Capital Craft Beer Fest 2019 is around the corner. This year Capital Craft will be returning with 3 stages and over 40 brewers lined-up to splash some of our countries finest craft beer into your mouth.
Before you start daydreaming about the above, dig into this: we caught up with William, the mastermind behind Everson’s Cider and asked him a few questions.
THE INTERVIEW:
William, you’ve gained what can only be described as a cult following for being a “garagiste winemaker”! Please, explain to us what being garagiste winemaker entails.
A garagiste winemaker is someone making small amounts of wine in his garage! This is how I started many years ago with buying grapes from small growers and making wine, now I buy apples and make cider in the same natural-as-possible way!
Mzi: You start by crushing the fruit and then ferment what you’ve extracted from it with premium cider yeast. How long does it take to transform natures candy into a tasty cider?
From the time of crushing the apples to get the juice to ferment it takes about two weeks for fermentation to complete. Then the yeast settles out another week, the cider filtered, carbonated under pressure, blends made up of our different ciders and bottled or kegged, in total a month.
What are a couple of things that if you fail to do (or do) during the cider-making process, you may as well chuck the lot out?
Working as natural as possible and with low levels of preservatives (we do add a small amount of sulfur dioxide to prevent oxidation and do pasteurize our bottles for a longer Best Before Date) the chance of the cider turning to vinegar are there, but if that happens we make Apple Cider Vinegar as a secondary product so, no waste!
Everson’s, alongside more than 40 hand-picked premium brewers, will be keeping the festival goers from being parched at this year’s Capital Craft Beer Festival. What ciders will you be bringing along with you?
We will have our two original ciders there: dry and pure fruit and the Apple & Perry (Pear cider), as well as our blends with other fruits and spices, the Cloudy cider is still very popular, the Mulled cider is a spicy cloudy cider that can be enjoyed warm like a “Gluwein” and then the Pomegranate & Blueberry are two fruit blended ciders that are extremely popular at festivals.
If Everson’s Cider were a person, who woke up in the morning, shuffled out of bed, and walked straight to their mp3 player to put on a song… what song would it be?
Well, there’s a lot of songs to choose from for myself, but for Everson’s Cider surely “I am a cider drinker” by The Wurzels makes me laugh every time I hear it!
If the audience at home wants to connect their lips with an ice-cold Everson’s Cider, where in Gauteng can they go?
Our ciders in bottles are available from various outlets in Gauteng, on tap Capitol Craft is the best spot!
Tickets for Capital Craft Beer Festival are available right here. The event has been known to sell out before the date so don’t sleep on it!