Beer-brewing brothers Tom and Evan Green are used to working with grains and hops, but their latest seed of a business idea came from their dad’s backyard.
“Our father’s backyard has got five or six big apple trees in it, and we were constantly collecting the apples and feeding them to my cattle,” Tom Green said.
“And one day we thought: ‘We make alcoholic beverages, we ferment beer every day — why can’t we make some cider?'”
The only problem was that they did not have enough apples to make a batch.
So the Deloraine-based brothers put a call-out on social media for spare apples from other local backyards.
“And to our surprise, we collected about a tonne and a half in the first three days,” Mr Green said.
Evan Green makes cider with his brother. It takes about 1,200 kilograms of apples to make a batch. (ABC News: Sarah Abbott)
The fun of cider-making
The Green brothers have been running the British Hotel in Deloraine for the past 10 years, and brewing beer there as Little Green Men Brewing Co for about five.
But Tom Green is “pretty excited” to now be learning the craft of cider-making.
“Once upon a time I really wanted to be a winemaker … and making cider is similar,” he said.
The British Hotel is the Green brothers’ beer-brewing headquarters. (ABC News: Sarah Abbott)
“So I suppose you could say this is something I’ve always wanted to do … [and] much as I love brewing, I really, really enjoy this process.”
Mr Green said compared to beer-brewing, cider-making involves fewer moving parts.
“And [another] good thing about wine and cider, as opposed to beer, is fruit really captures a moment.”
The brothers have processed 15,000 kilograms of apples so far this year. (ABC Rural: Fiona Breen)
“With beer, I can buy the same barley year-round, and I can brew the same beer every day of the week … over years,” he said.
“But with wine and cider-making, you’re sort of capturing that season, because grapes and apples have a pretty short lifespan.”
The apple season just gone was exceptionally good, Mr Green said.
“But next year’s fruit might be better, or it might be worse, and that’s part of the fun side of cider.”
The first steps in cider-making are crushing the apples and squashing them in a basket press. (ABC News: Sarah Abbott)
Locals offer up their unwanted backyard apples
The excellent recent apple season meant the Green brothers were hopeful they could source enough fruit for their first batch of cider from the community.
“We thought ‘[Dad’s] is not the only backyard in Deloraine with too many apples … because everyone plants two or three apple trees in their backyard around here,” Mr Green said.
And even two mature trees produce more fruit than any one family can eat, he explained.
“So yeah, people were happy to for us to come and take their apples.”
Tom Green and his brother visited locals’ backyards to collect unwanted apples. (ABC News: Sarah Abbott)
Mr Green said he visited 35 gardens in Deloraine and Mole Creek to pick unwanted apples, and another eight people delivered apples to his door.
“We had people we’d never met just turning up with boxes … saying: ‘I heard you were looking for apples,'” he said.
“It was incredible.
“If we had been more organised, we probably could have tripled the amount of fruit we got.”
Mr Green said he thought there were a few reasons locals were keen to donate their fruit.
Some of the brothers’ cider batches have included commercially grown fruit rejected by supermarkets. (ABC News: Sarah Abbott)
“One was that we were offering, basically, to come and clean up people’s backyards for free, and take their apples,” he said.
They also got “really excited” about the idea that their apples would be put to good use by going into “a product that could be enjoyed”, Mr Green said.
“Because a lot of these apples just go to waste — just get eaten by wasps, or chucked on the compost, or dumped.”
Maria Tessone is happy to donate some of her apples. (ABC News: Sarah Abbott)
Deloraine local Maria Tessone, who has around 12 apple trees growing in her garden, said there was usually “a lot of wastage” in her orchard each year.
So she found it satisfying to have her apples collected by Mr Green for cider-making.
“It was great to see, and it still gives me pleasure in knowing that there’s bottled apple cider at Little Green Men that came from my orchard,” she said.
Nine batches made so far
Mr Green said they had now produced nine separately bottled batches.
“[The bottles] are on display in the pub, and we get people bringing their friends in to show them, saying: ‘Our fruit’s in this one and that one,'” he said.
The Green brothers sell their cider in their pub and at markets. (ABC Northern Tasmania: Sarah Abbott)
People who contributed fruit to the cider have also been given free bottles of the finished product.
As well as letting him meet some local people for the first time, cider-making has led Mr Green to discover some “really cool” apples from local “gnarly, old” trees.
“People call us up saying, ‘We’ve got some old apples here — we assume they’re cider apples because they taste terrible, even the crows don’t eat them.”
“Those old trees yield apples with pretty different flavours to the modern ones — they’re perfect for us,” he said.
The new ciders have a higher alcohol content than most others on the market. (ABC News: Sarah Abbott)
Looking to the future, Mr Green said he and his brother are expecting to expand the range of their apple collecting to a town to the east of Deloraine.
“We were asked yesterday … to make a Westbury cider, so that’s the plan for next year,” he said.
Ms Tessone said she would happily donate apples again, if asked.
“I think Tom will be knocking, and I’ll be saying, ‘Help yourself.'”
