Cider farm worker

If you were to ask Viv what his favourite beverage was, the answer would probably be "Scrumpy"! This is a very strong drink, traditionally produced in the west of England and made from fermented apple juice. It's sold in pints in British pubs, just like British beer.

Just as there are two categories of beer:

1. Real Ale; produced using a more or less natural process.

2. Industrialised, mass produced beers and lagers; with carbon dioxide pumped in to make them fizzy.

Two kinds of cider exist:

1. Scrumpy;  a strong, still, usually cloudy drink, sometimes with white "bits" floating in it, produced in a small scale 'Cider Farm'.

2. Industrialized ciders; Fizzy, sweet and not very strong - not that much different from a soft drink.

Viv first got a real taste for cider after the discovery, by his friend Malcolm, of a cider farm called 'Thatchers' at the village of Sandford, about half an hour's drive from Farmborough. During the summer break from university, we would drive over to Sandford in Malc's car, and buy a couple of gallons of their delicious scrumpy. It was amazing, in the farm shop, you would buy plastic one gallon containers (or smaller sizes) at a price which included the cider which came with them. The next step was to enter an area with huge tanks, similar to the ones petrol is transported in. From these tanks, a man with a petrol pump, like at a petrol station, would fill your plastic containers with cider. Then it was just a matter of loading the containers into the car and heading for home. Many an enjoyable hour was spent with Malc listening to music and supping Thatcher's cider!

Bearing this in mind, one Xmas holiday, Viv was in the Job Centre in the nearby village of High Littleton, looking for work, when he came across a job advertisement for work at the Broadoak Cider Farm. It was near Clutton, less than an hour's cycle ride from Viv's house. Wow, he thought, this is going to be heaven!!

Of course, there are two sides to every business, including the leisure industry: the client/customer side and the production area. Viv had a dream of endless free quantities of, an incidentally very good, cider, but he was in for a very rude awakening. As with his job on the Xmas post, he had to be up at the crack of dawn for breakfast before the ¾ hour cycle to the farm. It didn't look anything like a farm!!! It was a big modern barn-type building with a huge pile of apples on one side, a conveyor belt going up to a mill, below which was a big aluminium funnel with a tap-like control at the bottom. My job was to put a large wooden square frame with thin (metal?*) filter across it, over a tank, the top of which fitted the frame. Then he would release a layer of mashed apple on top of the frame, spread it out, put another frame on top and add another layer of apple mush. When there was a stack of about ten frames, each with mashed apple in between, he operated a press, which came down from above and squashed all the apple juice out into the tank below. The next step was to remove the frames with the now dry apple mush, scrape it away and repeat the process. Although he was wearing rubber gloves and protected by an apron, spending hour after hour up to his elbows in semi-frozen apple mush on a cold winter's day soon lost it's appeal. To make matters worse, there didn't seem to be any free cider on offer, so when it was time for him to return to university at the end of the holiday, he wasn't too unhappy to hang up his cider farm worker's apron definitively!

* I can't remember if this filter was metal or some sort of very strong fabric.