Easterly wind tore through us. Julian was wrapped up in nine layers of clothes (thermal undies?) so he chuntered away, oblivious to our ‘townie’ discomfort…typical farmer! We then retreated inside to the marginally less windy ‘shop’, which is a barely converted barn with huge gaps in the floor, bits of old farm tat lying around (and not in an artfully created way, I hasten to add) and pigeons in the rafters. Thankfully, bottles were opened, corks were pulled and glasses distributed so we could sample various cider ‘brews’, eaux-de-vies and fruit liqueurs, all produced on site at Burrow Hill.
Despite the lack of pretension, please do not be fooled into thinking that Julian and his team are amateurs…far from it. They make an artisan, authentic product of the very highest quality with a distinct sense of ‘place’ and unique style. This has been acknowledged by his ‘peers’ in Calvados and other distilling areas so Somerset Brandy is now legally protected across Europe. [Anybody wanting to know more about IGP’s etc should cross-reference to my previous and very boring diatribes about this legalese.] However, they have not lost sight of where they started from and one of the highlights of our trip was an elderly local wandering in, clutching a 5 litre plastic jug and asking for some of “the dry stuff”! Julian left us with a sample of his new cherry infused apple brandy whilst he took care of his customer, probably chatting about mastisis counts in local dairy herds.
So, suitably internally warmed, we set off for a tour of the farm. First stop was the huge fermentation vats, which seemed large enough to stick double-decker buses into. I’ve visited lots of wineries which ‘temples of cleanliness’ with tiling everywhere and maxxed out on so much stainless steel that you need sunglasses indoors…Burrow Hill isn’t like that! Another useful reminder that Somerset Cider are more concerned about substance than mere style.
Then onto the highlight of the tour, the distillery. Two venerable old Calvados stills, called Josephine and Fifi, dominate the room, run by the expert ‘master distiller’. These were rescued from Normandy as the licences for mobile distilleries were gradually revoked by the French authorities. In ‘ye olden days’, these stills were mounted on horse-drawn carts and, eventually, the backs of lorries as they toured the cider farms. The licences were passed down through families for generations but, after WWII, the authorities decided that they would be withdrawn as that generation either retired or died – they could no longer be ‘inherited’. Julian managed to get two of the beautiful copper stills and bring them to Somerset. Now gas fired, rather than using wood, they are a magnificent sight, even more so when you look at the somewhat Heath Robinson pipework festooned around the distillation room. I was impressed by the volume of spirit (70% alcohol by volume) that was gushing into the Customs ‘receptacle’ before being pumped down to the bonded warehouse on site (more later). The spirit is colourless and definitely not to be drunk neat, unless you want early onset dementia, but it has a delightful aroma of apple and fresh cut wild meadow flowers.
I’m not going to go uber-techie on the difference between batch and continuous distillation but there’s an excellent article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillation with extra links to further info if you’d like to know more. At it’s most basic, you would use ‘batch’ distillation where you have relatively small amounts of raw material to be distilled and there may be large variations in the style/quality of each separate batch which need to be identified e.g malt whisky or where making products for laboratory use. However, a larger amount of homogenous raw material (several hundred thousand litres of cider!) can be ‘continuously’ distilled with equal quality but practically zero wastage. It is, contrary to what you might think after years of being brutalized by chemistry teachers, a fascinating subject. After just five minutes research into this topic before visiting Burrow Hill, I understood how that part of Wales that looks like Blade Runner (Milford Haven at night!) uses continuous fractional distillation columns to purify LPG.
Customs keep an incredibly tight control over distilleries (it’s a huge money spinner for them) so there is careful auditing of raw material in versus volume of spirit out. Customs ‘locked’ stills, remote controlled webcams and numbered seals on the doors are only part of the kerfuffle that Julian has to cope with. For all I know, they probably cross-check the number of bottles that he orders against the declared sales for each month! Each time the bonded warehouse is opened, the broken seal has to be kept and then replaced with a suitable replacement, all recorded in a log book and probably logged by the Customs webcam covering the doorway.
The bonded warehouse itself is stacked full of oak barrels of varying ages and provenance, all full of gently maturing cider brandy. The barrels gradually impart colour and flavour to the cider brandy, whilst some of the alcohol gently evaporates away for the “angel’s share”. There are a few very special barrels for the oldest spirits which, for no discernible reason, produce a ‘wow’ impact on the spirit. It can’t be predicted or replicated …it just happens! These barrels are probably worth their weight in gold to a spirits producer. Once the cider brandy has finished maturing, it is diluted with distilled water down from its natural 60% abv and then carefully blended and bottled. We did a delightful ‘barrel’ tasting (that makes your eyes water, I can assure you) – Julian is extremely enthusiastic - constantly expostulating, waving his arms around, taking out or banging in bungs, ranting on about the evils of ‘mass produced’ cider, trying to pour tasting measures through a broken pipette and doing a spot of quality control, all at the same time as trying to hold or find a flat surface to rest his glass on. Perhaps he ought to train an octopus as a valet? Anyway, as you’ll appreciate, a laid down barrel is a bit short on flat surfaces so Julian’s glass was constantly teetering on the brink of toppling onto the concrete floor. Not a great crisis, as these things go, but very distracting! It was amusing to watch my colleagues twitching and shuffling like keen slip fielders as the glass slipped ever closer towards its doom. My favourite part of the visit to the bond: in the midst of all the expensive oak barrels, analysis equipment, blending tanks and Customs paraphernalia, Julian has foregone the use of state of the art lighting and chosen instead to install a battered old chandelier of dubious ancestry. Some people are serial non-conformists!
The bottles are then all hand labelled in a separate room (they had a tiny ‘two bar’ heater …oh boy, they were cold in there!) and those staff also do the waxing for the capsules on the Alchemy (15 year old) bottles. I think the melted wax the warmest bit in that room.
We rounded off our visit with a quick spot of lunch at Brown and Forrest (www.smokedeel.co.uk) at Hambridge, who are rightly famed for their smoked eels. I had some of these with a ½ pint of medium dry cider and felt like I’d enjoyed a meal for a King! If any of you do get hold of any smoked eel, it is extraordinary on some vollkombrot or pumpernickel (dark rye breads) with a bit of horseradish and some zingy, spicy ‘leaf’, such as home grown rocket or mustard. We were joined by one of Julian’s charming daughters, Matilda, who was hobbling around in a leg brace after a very nasty skiing injury. Bad enough in itself but much, much worse when you find out that her main ’relaxation’ is as a trapeze artist! Matilda started off as a researcher in tropical medicine and spent many years in fairly wild (and lawless) parts of Eastern Africa before changing direction to become a very talented photographer. The Temperley family must be genetically programmed to avoid boredom by taking on ever more extreme challenges!
I would like to point out that the only two ‘retail’ outlets that Somerset Cider Brandy supply are Fortnum and Mason…and Christopher Piper Wines! How’s that for posh eh?
All of our Somerset Cider Brandy products are listed on our website (Burrow Hill Cider ) (Cider Brandy, Eau de Vie & Pomona)(Shipwreck) (Kingston Black) so please contact us if you would like any further details of this wonderful cider and all the special liqueurs/brandies that Julian and his team produce.
