THE CIDER AND PERRY INDUSTRY. 



193 



draught cider among the working classes at Buxton. It was 

 there also that a wine merchant told me that, running short in 

 the hot summer of 1893 of English cider, he bought American, 

 but discovered, to his loss, that his customers would not touch it 

 after English, and so found himself at the end of the season 

 burdened with forty dozen of unsaleable liquor. The fact is, as 

 an American writer of a handbook on cider-making says, " very 

 few indeed are the American orchards which have been planted 

 with reference to cider-making." Consequently, American cider 

 is, for the most part, made of the inferior grades of table fruit not 

 good enough to market. In an article on cider-making in the 

 American Agriculturist for the 8th of last August, the writer 

 says of American cider, "It is commonly made of refuse apples 

 of all varieties, little attention being paid to their condition when 

 taken to the mill, as to degree of ripeness, freedom of insects, 

 or the proportion of tart to sweet apples. The result is a juice 

 which quickly begins to ferment, then acidify, being often un- 

 palatable and insipid." I believe also that much of the American 

 cider imported into this country is pasteurised, and so has to be 

 artificially aerated after its arrival. If not pasteurised, a 

 chemical preservative, such as salicylic or boracic acid, has to be 

 added to it in order to enable it to bear the voyage. Some 

 American cider analysed in the laboratory of the Agricultural 

 College, Cirencester, was found to be impregnated with salicylic 

 acid. I am not sufficiently versed in chemistry or medicine to 

 say what may be the effect on the human system of continued 

 doses of these drugs, which form the basis of most of the secret 

 nostrums sold to cider-makers for the doctoring of the liquor; but 

 as the object of using them is to make inferior drink or drink 

 already on the turn pass for good, I think their use should 

 either be prohibited, as is already the case in some countries, or 

 that a statement of the kind and quality of the agent employed 

 should appear on a label attached to the article sold. 



My belief, therefore, is that with our abundance of orchards 

 full of vintage fruit, much of it consisting of varieties of approved 

 excellence, we ought, if we pay attention to the quality of our 

 produce, not only to hold our own against our American rivals, 

 but oust them from those markets in which they may have 

 already obtained a footing. 



I now turn to another branch of the subject — namely, to the 



