Pochle is the latest Scottish entry in the category of cider brandies, and the brainchild of Chris Miles. Chris is the owner of The Black Cat in Edinburgh and working on developing, new Granton based distillery, with the Incholm Distillery company. I first met Chris at a trade launch for his new Pochle spirit in March this year and loved the enthusiasm and passion he had for apples, terroir and representing the land.
I invited Chris to an interview with the bulletin to learn more about him, the Pochle project and where all of this sits in the Scottish Cidersphere:
Tommy: So you’ve got an interest in spirits, last time we talked you told me you’d also been a cider fan for a long time?
Chris: I suppose what I like about either a cider or a spirit is how it reflects the land. You can take produce from the area you are from and express it in some way. Cider is very good at that because, mostly the apples are quite local. With Spirits, I can then take the cider that I make and reflect the land that we live in with that. “
Audio from the interview:
What is Pochle?
Pochle is an urban orcharded, eau de vie/cider brandy made with a tequila ageing mentality. Apples are collected from community-walled gardens, excess from local farms and even people’s back gardens across Edinburgh. These apples are pressed and blended into a cider, which is aged and distilled into a fruit spirit or “eau de vie”! To get a cider brandy, you’ve got to age the young, colourless spirit that comes off the still.
Pochle approaches this with a “tequila” mentality:
“We’ve released our Blanco (white spirit) called Geal (Gaelic for White). Our reposado (Ciùin, Gaelic for Calmed) will be aged anywhere between 60 days and 18 months. We don’t know how long it’ll be in the casks. We’ll just taste it until we say ‘It’s tasting nice right now, so let’s release that as the reposado.’ And then some of the spirit will go on to stay in the barrels for years, and that’ll be the Añejo. The spirits are being aged in first fill bourbon casks, bespoke Pedro Ximenez ¼ casks and virgin American oak firkins.”
Chris, a bartender since the age of 18, has specialised in cocktails. Having worked in cities like Glasgow, Melbourne, and Prague, Chris has developed a deep passion for spirits and locality. While collaborating with whiskey companies, large spirit companies and working in development for some of them, Chris says he has always thrived behind the bar.
So how do you get from bartender to brand maker? I asked Chris where Pochle came from and how far the apple fell from the tree.
“There is this walled garden in Granton, next to where we hope to build the distillery, and as soon as I saw it, I went straight back to a memory of my childhood in the early 90s, of going around with my friends and pochling (classic scots word for taking something without exactly having permission) apples from a walled garden where I was from. So I used to jump the fence and sneak around, taking a few of the apples and holding them in my jumper, rolling it up so people wouldn’t see. Then we’d go around to the elderly neighbours and trade them the fresh apples for butterscotch sweeties, and one neighbour, she would always say “Awcht, you got another wee pochle”. As soon as I made that connection to the walled garden and Granton I knew there was something I could do to connect with the area more, and that’s where the Pochle project came from.”
Connecting with people through the land
From the hands that planted these orchards, some older than any of us reading this, to the young unmarred hands of a new generation, Pochle is a drink that holds the land and those people that pass through it in its heart.
It’s not an easy task, to take a variety of apples, not intended for making cider, and make a spirit out of them which tastes anywhere near palatable. I can assure you I have tried it myself, distilling some homebrew on a home pot still, taking cuts with nothing but intuition to guide me.
Intuition doesn’t lead to a very consistent or nice drink. What it takes is expertise, trial, error and passion. All of these elements were found by Chris in Heriot-Watt University’s Brewing and Distilling BSc course, one of the best in the country, producing graduates with aptitude and understanding that would take a lifetime to develop on its own.
“I met Dr Annie Hill, a professor at Heriot-Watt, at an event. I discussed my ideas about distillation with her, and when the opportunity arose to work together, we jumped on it. The students were excited to have a real-world project after a long break due to Covid.”
In the first year, three students from the program were tasked with taking any apple and formulating a method for getting a consistent product after distilling. They ran tests, looking at where in the process to blend – before fermentation, after fermentation or after distillation. This year, Chris has told me, a new crop of students will be looking at the effect of freeze pasteurising juice, which can greatly improve yield and quality, as well as affect flavour.
The students have been a key player in Pochle’s development and Chris has assured me there will be plenty more collaborations in the future.
The land that always was.
As new as the technology and science going into Pochle is, the apple trees are old, some even ancient. With apples being sourced across the country through urban orcharding (akin to the work of London cider makers Hawkes) there is an uncountable smorgasbord of varieties going into each bottle. Chris has told me this is key to what he wants Pochle to be, a reflection of the land that was and always has been.
When he started coyishly reaching out to people about any spare apples they might have, he was surprised by the response. To many people, he was providing a great service, abundant fruit trees are great if you have the time to pick them, but can become a dangerous nuisance if you haven’t the means to. With fruit dropping all over the place and rotting on the floor, many people resort to cutting down trees. Urban orcharding aims to save these trees from their death sentence by giving them a purpose and establishing a service to help the community manage their trees.
“The elderly people in the old bungalows, they seem to have apple trees in the backyard that have gone bananas. They’re scared to go out the back door in case they get an apple dropped on their head and take them out. You’d have no idea how many people in Edinburgh who I came across like that. I like reaching into the community that way, but the more I did it, the more I became aware of how this could help community orchards. If it’s a commercial product, we can then pay them for the surplus apples that they’re not using. They’re gonna juice some and sell it in apple crates and stuff like that, and that’s great, but they always have a surplus. If I can provide them with an income, then that goes back into the community and the orchard to help them grow and remain.”
The future of Apples & of Pochle
With casks now filled and ageing, it is a waiting game for the next Pochle releases. The ball is in motion and the path that Pochle will carve will, no doubt, be defining and prosperous. Scotland once had an abundance of apple trees and areas like Fife and the Borders were known for their fruit supplies. These days, orchards are being dug up for more favoured apple acquisition methods, mainly imported from distant, cheaper lands. 90% of traditional orchards across the UK have been destroyed since the 1950s. This decline in self-grown foods has hit orchards hard and is even seen across most other crops. The UK does not grow enough fruit and veg for its own population to eat the recommended healthy intake. I hope to see more interaction between cideries, community orchards and locals to save trees across the country.
Will we see projects like Pochle in other lands? Here’s what Chris had to say:
“What I hope is, Pochle always remains local. I hope that perhaps we can do this everywhere we can get, If people are collecting apples in Leeds, then we do a release in Leeds, and if in Glasgow, then a Glasgow version. It has to be an expression of the land that’s important to me. It’s not some old story, this is a modern Scotland in a modern time.”
It’s clear that Pochle is a project made of people that aim to restore the close connection we all once held with the land. By expressing the land purely, taking its fruits and crops and minimally intervening with them, we can truly listen to its wants and needs and will be rewarded for nurturing our relationship.
You can find Pochle in a plethora of independent bottle shops in Scotland such as Cork & Cask, Abbey Fine Wines & Leith Bottle Shop, or order internationally online, through sites like Drinkmonger or directly from Pochle.
Over and out.
Written by
Tommy Newbold
Journalist at The Scottish Cider Bulletin
Editorial by
Ivana Ilieva
Editor at The Scottish Cider Bulletin