Having not had a great upswell of interest in the urban cider project, but having picked some apples last weekend with my good friend Tim, and having got the promise of the loan of a scratter and press from another old friend, Craig, I'm about to press my very first juice this weekend.

We have about 30kg of apples, almost all Bramley's at the moment, and I've got another tree to pick on Saturday afternoon, eating apples. I don't have any cider apples, just a few crabs which are fairly tannic, so while they'll help with the flavour it's likely that my cider is going to turn out to be fairly acidic, somewhat in the Kentish style.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do to offset this - I may try to stimulate a malo-lactic fermentation after the first racking - this can help to reduce acid levels and increase the interesting flavours in the cider.

The other thing I'm thinking of trying is not adding a cultured yeast, at least at first. Apples have plenty of wild yeasts in the flesh, and they imbue the cider with desirable flavours, but unfortunately these yeasts, the "apiculate" yeasts, so called due to their lemon shape under a microscope die out when the alcohol level reaches about 2%. At that point the Saccharomyces yeasts have to take over. Since the press I'm using has been used before to press apples I'm banking on there being some dessicated Saccharomyces left in there somewhere. According to cider guru Andrew Lea, this is the main way in which the non-wild yeasts get into cider in traditional making, since apples do not generally contain Saccharomyces.

By the way, if you are serious about wanting to understand cider making, I guarantee that reading Andrew Lea's book Craft Cider Making will help a lot.

So, if some Saccharomyces does manage to get into the cider, all well and good, although the fermentation might be a bit slower. Actually, slow fermentation is another thing that can help the flavour, which is why I'm thinking of doing it this way. Ultimately, if the fermentation appears to stop, I'll open it up and add a white wine yeast and some yeast nutrient - without extra nutrients the boisterous wine yeasts can overwhelm the cider, breaking down the juice for nutrients and liberating sulphurous flavours.

That's the theory, anyway, but you know what they say about theory: "In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they differ".