Uncultivated Wild Apples, Real Cider, and the Complicated Art of Making a Living Andy Brennan, reviewed

An interesting meditation of apple growing, cider making, and the challenges of making a living by doing both of these things. Written by Andy Brennan and available from Chelsea Green Publishing here.

Uncultivated Wild Apples, Real Cider, and the Complicated Art of Making a Living reviewed

This is an interesting and thoughtful taking on cider making by Andy Brennan, and ex painter and artist who moved out of New York City and dedicated his time to apples instead. Brennan has clearly thought long and hard about why he makes cider, how it makes it, and what he does, and does not want it to be. All of which makes for an enjoyable read as he walks us through these decisions and the impact it has had on his life and the trees that he works with.

Along the way you will learn a lot about apples, the evolution of apple growing, and what is a natural growth of apple trees, and what is a more commercial, and often less hardy type of tree. At the same time Brennan accepts that some of these opinions are arguably subjective ones. This does not make the book weaker for it though, as it helps to convey the nuances and intricacies of growing apples for making cider. We are not huge fans of scrumpy for example, and we never realised how many varieties of apples there are, and the debate over what is, and is not the ‘right way’ to make cider.

All throughout the book it does feel like you are reading something like Aldo Leopold’s Sandcounty Almanac, or a book by Edward Abbey, as Brennan is clearly aiming to inspire us to reflect more deeply on the natural world around us. It works too, and makes for a surprisingly calm yet thoughtful book. We enjoyed it, and you might do so too.

About Andy Brennan

The book’s blurb

“The best wine book I read this year was not about wine. It was about cider”–Eric Asimov, New York Times, on Uncultivated

Today, food is being reconsidered. It’s a front-and-center topic in everything from politics to art, from science to economics. We know now that leaving food to government and industry specialists was one of the twentieth century’s greatest mistakes. The question is where do we go from here.

Author Andy Brennan describes uncultivation as a process: It involves exploring the wild; recognizing that much of nature is omitted from our conventional ways of seeing and doing things (our cultivations); and realizing the advantages to embracing what we’ve somehow forgotten or ignored. For most of us this process can be difficult, like swimming against the strong current of our modern culture.

The hero of this book is the wild apple. Uncultivated follows Brennan’s twenty-four-year history with naturalized trees and shows how they have guided him toward successes in agriculture, in the art of cider making, and in creating a small-farm business. The book contains useful information relevant to those particular fields, but is designed to connect the wild to a far greater audience, skillfully blending cultural criticism with a food activist’s agenda.

Apples rank among the most manipulated crops in the world, because not only do farmers want perfect fruit, they also assume the health of the tree depends on human intervention. Yet wild trees live all around us, and left to their own devices, they achieve different forms of success that modernity fails to apprehend. Andy Brennan learned of the health and taste advantages of such trees, and by emulating nature in his orchard (and in his cider) he has also enjoyed environmental and financial benefits. None of this would be possible by following today’s prevailing winds of apple cultivation.

In all fields, our cultural perspective is limited by a parallel proclivity. It’s not just agriculture: we all must fight tendencies toward specialization, efficiency, linear thought, and predetermined growth. We have cultivated those tendencies at the exclusion of nature’s full range. If Uncultivated is about faith in nature, and the power it has to deliver us from our own mistakes, then wild apple trees have already shown us the way.

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