Almost half of all the apples grown in the UK...
..go in to making cider.
We drink around 1.3 billion pints of cider every year.
That's nearly four million a day!
In fact, we drink more cider than any other country in the world.
Whether you like classic apple, pear or mixed berry...
..it's all made here!
At the largest cider factory in the world!
HE LAUGHS
I'm Gregg Wallace.
And I'll be following the fruit...
This is a constant avalanche of apples!
..on an incredible journey...
We pick from about 600 orchards in total.
..from farm to factory.
700 million pints?
Correct.
And finally - to fizz.
Oh, I love this stuff!
Whoa!
I'm Cherry Healey.
And I'll be finding out how the gas in cider...
Oh, that is so satisfying.
..could also save your life.
And historian Ruth Goodman reveals why it was British cider makers
and scientists...
It's as if NASA had a home-brew division.
Who put the...
CORK POPPING
..in champagne.
So, the whole history of fizz in champagne is actually
about fizzy cider?
Over the next 24 hours, nearly a million bottles of cider
will come off this production line.
And we're going to reveal just how they do it.
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This is the Bulmers cider factory in Herefordshire.
They've been making cider here since 1887 and they manufacture
seven of the UK's leading brands.
Tonight, I'm following the production of one of their
bestsellers - Bulmers Original Cider.
Every year, this massive factory produces
more than 350 million litres of cider.
I'm going to be making 250,000 half-litre bottles.
So, it looks like I'm going to need a lot...
..of apples.
I've come to the heart of cider country to an orchard
at Birchley Farm in Herefordshire, and for a former fruit and veg man,
this is a little slice of heaven.
It's just one of the local farms that supplies the factory
with 100,000 tonnes of apples each year.
Gilly Turner is the supply manager.
Gilly. Hello.
What a lovely day!
It's a glorious day.
Don't you have a beautiful environment to work in? I do.
I'm very lucky.
I'm very jealous.
Tell me, how many different orchards are you picking from?
So, we pick from about 600 orchards in total.
I know! 600.
An apple is an autumnal fruit and it's only got a short season.
What's your harvesting season? So, we have a 12-week period.
A whole year's cider production
relies on 12 weeks of apple harvesting?
Absolutely does.
Gilly sources a mix of 20 varieties for the factory.
They're mainly cider apples, which are smaller and drier
than the eating and cooking apples we buy in the shops.
What apples are we looking at here? Because they're obviously...
These ones, either side of me, are different.
Over there, we have Fiona. And on these trees here, we have Gilly.
Gilly? Is that a coincidence? Not at all.
They were named after people within the cider industry, mainly ladies.
So what characteristic is a Gilly?
Unfortunately for me, it's slightly acidic and a little bit bitter.
And I'd just like to say, it's nothing like its namesake.
How do you know when the apples are ready for harvest?
So, one of the tests is to check the pips within the apple.
When it's not quite ready, the pips will be white
and when it's ready to harvest, the pips will be brown.
So, they're ready for harvest?
They're ready for harvest. To pick this lot in 12 weeks,
we're going to need a long ladder and a very big bucket, won't we?
HE LAUGHS
That's ridiculous.
That can't be the way you harvest apples!
But as bonkers as it looks, for the last 30 years,
this is the way cider apples have been picked.
The tree shaker clamps the trunk with its hydraulic arm, shakes
energetically for a few seconds and 60 kilos of apples tumble
to the ground.
I tell you what!
If I hadn't see it with me own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it.
Most eating apples are still harvested by hand,
but this machine can shake down
100 tonnes of cider apples in a single day,
without harming the trees.
Will they let me have a go at that? I think they will.
Will they? They will.
Can I have a go?
Yeah. Can I shake the tree?
Yeah, you can have a go.
Yeah, no problem at all.
Tom and his family have been growing apples here for
four generations, so I'd better not make a mess of this.
Uh! Press the shake button.
Ah ha-ha, ha-ha!
That's the job. That's the one!
And you get to do this for a living, do you?
Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Brilliant.
Listen, I'll turn it off before I cause any damage.
That's all right.
My friend, thank you very much.
That has made me ridiculously happy.
You've got loads to do, right? You've only got 12 weeks.
Thank you. No problem at all.
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
As soon as the apples hit the deck, my cider production begins.
And young Tom needs to crack on because right behind him
is a tractor pulling the harvesting machine.
It's the start of a bumpy ride for the apples.
But since they're going to a juicer, not a grocer,
a bit of bruising won't hurt.
The harvester scoops up 12 tonnes of apples per acre.
Tom's dad, James, oversees every load.
How long would it take to fill up
a four-and-a-half tonne trailer of apples?
About...
..ten minutes. No way!
No way! Yeah.
So, how long would it take them to strip the whole orchard of apples?
Probably...three days.
Wow!
That's nearly 300 tonnes of apples from this orchard alone.
Enough to fill 60 of these trailers.
And the family have a total of 14 orchards to harvest.
Is that it? Are we full up?
Yeah, we're all ready to go.
My apples can go and make cider.
Cider's only got one main ingredient - apples.
But that doesn't mean it's going to be a quick process.
It'll take more than three weeks to turn my apples into cider.
As a greengrocer, I've sold lots of apples in my time.
But nowadays there are hardly any native British varieties
in our shops.
But there was a time when we couldn't get enough of them.
Ruth's been getting to the CORE of the issue.
Today, over 60% of our apples are imported from abroad.
But in Victorian Britain, there were over 2,000
home-grown varieties available.
This was thanks to an apple-breeding boom that took off
at great country estates around the UK.
And we know that this obsession went right to the top.
Victoria herself, the Queen, regularly toured gardens
like this one here at Burghley.
But what drove the Victorians' insatiable appetite for apples?
I'm meeting food historian, Dr Annie Gray to find out, starting
with how they managed to create so many varieties in the first place.
Oh, ho! You can really get an idea here of the sheer size, shape and
colour variety of Victorian apples.
This is enormous!
You know, I mean, goodness me! Look at the size of that!
Is that barely an apple?
Look at it. It's more like the size of a melon!
Queen Victoria was known for eating monster apples. Was she?
But she was the Queen, so she could, sort of, set fashion.
Whereas I think, if you were a lady...
..perhaps you wouldn't sit down to that.
You'd rather have something small and delicate...
A little Golden Pippin here. I'm very fond of Golden Pippins.
Of course, country house gardeners had an advantage.
There were lots of apple trees in places like this -
all cross-pollinating.
So, a lot of varieties were discovered in the grounds.
Cross-pollination is when one variety of apple tree fertilises
a different one.
The resulting "offspring" inherits characteristics from both parents,
producing a new variety of apple.
Bees do this job in nature by transferring pollen between trees
as they buzz from blossom to blossom.
But the results are unpredictable.
So, the Victorians, who wanted to breed unique varieties of eating
and cooking apples, took nature into their own hands and found
a reliable scientific solution.
There was a real sort of competitive streak
to try and commercialise them.
There's a man called Thomas Laxton, for example, who is very, very
interested in plant breeding, corresponded with Darwin.
Of course, this is the great age of the discovery
of evolution and scientific progress is being made,
and he was a real commercialiser of apples like this.
Laxton selected the very best trees to cross-pollinate by hand,
looking for flavour, colour and size.
From the 1880s, large commercial orchards
were mass-producing apples for the first time.
So, what variety are these, then?
Well, this is an apple tree called the Lord Burghley,
which is also why it's called the Burghley apple.
It's a really nice kind of all-round apple.
And what better to serve when the Queen comes
than an apple named after your own family?
Well, I mean, you know, in terms of rubbing it in...!
When Victoria visited Burghley House in 1844,
a grand banquet was served in her honour.
The Queen was particularly partial to baked apples,
so I'm going to help Annie create a dish worthy of a royal feast.
Hello! What have you been up to?
I've started the preparation for a dish
called apples and rice ornamented.
This is a dish that comes from a recipe book
called The Modern Cook, by Charles Elme Francatelli,
who was BRIEFLY cook to Queen Victoria before
there was a...fracas in the kitchen.
Francatelli was known for his fiery temper,
and after just a year in the Queen's kitchen,
he was fired for falling out with her staff.
Despite, or because of, this notoriety,
he became one of the first celebrity chefs.
His dish combined sweetened cooked rice with poached whole apples.
Well, the recipe specifies the variety,
and it calls for Golden Pippins.
Golden Pippins! Lovely, my favourite.
The Golden Pippin was grown commercially from the 1830s.
It's particularly good for complex puddings,
as it keeps its shape when cooked, and has a sharp, lemony flavour.
So you've got apples, pastry, rice, but it's for a queen, so...
..it needs to look stunning.
So...
Brilliant, that looks fantastic.
Now all we have to do is to make them... Stand in a pile. Yeah.
Let's go for three layers.
If I do the final apple, it'll all collapse in one.
Don't let it collapse. It will.
Don't let it collapse.
To make it fit for a queen, the assembled dish would have been
highly decorated with colourful fruits,
like candied angelica and cherries.
Right, so, let's brush these apples with apricot jam
to make them glisten.
OK, you're Victoria. OK.
Have a spoon.
Mm. It does work.
The acidity of the apple and the sweetness of the rice
are really nice. The right apple for the right recipe.
Three cheers for the Pippin.
It's a real shame that so many of these varieties
have disappeared from our grocers' shelves.
But, nonetheless, with the rise of farmers' markets,
of many enthusiasts and specialist heritage orchards,
there is hope yet for a renaissance
in this delicious and versatile little fruit.
I think Queen Victoria would have approved.
Back in Herefordshire, my apples have been shaken and scooped up,
and a whopping 29 tonnes are on their way to the apple mill
in Ledbury, just five miles from the orchard.
During harvest time, four of these giant trucks pull up every hour.
That is a serious amount of apples. Look at that!
Seeing them in an orchard is one thing,
but seeing see them all here together is huge.
And there's mine, just about to be unloaded.
There's 100 tonnes of apples in this one silo,
which is what I need to make my batch of 250,000 bottles of cider.
A torrent of 90 tonnes of recycled water sends my apples
thundering down four channels to check in at apple reception.
Where I'm meeting shift manager Simon Stone.
Simon. All right, Gregg?
Mate, I have never, ever been in an environment like this.
The noise is unbelievable.
The rumble of the apples, it's like when the Tube train comes along.
It's actually vibrating through my feet.
What are you doing?
We're sorting out any unwanted debris - leaves, grass, anything
like that - that we don't want to get into our mill.
There won't be anything wrong with these, mate - these are my apples.
It might be one of the best batches you've had in years.
As well as twigs and leaves, what else do you normally find?
One of our growers is situated next to a golf club,
so you get golf balls coming down.
They don't get thrown away, though, cos we've got some keen golfers
in here, so they get dished out amongst the lads.
How fast are they coming through here?
So, each table will be processing 25 tonnes an hour.
Each one of these is a table? Yeah.
So, the aim is to get 100 tonnes an hour through the mill.
100 tonnes an hour?!
Yep. That is incredible numbers.
This is a constant avalanche, wet avalanche, of apples.
Unbelievable, my friend. Unbelievable.
But my apples aren't pressed whole.
After sorting, they're fed in to the milling machine.
Inside this beast of a blender is a milling plate,
armed with 28 serrated blades which turn at 1,500rpm,
chopping the fruit into bite-size pieces.
These apple chunks then pass through 120 metres of pipe
into six 50-tonne tanks.
So this is where all the mash gets pumped in to the mash tanks.
Mash? What mash?
There hasn't been a single potato in the whole factory.
What are you talking about?
That's what milled apples is known as. It's known as "mash."
Right.
To soften the mash, ready for juicing,
the mill adds a natural enzyme called pectinase,
which creates a chemical reaction.
What the enzymes do is they break down the cell structure of the apple
so that when we press it, it releases more juice
And then what happens to it?
Then we load it into the press.
Is that the press? That is the press.
It's looking more and more like an Underground station every time.
They may look like a row of train carriages,
but these are the apple presses.
Mind the gap!
And the INSIDE isn't what I was expecting either.
A bowl of spaghetti?
It's the filter socks for the presses, Gregg.
So, tell me how this process works, please.
Nine tonnes of mash will be pumped in,
all of the mash will stay on the outside of the sock,
all of the juice will filter through the sock.
I've got one, if you want have a look at it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, that is a filter sock.
So...you have ten grooves there.
The sock here, the juice goes through,
the sock runs out of the grooves and into the juice bin underneath.
The press fills up with nine tonnes of mash,
and a piston forces the juice out through the 288 filter socks.
It's channelled away through a pipe into storage tanks,
leaving behind the unwanted bits of apple.
And I want to have a look at the leftovers.
OK, Gregg, let's open it up.
Can I do it? Yeah. Let me do it, let me do it.
Carry on.
There, look, I'm an expert now.
Oh, that is not what I expected.
I expected little bits of white apple.
That's apple pomace, Gregg.
Pomace? Pomace.
Am I allowed to touch it? Yeah, carry on.
It's a little bit like modelling clay.
You could make a ball out of it, look. Yeah.
So what is it? Is that partly cooked or...?
No, that's all the leftover mash
that's had 85-90% of the juice extracted from it.
Look at that, I've made an enormous rissole.
What do you reckon?
I reckon something like that would get you through
the first round of Celebrity MasterChef. Get the pan on.
You must be producing tonnes of it?
Thousands of tonnes of it.
So what, do you have to dump it?
We make electricity with it.
No way. Yeah.
We send it away to a bio digester and it's turned into electricity.
The pomace - bits of leftover skin and seeds - is heated
to produce methane, which is turned into cleaner green energy.
Amazingly, the pomace from the mill can power
a thousand homes every year.
You must have to scrub those socks?
We do have to clean them twice a week.
Cos they look worse than my rugby socks, they do.
Luckily for Simon, they don't smell as bad as mine.
From the apple presses, my juice is piped to the evaporation hall.
Where I'm greeted by something...
..quite incredible.
MUSIC: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by JS Bach
No way!
What on Earth is that? Mate, you're just showing off.
Gregg, that's a falling film evaporator.
What? A falling film evaporator.
No, seriously, what does it do?
Your raw juice that came out of the presses? Yeah.
What we're going to do is take it from 10-12% sugar up to 70% sugar.
Pipes inside the 19-metre-tall evaporator are heated by steam
to 80 degrees Celsius to concentrate the sugar in the juice.
And just like making gravy, the heat causes water to evaporate,
thickening the juice and turning it into a sticky, sweet syrup.
That's incredible!
Because it's a syrup, it'll make it really, really good for storage.
That smells like maple syrup.
Mm.
What's incredible is,
before the sweetness is a little bit of sharpness, like a lemon.
That's because we're using cider apples.
So, all of this - all of this pipe after pipe
of incredible machinery - is just to turn apple juice into a syrup?
Correct. Now what?
Just when you think this place can't get any more epic,
the scale of it blows your mind all over again.
They can't all be full of this syrup.
They certainly are. They can't be.
How many of them? There's 140 tanks, Gregg, in total.
They're all full of that syrup?
And combined, they hold 15,000 tonnes.
15,000 tonnes of that stuff I just tasted?
Yep. Why so much?
So that we can make cider all year round.
Oh, of course.
Of course, you don't have the apples all year round.
Absolutely.
How many pints of cider will this syrup eventually make?
About 700 million.
700 million pints?
Correct.
That's just astounding.
That's just... There's only 60 million people in the UK.
These mega silos store syrup made from 100,000 tonnes
of traditional cider apples, but the factory's also begun
to use more sweet eating apples in its blends,
although growing enough of them isn't as easy as you might think,
as Cherry has been finding out.
I've come to Herefordshire to find out how the cider factory
is growing a very specific crop on a super scale.
I'm meeting orchard technical manager Ben Moss.
Hi, Ben. Lovely to meet you. It's very nice to meet you.
What a stunning orchard. Yeah.
Ben is six years into a huge project to establish
a new orchard of sweet apples called Scrumptious.
In the future, it'll be used to replace some of the sugar
in the factory's cider.
But how do you breed a brand-new apple?
If I want to grow a beautiful apple, just like this,
do I just take the pips and put them in the soil and watch them grow,
and Bob's your uncle - I get another apple just like this?
Unfortunately not. Think of it like children -
not all children are the same as their parents. Thank goodness.
There's very slight variations...
You'll get some that are very similar, but you won't get
consistency or uniformity within those trees.
So, the trees will vary ever so slightly,
and the apples will vary ever so slightly.
That must be quite tricky for you if you're trying
to create a consistent product?
Yeah, it's a troublesome thing that we've got to overcome.
Ben's already started to grow Scrumptious trees,
but to keep the factory supplied, he'll need thousands more,
and they've all got to be identical.
So, to help achieve this consistency,
he's using a technique called chip budding.
Oh.
Why are you slicing huge bits of the tree off?
So, under every one of these leaves is a growth bud.
What we do is, we transfer that bud onto a small apple tree.
If I want to guarantee the kind of apple that I grow,
I have to almost skin graft that bud onto another tree?
That's correct.
An apple seed WOULD grow into a tree,
but it would be different from its parents.
So, to grow identical trees,
Ben's cloning them using an ancient method called grafting,
which joins two plants together.
We've come to the new orchard to see how it's done.
What an extraordinary place.
I mean, there's tiny trees as far as the eye can see.
We're growing, in total, 100,000 new trees.
Ben is grafting two apple varieties together.
He's chosen a tree with very strong roots to form the bottom part -
this is called the rootstock.
Why is it so important to you to have the base of the tree
with such strong roots?
We're mechanically harvesting, so we need a really good,
strong root system and anchor.
So you know that every single tree in this orchard
has a strong base, so that when you shake the tree,
they're not going to fall over?
That's it, yeah.
The top half, where the apples grow, will sprout from
a bud on the cutting we took from the Scrumptious tree earlier.
That's like a perfect marriage.
You've got the really strong foundation of this particular
variety of tree, and then you're going to graft on,
like a sci-fi movie, another variety of apple.
That's it. So, you've got a strong base and a beautiful apple.
Yeah, that's it. So, we're pairing the two apple trees
together to make one perfect tree.
I kind of have to see it to believe it. Can I have a go?
Sure, yeah. Let's go and see the chaps.
To find out how science fiction becomes reality,
I'm meeting my new grafting buddy, Peter Bukowski.
Hi, my name's Cherry. Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you, too.
First, Peter removes a bud from our Scrumptious cutting,
and then creates an opening, or slot, in the rootstock.
You have to make sure there's a tiny pocket
which will cover the tiny bud.
Almost so that it holds in place?
Yes. Right.
Am I allowed to have a go?
What I will do, I will cut you a few buds.
Safety first.
I'll just place it in. Yes.
You can do all the cutting, I'll do the placing.
Yes. Perfect.
OK. So, what, I grab the tree between my legs...?
Just under the tree bark is a pale layer called the cambium,
which is responsible for growth.
..and then just slot it in there carefully.
When the cambium of the bud and the root tree
are carefully matched up...
Like a glove!
..new cells will grow from both sides to heal the join.
Perfect. Is that good? Yes.
A covering of tape protects the bud while the graft heals.
Slowly... It's really fiddly.
One more time, and try one tiny knot.
The grafted bud will produce a shoot,
which will produce more buds and more shoots,
and these will eventually become the branches
of the adult Scrumptious tree.
Did I do it? That's really good, that is.
I think that's not going anywhere. No.
There you go, skin-grafting apples. Brilliant.
Hooray!
That's a good day's work.
We have about 6,000 still to do.
OK, you haven't almost finished.
How many trees does your team get through in a day?
So, one budder and one tyer, they'll do around 700-750 a day.
700 trees? Yeah.
So, a really good day, you know, they'll do upwards of 800 trees.
My grafted tree will take three weeks to heal,
but here's one Peter prepared earlier.
There's a perfect example. Have a look.
That is amazing.
They're completely fused together.
That's so amazing. I'll never look at an orchard in the same way.
This tree will produce its first apples in five years' time,
just one of 100,000 identical trees in this new orchard.
And with a successful harvest,
it will help sweeten the cider of tomorrow.
It's got the best name for an apple - Scrumptious.
I don't think that you can get more flattering than that.
Back at the mill, my apples have been pressed,
and the juice has been turned into 19,500 litres of sweet syrup.
From the mega silos, it's pumped in to a 29-tonne tanker,
which travels 16 miles to the cider factory in Hereford.
And what a factory!
This is the biggest cider plant in the world -
producing 350 million litres of cider a year,
enough to fill 140 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
My apple syrup is unloaded, and technical brewer Dave Dobell
is going to guide me through its transformation.
Dave? Hi, Gregg.
You're my man, right? You're going to teach me about cider-making?
I am. Follow me.
Dave begins with an essential ingredient so precious
it's kept under lock and key in the factory's laboratory.
This is our special strain of yeast.
We've been using this yeast since 1905.
So, is that a relative of the original one
from all those years ago? Absolutely.
Hang on, explain the part of yeast for me in cider-making.
I just realised I know nothing at all, Dave.
Well, we add the yeast because that's where the magic starts.
The yeast consumes the sugar, and it converts it into alcohol.
So, without that little thing there, there is no cider?
Correct.
This magical process is called fermentation.
For each batch of cider, the lab mixes Dave's tiny 1g pot of yeast
with 20ml of apple syrup.
Then it grows and grows and grows...
..until it fills a 16-litre container.
How much cider will that amount of yeast eventually make?
This volume of yeast will eventually make 7,000 hectolitres of cider,
which is 3.5 million pints.
What?! What?
Yep. It's amazing.
The 16 litres of yeast mix are added to a holding tank containing
my apple syrup, before it's piped to the fermentation cellar.
Which is where we're heading, to see where the yeast gets to work.
What happens in here?
At the moment, we're underneath our massive fermentation vessels.
How many of them?
We've got 17 in total.
So, how much liquid in one fermentation vessel?
Each of these tanks holds up to 3.5 million pints.
That's just ludicrous amounts.
Inside the vessels are a blend of apple syrup, sugar, water,
and the all-important yeast mix.
How many of those yeast cells are there now in there?
At the peak cell count, in each vessel,
we have around 60 quadrillion yeast cells.
Don't know what that means. I have no idea what that means.
Me neither, Gregg.
But that's the number?
It's a vast amount of yeast cells. Absolutely vast.
They don't actually look that big, Dave.
What we can see here, Gregg, is only the bottom of the vessels.
If you go outside, you can get a real feel for how massive they are.
Is there any chance at all I can taste a little bit
during its process? There is, Gregg. Follow me.
No way. I honestly thought you were going to say, "Not a chance."
You're welcome to.
Now, when Dave says come for a taste test,
what he really means...
..is a climb up five storeys
to the top of these enormous fermentation vessels.
Wow!
Mate, you suddenly get a proper idea about how big these things are!
Yes, you get a much better perspective.
Good job I've got a head for heights.
What, you've literally got a tap here, have you?
Absolutely.
After ten days' fermentation, the sugars turn to alcohol -
but will it taste like cider yet?
It's strong like a strong pint of bitter,
and then it's acidic like a vinegar.
Like a fruit vinegar on your tongue.
Ah!
So, at the moment, that's 13% alcohol,
and it's still what we class green cider.
So, this tank will have another two weeks to stand,
just so that it develops its, sort of, complex group
of flavours and characteristics.
It's got to kind of smooth out, it's got to calm down a little bit.
Yes. The purpose of this stand is just to allow the bitterness,
the astringency, the tannins, to smooth out,
and just give a fully developed, nice, rounded flavour.
13% alcohol. So, what's your bottle of cider, then?
Our bottle of cider would typically be 4.5%
Right. Almost two thirds weaker than that. Yeah.
I think I'd rather look at the tank. OK.
In fact, any more of that...
..I'll be laying down over at the tank.
These massive vessels are turning sugar into alcohol for my cider.
But this clever chemical reaction is also producing
the gas that will give it its fizz.
So I'm heading to the CO2 recovery plant to meet engineer Tom Hall.
Tom? Yes. Lovely to meet you.
Good to meet you, my friend.
This is where the CO2, during fermentation,
this is where it comes, right? That's right.
The pressure in the vessel builds up, and that drives the gas over
to this room through this big pipe here,
to be reused, to carbonate the product, to make it fizzy.
But when it arrives here, the CO2 still smells of fermenting cider,
so Tom needs to strip out those unwelcome whiffs.
We use this thing here to clean up the CO2.
So, we pass the gas in at the bottom,
and what we do is, we spray water in from above,
and the water drops down and absorbs the soluble-impure alcohols
and the sugars that come across with the fermentation gas.
You take the smell out of gas? Exactly.
Can I have one for my bathroom?
Wouldn't that be nice?
All right. Well, that's very, very impressive.
Yeah. Well, I can actually show you, Gregg.
Can you? Yeah.
So, if we take a sample of the water coming out of here...
..you should be able to smell, that actually smells quite appley.
A bit appley? That's VERY appley.
Yeah. I mean, that is like a carton of apple juice.
Exactly. Well, that actually gives us quite a good indication
that this piece of kit is doing what we think it's doing
and taking out those odours, ready for it to go back into our product.
Until my cider is ready,
the odourless gas needs to be safely stored.
So it's chilled to -24 degrees,
which turns it into a liquid in a process called condensation.
A bit like when your breath turns to water droplets on a cold window.
Why bother turning it into a liquid?
The reason we store it as a liquid is cos it takes up far less space.
So, we've got some 60-tonne CO2 tanks outside,
which actually would have to be 500 times bigger
if we were to store the gas as a gas.
That's just why we have to store it as a liquid.
You're turning the gas into a liquid? That's right.
But you're going to put it back in the bottle as a gas?
That's right.
What an absolutely ingenious,
very clever, and slightly mad process.
Absolutely.
It takes an unbelievable 500 metres of pipes
to clean and store this gas,
before it'll be needed to put the bubbles in my batch.
CO2 may put the fizz in my cider,
but this versatile gas can also save lives -
as Cherry's been finding out.
Every year, there are 29,000 domestic fires in the UK.
Amazingly, a by-product of the brewing industry
powers one of the essential tools to fight these flames.
It's just extraordinary that he put that huge fire out
with just one extinguisher.
Foam extinguishers are used to tackle fires
in materials like wood and paper, or liquids like petrol.
To see how carbon dioxide plays its part,
I've come to Norfolk to meet Andy Spence,
whose company has been making extinguishers since the 1970s.
Hi, Andy. Lovely to meet you. And you. How are you?
I love this workshop. It looks so handmade.
Yeah, absolutely.
Each extinguisher is filled with six litres of liquid,
a mix of foam concentrate, and water.
At the neck of the extinguisher is the all-important
canister of carbon dioxide.
It's only 55g, but it's going to give it a powerful punch
to expel the six litres of foam that's in there.
Without this, it's just foamy water?
Yeah, just some foamy water.
So how does such a small canister of CO2 force all of this liquid
and foam out so quickly with so much power?
Once it's activated, it pushes itself out at high velocity,
purely because it's gone from a liquid state into its gaseous state
and it wants to escape.
When the handle is squeezed, the canister is punctured,
releasing highly compressed carbon dioxide liquid into the cylinder.
The liquid CO2 instantly turns back into a gas,
expanding hundreds of times and forcing foam out of the nozzle.
So, the CO2 is like the powerhouse behind the extinguisher?
Yeah, absolutely.
Where does the life of a fire extinguisher begin?
It starts here, where we take it out of the washing machine
as a sheet of steel, and then we roll it.
There we go.
The edges are welded together at 5,500 degrees Celsius.
Oh, there it goes.
Now we have a welded cylinder.
Next, our extinguisher needs a wall bracket.
Ah!
I knew it was coming, and still it's scary.
The top and bottom are added.
These are made of preformed steel, and are firmly welded on.
Once the CO2 gas cartridge expels, if this wasn't welded on,
this would go that way, and this one would go that way.
Ooh, what's this contraption called?
This is called the nodding donkey.
Nodding donkey? This sounds fun.
This is a really, really important job.
We've got to try and stop corrosion inside the fire extinguisher,
so we put these crystals inside it.
When heated to 300 degrees Celsius, the crystals melt,
forming a plastic layer inside the extinguisher to stop it rusting.
What a clever donkey!
The inside is now sealed,
but the outside needs a visit to the powder room.
Is there a knack to it?
The lads that paint them think there is, but there isn't really.
Oh, that is so satisfying.
That's a really good job.
Is that all right? Yeah, I think you could get a job here.
Yeah!
Job done. OK.
The polyester powder paint is baked to an enamel-like finish,
before the instructions are added.
Just like that? Yes. Yep, go for it.
Hey, hey.
I'm sorry, but that is just perfect.
Cylinder complete.
It's filled with 150ml of foam concentrate and six litres of water.
And finally, it's fitted with the essential carbon dioxide canister.
I want to see how effective my fire extinguisher is,
so I've come to the factory's specialist testing facility.
Whoa!
So, now you can see the flame is taking hold. Whoa.
There we go. The minute it hit the tablecloth, it just went whoosh.
Pull? Aim it at the base of fire, and off you go.
Can you get quite close? Yeah.
Ah!
And it's out.
That was so fast!
It's amazing that CO2, a by-product of alcohol production,
is such a key weapon in the fight against fire.
I cannot believe how quickly the fire spread.
I have to admit, I've never even really considered having
a fire extinguisher at home, and I think that might need to change.
Back at the factory in Hereford, my cider has been busy fermenting...
..and its CO2 is safely stored.
So I'm heading to the filtration area to see
what cider wizard Dave is doing with my batch of flat cider.
That can't have anything to do with cider-making.
That looks like an enormous piano.
This is our chill haze filter.
It's freezing. It is.
That's exactly the point.
We put this cider through this filter
to remove any haze, or particles.
"Chill haze filter."
Yes. So, what will the particles, or the haze, be?
In cider, because it's derived from apples,
we get naturally occurring tannins and polyphenols.
If we were to continue to package our cider
without carrying out this step,
when the cider is warm, it would look perfectly clear.
But the moment you start to chill that cider in a refrigerator,
it will slowly become cloudy.
So, to prevent that from happening when you're drinking
your pint in your local pub,
we perform this important additional filtration step.
So, we freeze the cider then at zero degrees Celsius.
That brings out these hazy, cloudy compounds, and then this filter
filters them out and removes them from the cider.
MUSIC: Cold As Ice by Foreigner
Every hour, 35,000 litres of super-chilled cider
pass through these 105 cellulose filter boards.
It's not easy, cider, is it?
Best things in life are worth waiting for.
You might be right - I was married four times.
I'm not bitter, but is my cider?
Can I taste it? Can I sample it at this stage?
Yes, you can, Gregg.
That's smelling more like cider.
It's not quite as sharp, and the colour's a lot better.
The bitterness is going from it.
It's most certainly beginning to get fruity.
It's most certainly acidic.
However, it's missing its sweet, and it's missing its fizz.
It is, Gregg. So what do we do next?
Next stage, we'll add the sweet apple to get that perfect blend
of bitterness and sweetness, and then we'll add the fizz.
The fizz is what I want to see. Come on, take me, Dave. Let's go.
So, we're leaving filtration and heading to the bottling hall.
And, at last, I'm just moments from meeting my fizzy cider.
Fizz?
Fizz.
Is that it? Yep, that's it.
And what exactly is the fizz?
The fizz is carbon dioxide.
That you took off before? Yes.
That you're putting back in again? That's it.
Right. Am I doing it?
Yes.
FANFARE
Nothing's happening.
Just wait a couple of seconds, Gregg.
It's a bit underwhelming, mate.
I was expecting maybe a couple of bubbles, a few flashing lights.
Wahey!
Did I just set that off? You did.
50,000 bottles are racing every hour to meet my cider,
which is flooding towards them through a network of pipes.
Inside, the liquid is mixed with a sweeter apple juice,
and my recaptured CO2 to fill it with fizz.
But who first came up with the sparkling idea
of putting bubbles in a bottle?
Ruth has been in search of the answer.
You may be forgiven for thinking that fizz is a French invention.
But, in fact, the history of bubbly starts much closer to home...
..due to a crisis caused by Oliver Cromwell.
In the 1640s, parliamentarian and soldier Oliver Cromwell
led an army against King Charles I,
deposing him and establishing a British republic.
The ruling classes were in turmoil.
After years of bitter civil war,
Charles I had had his head cut off,
his son and heir, Charles II, was away in exile in France, but now...
..the aristocracy and gentry faced a whole new challenge.
They were in danger of running out of wine.
It was the Dutch who controlled the lucrative trade
in wine at this time.
In 1651, Cromwell passed a law called The Navigation Act,
effectively blocking the Dutch trading ships,
and causing a severe shortage of Sauvignon.
I've come to Chastleton House, in the Cotswolds,
to meet wine writer Henry Jeffreys to find out
how the biggest brains in Britain overcame the crisis...
..by giving a much more modest drink a makeover.
So, this was the sort of Bible of English cider-making,
by a chap called John Evelyn.
He's quite a famous name. I mean, we're talking right at the top
there of the sort of scientific elite.
He was. And his thing that he said was,
he would "relieve the want of wine by a succedaneum of cider."
What a phrase!
Which means a substitute.
It's a medical term for a substitute of cider.
But cider had an image problem.
It was considered a working-class drink.
It was stored in wooden casks, and the natural bubbles produced
during fermentation leaked out of the barrels and evaporated away.
How to refine the cider and keep hold of those bubbles
became a pressing question for Evelyn, and other great men
of the time who wanted to elevate cider beyond its humble roots.
These people are like Newton,
and they were delivering papers on making cider.
It's as if, like, NASA had a home-brew division.
That's how clever these people were.
And they want to make a sparkling cider.
It sounds quite straightforward,
but, actually, it required high technology in the 17th century.
The biggest problem was the fragile bottles of the time.
To retain the fizz, cider-makers needed glass
that could withstand the pressure of the bubbles.
As luck would have it, scientist Sir Kenelm Digby was already working
on a new method of glass-production.
Henry and I have come to a glassworks, in Bath,
to see this ground-breaking method in action.
Well, this is a bit different, isn't it? Look at that.
Oh, it's hot in here, isn't it?
Digby built on existing technology -
using a hotter furnace to make stronger glass,
improving air flow, and burning coal instead of wood.
So, you ended up with a bottle which was much, much stronger.
So stronger is resisting pressure?
Yes, it was much less brittle, much thicker.
So, it could take the pressure of fermentation.
Digby used this stronger glass to create a more robust bottle design.
Oh... Move back, move back!
Am I in your way?
And this is the shape of bottle that he was coming up with?
Exactly. It was known as a shaft and globe bottle.
So, it had a globe and a shaft,
and they were very, very strong.
The globe, especially, was very, very thick glass. Right.
So, it's all sorts of things happening.
He's inventing new sorts of furnaces,
new sorts of glass,
a new shape to make it into.
Exactly. Yeah, he's doing all this, and the result is
something like a modern wine bottle.
And here's the finished bottle.
Oh, right. Isn't it beautiful?
And this is the technology that allowed us to have
fizzy alcoholic drink. Exactly, yeah.
And then the bottle moves over to France, where they...
..put fizzy wine in it!
This type of thick glass, in France,
they still call it verre Anglais. The English glass. Yeah.
So, the whole history of fizz and champagne
is actually about fizzy cider?
It began with cider, yeah.
Basically, cider in Britain. Yeah. Strange but true.
So what better excuse for a toast?
Here's to the British for being the first to put fizz in a bottle.
Cheers.
At the factory, after 29 days and six and a half hours,
the sparkle has finally been put into my cider,
and thousands of bottles are on their way to be filled.
Getting these fragile towers of glass safely onto
the production line is technical operator Sophie Morgan.
Sophie? I don't want to break your concentration.
I mean, that is a serious stack.
How many bottles are on there?
There's 2,376 bottles on a pallet.
But you're going to cut the strings that are holding
them together, right? Yes, but they're still safe.
They're stacked nine-high,
and they've got the layer pads in between.
How long have you worked here? Ten years.
Has one ever collapsed? Never.
Never? Never.
Because, I mean, that's some serious trouble if that tumbles over.
It would make one hell of a mess.
I do have a serious question for you. OK.
Is any of that glass recyclable?
All of it's recyclable. Is it? Yes.
Oh, right, OK. Well, look, full green marks to you, OK?
Do you have time to show me more of the process?
Yes, of course I do.
First, the debander removes the plastic strips.
Then the depalletizer unloads 20 pallets every hour,
sending the empty bottles to the rinsing table,
a supersized bottle washer.
Oh, wow.
Oh, get in.
Oh, I love this stuff!
Yeah. Absolutely love this stuff.
Right, how many bottles are in there?
It's 154 bottles a second.
No way, it can't be!
This is why the bottles behind that are turning are just a blur, right?
How fast are they going?
50,000 an hour.
No!
Why are they spinning upside down?
So, they're being spun upside down, and they'll get jetted with water,
which will rinse out the bottle, and then it'll just make sure
there's no contaminant stuff or anything in the bottle.
And where does the cider go in?
So, the cider comes in in this big machine here.
This is it.
These beautiful carousel machines are filling
833 bottles every minute with my fizzy cider.
A bit noisy, loads of energy - a bit like me.
Then a tiny jet of hot, highly pressured water
is sprayed into the top of each bottle,
producing a small head of bubbles called the fob.
This pushes oxygen out of the neck of the bottle,
which if left in, could cause the cider to spoil.
There's a very small dome of froth on top of the bottle,
and the crown gets clamped shut,
sealing the precious cider in the bottle.
The crown is the lid. Yes.
Then the bottles form an orderly queue into
a 22-metre-long pasteurizer, where they're given a hot shower,
warming the cider to 63 degrees Celsius, to kill off any bacteria.
Then a cold shower takes the cider back down to 28 degrees.
Why'd you cool them down?
To make sure the bottles don't burst, for safety reasons.
Seriously, you cool them down to make sure they don't break?
Yeah.
Squeaky-clean and bug-free, the bottles get their labels -
at a rate of 25,000 an hour.
And then they're on to boxing-up.
Robot arms group the bottles into eights,
and the box is folded and glued around them.
Finally, they're ready to be palleted,
and I'm going to meet the ingenious robot in charge of the job.
What is that machine doing?
So, this is the robo box.
This is building the layers for the pallets.
So, the two robotic arms are forming the pallet of packs
into specific patterns so they form a safe, sturdy palette.
But they're not, are they? There's no pattern at all.
They're out of control, just doing what they want.
I'm watching these, there is no discernible pattern.
They're doing it for a reason, Gregg, Oh, I see!
Oh, I see. They're spacing them out so that when they get
to the end, they form a square. Yes.
So, they're putting them in a specific pattern
so they all fit in together nicely. That's crazy!
That's brilliant.
Do you remember Tetris? Yes.
When the shapes come down and you had to build a block...
That's what they're doing.
It's a never-ending game of Tetris.
More than 50,000 bottles of cider are packed every hour
by these robotic arms.
Hope you like cider, Gregg.
Uh-oh.
I drink beer, I'm sorry to say.
Are you a cider drinker?
I do you drink cider. Are you disappointed in me?
I am disappointed, Gregg.
It's been a long journey, but my batch of 250,000 half-litre
bottles of cider is ready to leave the factory.
There we go. That's my cider, right?
That is your cider, definitely, Gregg.
This lorry will hold up to 24,000 bottles.
That's a huge amount.
That's about a million bottles every day, going out.
That is just astounding, isn't it?
The factory sells the most cider in central England,
followed by the south-west,
Wales, and Lancashire.
I think that's my last pallet, right?
It is, it looks full.
Should we do the old-fashioned bang on the truck? Go for it.
Thank you, driver.
TRUCK HORN HONKS There he goes.
I haven't scratched it, I promise.
I may not be a cider drinker myself,
but I am seriously impressed with the scale of production here.
I was blown away by the apple mill,
with its monster tanks storing
enough syrup to make 700 million pints.
And here at the factory, the enormous fermentation vessels,
where quadrillions of yeast cells do their work.
But do you know what I find even more impressive than that,
is that it starts with a tiny 12-week window of opportunity
to harvest 135,000 tonnes of apples for a year's worth of cider.
Now, that is a lot of apples.
Ha-ha-ha!