“It’s the cow that tastes good, not the butcher’s handiwork”
Andy Brennan: Uncultivated. Wild Apples, Real Cider nd the Complicated Art of Making a Living
Andy Brennan has written a book about making a decent living from stubborness, hard work, and a type of more or less happy madness. It’s a good living. He makes amongst the best cider in the US. If you drink a cider in a Michelin starred restaurant in the US, it might well be his Aaron Burr brand. He’s in love with wild things, local food, the oddness of ordinary people and the kind of apples that grow halfway to nowhere and taste like the inside of your mouth is being cleaned with a brillo pad dipped in acid. Character he calls it. He, his apples, his book and his cider have character by the barrel. The book charts his progress from urban New York artist to accidental orchardist and wild apple cidermaker. It’s honest, unorthodox and interesting, to grwoer and eater alike.
He’s the author of Uncultivated. He has an interesting idea. You taste everything when you eat a thing. All the decisions about how you farm, the type of soil, the weather it grows in, the history and tradition of varieties, everything, down to the personality of the grower can all be tasted in the food. Profit Driven pesticide wielding produce? You can taste it. Hands off hippy raised honey? You can taste it. Cider from wild apples. Cider from bought in pulp. Cider from the three trees that have been growing in the front yard since sometime last century. You can taste it. Gin from a bathtub that granny bathes the babies in. You can taste granny, the bathtub, the babies and the colour of the bathroom wall.
He also has another idea. A food producers job is to get out of the way of the food expressing itself. You don’t taste the butchers work. You taste the soil, the sun, the grass and the meat. And he has a third idea. This is all character. Food will have character if you let it. It will lose character if you interfere too much. The most magical and wonderful of the foods we love have character that’s particular to where they are from. The more we interfere the less foods taste like where they come from, the more they taste like they could and do come from anywhere. Good food comes from the careful work of local producers who understand and value what their unique location and culture brings to their produce. Bellota ham comes from the Dehesa. Denny’s ham comes from a packet.
He also argues that good food and local culture, taste, community, work and our connection to the people we share our communities with are part and parcel. Food creates community and culture. Culture and community creates great food. And they all get wrapped up in each other. Food grows in the soil of a community, and a community creates itself in the harvest and the eating of the food that grows from it. Sharing that distinctiveness with each other, inside and outside our community enriches all three. There’s a lesson here for food producers, for farmers and for communities. We grow our identities by wrapping ourselves economically up in each other. If we buy food from our community, we make that community, create it;s bonds, and in that sharing create foods that bind us. There’s a reason the Place of Origin certifications have place at the beginning. Great food comes from the people and the terroir in a place.
Andy is passionate about his craft. Passionate is probably underselling it. Andy is a driven maniacal visionary wholly in thrall to the craft he has dedicated almost everything he has and is to.
“It’s the tannins! You might try to spit it out but it’s too late. The apple has already released a chalky, woody quality that acts like the little people of Gulliver’s Travels tying down a tingling sensation to the front end of your mouth like a 9-volt battery. Shit, this actually hurts! you unexpectedly say to yourself. You’re used to juicy apples exploding in your mouth before swiftly falling off the back waterslide, but this apple is setting up shop like a sadistic dentist and you’re alarmed at what the Novocain precludes. Maybe the bitterness means the apple is poisonous. Maybe Denniston Red was the model for Snow White’s witchy queen after all. Maybe this is why the fruit is forbidden? Doomed, you just tasted a cider apple.”
Andy Brennan’s Uncultivated is like slow food. But cantankerous, slightly drunk and on steroids.
The farmers job is not to make food happen. It’s to let it happen. To get out of it;s way. Food should have character, not characteristics. It’s both a simple and complex idea. Character are things you like to taste in your food. Often things tied to a place. A depth of taste, the texture of air dried Parma ham, the earthy depth of a pasture raised rare breed pork, the hot singing depth of good chorizo. Whether the soil is stony and poor (think good riesling), or volcanic (Pomodorino Vesuviano). If the pig eats acorns and lives outside. Characteristics are things that make production easier. Fast growth, predictable time to market, ability to digest grain in sheep. Conversion rates of grain to muscle and fat in pigs. Resistance to roundup in corn. True character involves accepting unpredictability, oddity, and variation to produce artisanal produce. Good characteristics enable producers to eliminate unpredictability to produce profit. Character in food shines through when you let it grow on it’s own terms, privileging local produce and natural processes. Characteristics make growing faster, easier, more efficient. But they eliminate character. You want a cider that tastes like it grew in a small hill farm in Wicklow and has been that way since 1782. Then you want character and an apple the size of a ping pong ball that tastes like your mouth being turned inside out in a tub of baking powder. You want a cider that costs 99 cents a litre and tastes exactly the same wherever it grew? Then you want characteristics.
But I believe he’s right. Our lamb and goat eat what grows here. We don’t spray, we don’t plough up pasture. The herds eat what grows naturally here. Everything from wild mint to hawthorn trees. A diverse diet of wild foods that they would naturally forage. Our job is to work very hard to not get in the way of that. Which we do. We set up rortational grazing, harvest tree hay, plant more trees than we harvest, grow hedges. Our lamb grows unpredictably. It grows slowly. Our livestock spend grazing season eating what they want, and the pastures are semi wild, and filled with a riot of plants, herbs and forage. And it tastes all the better for it. Our pork is outdoor grown, on fresh wild fields.
It’s a choice we make for environmental reasons. For herd health reasons. For biodiversity reasons. And for the quality of our produce. Slow grown lamb, raised on wild pasture, raised outdoors, on healthy, bio diverse, wildlife friendly pastures gives us a better end product. It gives us happier, healthier lambs, it gives us a diverse ecosystem – we have everything from dragonflies to pine martens to wild orchids. And it gives us lamb and goat that you can taste the choices we make.
Uncultivated is a challenging, interesting, hare brained read of an artist converting half baked aspiration into a fully baked cider and philosophy. Its passionate, carefully and considerately written. I love this book. It’s an honest meditation of farming, food producing, hard work, and what it takes to make a thing worth making so much you pour yourself into it. It says important, interesting, occasionally insane things about how we make our food and how we make ourselves in that process. About community, culture and how we create both those things across an orchard and a kitchen table. About how important who we are is in what we eat and the danger of losing that to cheap efficiency. About the absolute value of taking nature, land, produce and farmed food on its own terms as a way, the way, to make the kinds of food we can be proud of. Are proud of. Uncultivated is available to order from your nearest independent bookstore. Because sure as feck it’s not one to get from Amazon.
