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In which we discover another alcoholic beverage popular with the locals
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These days, cider attracts those with a sweet tooth; usually a younger drinker who has spent years drinking super-sweet soft drinks or those pointless “energy” drinks, so their palate constantly screams for sugar. Some of the ciders these days seem so full of sugar that you could stand a spoon upright in a glass of the stuff. These kids want to get drunk but they don’t want their drink to taste like, you know, alcohol – so sugary ciders it is.
That said, it’s not the first time Australians turned to cider to get themselves bent. The same thing went on back in Squire’s day, when farmers needed to find a way to get rid of a glut of peaches and people needed to find a cheap way to get drunk – so it was a mutually beneficial arrangement.
And one that, curiously, the government didn’t like – despite initially encouraging everyone to make the damn stuff.
In March 1805, the Gazette was full of praise for those who had worked out how to turn the fruit into booze “in such quantities as to promise real advantage”.
“Several of the settlers at Kissing Point have devoted much attention to the praiseworthy object; one of whom informs us that he has already put up about 200 gallons which, with a few months fermentation, he doubts not will be found equal to the apple cyder in strength and not inferior to the taste.”
The article then proceeded to go into some detail about how he managed to extract the juice. Really, it’s almost as if the Sydney Gazette actually wanted people to set up stills and make peach cider.
Of course, they didn’t actually want that – you needed to get a government licence to make beer or spirits – but telling people how to make cider and then not expecting them to do it is just weird. At least a decent amount of Sydneysiders thought so too, because what soon followed was an ongoing issue of people cranking out cheap peach-flavoured booze.
In April 1806, the Gazette reported that “several very indifferent characters among the settlers entice the servants of their neighbours from their duty by the lure of cyder made from peaches”. What they were getting at was people setting up sly grog houses and getting people drunk; so the law said it would punish both the home owner as well as all the convicts drinking there. Even those with a licence had to prevent “any unlawful or improper meetings of the idle and dissolute in their respective houses”.
A month later, on May 11, 1806, there was a report of the case of James Meyne, busted for being in possession of a still. Meyne denied the charge, which did him no good at all – most likely because he had at least 400 gallons of peach cider fermenting at the time in preparation for it to be turned into something stronger.
In June, there was another still uncovered at North Rocks, just off the Parramatta River. The people sent to raid it were watching the two men working the still and, while discussing how to capture them, found the bootleggers unknowingly walking in their direction – so pistols came out and arrests were made.
“On further search being immediately ordered,” the Gazette reported, “seven casks of cyder were found, containing numerous ingredients to promote fermentation, etc, together with a few quarts of pernicious spirit, concealed in the cavity of a rock.”
The search also uncovered information which led to another still being found at the Field of Mars (a brilliant name for an area in the vicinity of Ryde).
The anonymous Gazette writer then proceeded to weigh into cidermakers and distillers at some length.
“The activity of Government in restraining this infamous practice, which is certainly a most atrocious attack upon the health of the inhabitants, will, it is to be hoped, very soon effectually suppress every inclination to attempt it.
“The rewards held out for the purpose of bringing the delinquents forward are a sufficient testimony of the most serious determination to crush the evil, by placing every principal in the power of his meanest assistant or associate; and as the principals, agents, and devisers can be esteemed in no other light than as the mercenary factors of pestilential calamity, actuated by a principle of self advantage to spread disorder and contamination, it becomes a public duty assiduously to promote detection, as the only probable means of effectually subduing the evil, and suppressing the dangerous evaporation of so malevolent a spirit.”
Fighting words, right? The paper had had enough of people making cider and then turning it into something rougher, right? Surely, they wouldn’t then go and do something that appeared to encourage people to make it again, right?
Wrong. Just five months after that screed the Gazette published a 450-word explanation on how to pick, store, prepare and ferment peaches. Here’s a sample to show just how much detail the article gave.
“Most are already aware, that the juice will ferment without any assistance from yeast or other ingredients; and it is necessary to be known that this state of natural fermentation must not be checked, but allowed to subside of itself, which will be known by the head flattening.
“It must now be drawn into clean and sweet vessels, the neglect of which occasions many a failure; for if it be suffered to remain in the casks in which it fermented, it is not possible to insure it against fermenting anew upon a change in the atmosphere.”
Really, it’s like they actually wanted people to make cider. In December, they even turned it into a contest where people were asked to make two hogsheads of cider and, after a taste test the following year, the winner would get a cow from the government stores.
It is all evidence of a really odd approach to alcohol regulation - the government makes it illegal to create booze but also spends a good deal of time telling the public how to make the base ingredient of that booze.