Core blimey! Hot weather sparks bumper apple crop

A CIDER maker from Stoke Row said he has seen a “bumper crop” of more flavourful apples because of the recent heatwaves.

James Pearce runs Kicking Goat Cider which will benefit from an abundance of fruit from this year’s harvest.

He said they will look to finish picking almost a month earlier than normal and the production and fermentation process has been brought forward because apples are “dropping earlier”.

However, the drought has caused a lower liquid content in his crop which has resulted in apples with a “very high” sugar content.

Mr Pearce, 57, who sells his family cider in five counties, said: “This has probably been the driest summer since 1976.

“We have had some late rain which is helping but the extra crop isn’t necessarily coming through in the extra liquid.

“It’s to do with the fact that there hasn’t been the moisture or the rainfall over the summer that has given the trees the opportunity to suck up the moisture and put it in the fruit.

“The fruit wasn’t growing at the same rate size-wise.

“There was a lot of fruit but it had come good at the end of the summer with some late rain.

“The trees were definitely struggling to get going because of the drought.

“We would normally get 700 litres of liquid per tonne and it’s coming in at about 600 litres per tonne.”

Mr Pearce is married to Natasha, with five children between them, who help at events where their products are sold. Kicking Goat is made using freshly pressed juice that blends 17 varieties of cider apple, including Yarlington Mill, Michelin, Bulmers Norman, Stoke Red, Somerset Redstreak, Dabinett and Stembridge Jersey.

There are three ciders, which vary in sweetness.

Natasha’s family [the Bruce-Lockharts] produce dessert apples at their 130-acre farm in Kent, which has also experienced a bumper harvest this year, some of which will be used for Kicking Goat’s “Fresh Berry” variety of cider.

Mr Pearce said they are expecting to complete their Somerset harvest by mid-October when they would usually harvest between the beginning to middle of November. He said: “If anything, it helps us because we will be potentially a month ahead in our fermentation process.

“We leave our liquid in our fermentation tanks for six months before we rack it off and start to blend it ready for bottling and kegging.

“We will have a higher sugar content but a lower juice content.

“But we can get around that so we can end up making sure that the liquid we put out to the market place is the same as previous years.

“To get the consistency is not a straightforward task but we have ways and means of making sure it is like the length of time in the fermentation tanks before going into production, the amount of water and other variants.” Nick Hay runs Three Oaks Orchard, off Greys Road, Henley, with his wife Banny Poostchi where they produce pure, organic apple juice. He said they have lost about
10 apple trees this year which “snapped” due to the volume of fruit produced.

Their harvest was about
10 days earlier than usual. “It has been ridiculous,” he said. “The overall volume is probably three times what we normally have. I’ve never seen a harvest as good as this.

“Trees that weren’t doing anything a couple of years ago are all good and the disease is low, there’s no sort of fungal disease which is good.

“In 2024, it was heavy rain for three or four weeks so all the flowers got bashed up, the insects weren’t flying and the flowers didn’t get up to a high enough temperature to produce the nectar.

“It was a disaster. But this year, because it’s dry, it’s different. We had a lot of sunshine and the sweetness was there but the only question was if there was enough water to make them a decent size.

“Luckily, because we had a few weeks of rains, they swelled up quite nicely.

“We might make another couple of hundred bottles.”

The couple will use the excess apples to make cider vinegar after launching the product for the first time last year.

Mr Hay, of St Mark’s Road, added: “That seems to be a really good way to use the apples and we’ve had a lot of interest.”