Carbon Credit Cider
Last year, our Provincial government introduced a new carbon tax. Whether a carbon tax is an effective way to curb climate change is a discussion I will leave to the likes of climate change expert and my favorite critical thinker, British author George Monbiot www.monbiot.com . Instead, I want to focus on what I did with my $100. carbon tax credit cheque. Every man, woman and child in British Columbia was issued this cheque last summer with the encouragement to spend it on something with a positive environmental impact. No doubt a political jesture to quiet some of the negative press the tax had been receiving. Working at home and cooking from a garden takes a good chunk off of my bad carbon score for flying, but when my personal wine budget is tight I often turn to imports. So this was where I decided to try to make a difference. Here at Fairburn Farm we have about a dozen old fruit trees. They are very tall, crooked and well beyound pruning. Every year we loose at least one or two due to storms and the juvenille water buffalo that like to rub up against them. Yet they still produce enough fruit for 3 families, the sheep and chickens grazing in the orchard and the occassional bear or racoon that comes through in the fall. I never manage to pick as many as I would like and several varieties are not good keepers. So one warm day this fall my friend Valdilia and I headed out to the Orchard with a ladder and some plastic tubs. After about an hour of harvesting, we had around 200 pounds of heritage apples, including Gravensteins, Alexanders, Jonathans and Northern Spys, 2 kinds of pears and quince. We loaded them up in the car and drove them 5 minutes away to “Duncan McBarleys”, a local You-Brew facility. They washed and crushed the fruit and made a dry, hard cider according to my specifications, for a cost of $200. for 50 litres, including the cost of the bottles. A month later I showed up to bottle the cider, an easy task that took about an hour.The results were great! A dry, crisp cider which has developed more integrated fruit flavour in the last two months has been my local apperitiv through the winter months and has also been a great braising liquid for lamb, roast pork and sablefish. It’s just too bad it won’t last until summer!
Yum!
I’m coming to the Farm on the first weekend of July. I hope there is some left!!