THE FOREST STIRE. 
The Foiest Stire is almost universally supposed to afford 
a stronger cider than any other kind of apple. I am, 
however, much inclined to doubt its pretensions in this 
respect, and to believe that the juice either of the Hag- 
loe Crab, or Brandy Apple, if obtained from fruit of 
equal maturity, and fermented with equal skill, would be 
found to afford, by distillation, as much, if not a greater 
quantity of ardent, spirit. The Stire is a native of Glouces¬ 
tershire, and is planted principally in the light soils in the 
neighbourhood of the Forest of Dean, where it affords a 
stronger cider than in the deeper soils of Herefordshire. I 
have not been able to find any account of it previously to the 
publication of Philips’s Poem,* where it is called the Stirom, 
on what authority I do not know. 
The trees of the Forest Stire, are not by any means ver 3 ’’ 
productive of fruit; and the fruit itself contains but a very 
small portion of juice; the specific gravity of which, I have 
observed to vary from 1076 to 1081, though obtained from 
samples of equal maturity and apparent perfection ; but 
which were produced by different soils. The Plate presents 
the apple in its most perfect and beautiful state. 
This variety, as Mr. Marshal in his Rural Economy of 
A. 
Gloucestershire has remarked, is decaying rapidly. 
