Can you help, please?

Flooding in Nepal

Greetings, Ciderling

If you’re local, you might have already heard the devastating news about Pedro from MoMo Nepalese Street Food (one of our event regulars). Pedro’s wife, his mother, his brother, and his uncle are all missing in Nepal following the floods. Pedro has dropped everything to fly out to Nepal to join the search and rescue efforts. As a result, his food truck businesses and all local bookings have been put on hold. As a self-employed business owner, facing this unthinkable nightmare also means facing an immediate loss of livelihood, alongside mounting emergency travel, logistical, and rescue costs. Helen at Lakedown Taproom has set up a fundraiser to support Pedro with the loss of earnings and extra costs. Please support the fundraiser if you can. 

🍎 The apple appeal is open 

We’ll need all the help we can get this year please - the early frosts and hot hot weather have meant lots of appleblossom died off early doors. The blooms that survived into applehood haven’t grown very big because of the combination of hot hot heat and minimal rainfall. Apples need water to plump up. Small apples mean not much juice. Not much juice means not much cider. 

But you scratch our backs (bring us your apples) and we’ll scratch yours (give you a bottle of cider for every large shopping bagful). We take all varieties of apples (including crab apples) and pears. You don’t need to know what kind they are - they’ll get mixed in with all the rest of the apples we get donated.

It’s not a problem if the fruit has a few nibbles and nicks in it. But we can’t take anything that’s crawling with maggots or starting to rot. If they’re a bit squishy, we probably can’t use them. Not even for pigfeed.

So get gathering and bring them along to the cidery on Brook House Lane, Framfield (close to the bottom of the lane before the fisheries) any time. If we’re not there, fill in a form and we’ll sort you out with the cider later.

If you help with the apple appeal, you’ll become a part of the future of Sussex cider! Your apples will go into the 2027/8 cider batches so who knows, in a while you could be sat at a tap night chugging on the fruits (so to speak) of your own apple collecting labours.

And if you don’t have any apple trees, you’re not off the hook yet…

🌳 Orchard picking days

You can still help with the apple haul by coming along to one of our Orchard Picking Days starting this Sunday 13th September near High Hurstwood. 

These apples won’t find and pick themselves y’know. So we need some good oldfashioned child labour. Tear your kids off their screens and come for a wholesome outdoorsy day where they’ll learn about apples, pick apples with their (helpfully small) hands, and juice some fruit. Then they can put their teeny hands over their teeny ears while we tell you all about nature’s finest trick - how the wild yeast ferments the apple juice into delicious, alcoholic cider. 

You don’t HAVE to bring along a child by the way - we accept apple pickers of all ages. 

And we’ll feed you and send you off with some juice and as many apples as you can stuff in your pockets. So come along for a wholesome harvesty day outdoors. 

Sunday 13th September - near High Hurstwood
Sunday 27th September - near Iden Green
Sunday 4th October - near Bodiam Castle

It’s totally free (we are putting you to work, after all) but we do need to know if you’re coming please so we know how much food to prep. And so we can send you the exact address.

Get your name on the list here: https://bignoseandbeardy.com/collections/events/products/orchard-picking-days 

🍏 Cidermaking 

Our first cidermaking course is on Saturday 19th September, then we have another on Saturday 17th October, both 10am - 4pm. We’ve got a handful of tickets left for the September event so get a wriggle on if you’re interested in learning how to make cider the traditional Sussex way. 

Together, we’ll pick and juice the apples and you’ll head home with 20L of fresh apple juice to ferment into cider at home. We’ll also have a delicious communal lunch and lots of cider chat. 

Tickets are £175 - book your place today [Button - book your place]

🍻 Tap nights & tours

We had a brilliant turnout to our recent tap night, thanks to all who came along. Our last tap of the year is on 2nd October, and if you tour the cidery on the same afternoon, you get into the tap night as our guest, no ticket needed. We’ve also got a tour on Saturday 3rd October. Find out more and book yourself in on our events page. 

And if you’re algorithmically inclined, do please follow us on instagram for more updates and farm life @bignosebeardy 

Cheers,

BN&B