Dour Cider
The Scotsman, Oct 2021
Our car grinds up a steep rubble track, threatening to tear the bumper from its mounts and eliciting sharp intakes of breath. We crunch to a stop behind an old Land Rover and gingerly open the doors to inspect the damage. Below us, hidden from the road behind a mess of brambles (so thick we drove past it twice before spotting the turning), sits an unassuming brick building with a sloped iron roof. In front of its open doors, an assortment of waxed paper packets, bread, and cheese – sit open on an upturned crate. Fields roll away mistily in the distance, and music resounds from inside. On the rough stone of the stoop, racks of glass bottles glint in the low Autumn sun.
There exists a particular sweet spot in the evolution of any business – near enough the outset that its story remains tantalisingly unwritten, but sufficiently far along the road that distinct character traits have begun to emerge – that has about it an aura, verging on the magical. Passion projects brought to life on kitchen tables, in garages, attics, and dimly lit back-rooms. Ideas so white-hot they must be acted upon lest they burn a hole in you – all possess a kind of effervescent propulsion. It drives objectively sane people to do objectively risky things. And it’s magnetic. Which is why, on an otherwise perfectly serviceable Sunday, five fit-young-thirty-somethings are giving up their time, for free, to pump, bottle, cap, and stack around a thousand cask-aged expressions of pale golden cider, in a tractor shed, in the middle of nowhere. And why I am visiting them. Welcome, to Dour Cider.
As we approach, a swarthy young man with what would once have been called matinee-idol looks (and sporting a pair of suspiciously clean bib overalls) raises from his haunches and smiles in warm greeting. From inside, another man emerges, laughing – dressed in shorts and battered work boots. He has an outstretched hand, an unruly mop of hair, and a smile best measured in megawatts. Dour is the handiwork of these two, Christian and Jack. But though the name has its roots in their humble HQ’s rural setting – a stone’s throw from the village of Aberdour, on Fife’s picturesque south coast – their adventure in cidermaking has its origins considerably further afield, on the Hebridean isle of North Uist. (Ironically, a place almost comically devoid of trees.)
The pair already shared a passion for food, having cultivated a bond through the Fóram supper clubs that Jack and his partner Eilidh organise in Edinburgh, and which Christian and his wife Amelia have attended since their inception. But holidaying together on the island in 2020, cooking and fishing and foraging (and quite possibly enjoying an inspirational tipple or two) they discovered a mutual interest in brewing, too, and set out to make just enough for personal use. But thanks to the frustrations of lockdown, and the sheer volume of surplus fruit they found themselves being offered, a business idea soon began to ferment.
We talk in the dim cool, scrupulously clean interior of the shed, as all around us the sterilized bottles air-dry, and the transparent stack grows ever larger. Eilidh patiently caps the full bottles with a burly hand-press behind us, and as we talk the boy’s enthusiasm for cidermaking is striking. In his soft American accent, Christian tells me that, “as soon as we discovered just how many people were happy to see their unwanted apples put to good use – for them not to go to waste. And for free. Well…”
“People have been so generous, so helpful” Jack continues, “we’d only been at it a couple of months and I’d already be messaging back and forth with some of the country’s best cidermakers – proper legends – trying to figure out what kind of apples we’d got our hands on. Everyone’s been so welcoming.”
“Really, what this is all about is getting away from the idea that cider has to be entirely rural. We live in Edinburgh, our friends live in Edinburgh, and there’s so very many places with more forgotten fruit than they know what to do with. But drive twenty minutes in virtually any direction, and you’re in the countryside. It’s so rich. The perfect place to make cider,” adds Christian.
Poring over manuals, they invested countless damp and chilly hours in the brews. Harvesting by hand, from the trees and the ground, and experimenting with blends, ages, and casks, they soon found out what did, and what didn’t work. “We’ve got rather an interesting raspberry. And there’s one in the back that’s been resting in the cask with pine. Quite a lot…you might almost say too much pine, actually!” says Jack.
“Right now, that one is a little wacky – distinct notes of fairy liquid – so we’ve some work to do on the blend,” chimes in Christian. However, the batch we’re watching being stacked now (whilst sipping it from chilled short stem glasses and developing a definite afternoon buzz) is anything but wacky. In fact, it’s rather delicious.
This expression is an eighty-twenty apple pear mix, with a pleasing natural fizz on the tongue. Christian explains as I roll the wonderful stuff around my mouth that the bubbles are naturally occurring, from yeasts in the fruit – though it must be un-casked earlier than the still variety, whilst the fermentation has a little work left to do in the bottle.
A quick note on apples. Apples are quite heroically contrarian. These fruity little chaps are so desperate to be different – to fall as far from the tree as possible – that simply identifying many of them requires an expert eye. And even then, it’s hard to be sure. In the UK alone, there are in fact so many types that, logistical (and intestinal) challenge though it would be, one could (technically) eat an apple-a-minute for an entire weekend, without tasting the same variety twice.
The varieties that have gone into the blend I’m supping now, number around thirty, carefully collected and handpicked from Edinburgh's back gardens, parks, hospitals, churches, and palaces. Discovery, Bramley, Emneth Early, Saint Cecilia, Grenadier, Herring’s, and Stoke Edith Pippin. The wonderfully monikered Egremont Russet, and many more besides. To my untrained palette the taste of all this hard graft is dry and fresh and crisp. Fruity. With none of the overpowering bubble-sweetness of the ciders of my youth. At around seven percent, it is strong, but not noticeably so. At least not until I am nearing the bottom of the glass.
In the shadows, a huge tank is pumping the pale golden liquid into clear glass bottles, through metal tubes. Next to it are three oak barrels, where the cider has been fermenting over the past year. Of these, two are from the Loch Lomond distillery, the other is a lighter oak – a rioja cask. And does the oak impart something of itself into the flavours, I ask, as it does with wine and whisky? And then I feel rather foolish for asking. Because of course it does. But not as much as you might think.
“We scoured the whisky casks, to keep the flavours subtler, lighter, more authentic. But there is still some character coming across,” says Jack. And character, now that I come to think on it, is what this place – and this drink – seems more than anything, to have at its core.
All Images: Amelia & Christian Masters
