"When life gives you lemons," the cliche runs, " make lemonade."
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But what happens when you are given an orchard full of apples, and a supermarket duopoly which insists on screwing your payments to the absolute minimum, leaving you to make a loss on each piece of fruit?
You make cider. But not just any cider: you make one that is faithful to the traditions of English and European brewing, low in sugar and strongly-flavoured, respecting the heritage of the varieties used.
This is the story of what happens when a ciderist, a vigneron and a brewer of beer walk into a bar.
Michael Henry, Roland Kaval and Peter Aldred have a collective background in brewing spanning three-quarters of a century. Henry of Harcourt is a family-run orchard at the base of Mount Alexander, a 100-acre property with 14 acres planted to 4500 varieties of apple.
Kaval began his career as a brewing chemist with the ill-fated Courage venture in Melbourne, before a 20-year sojourn making wine and tending vineyards.
Aldred is senior lecturer and program coordinator of brewing at Federation University, and runs the university's microbrewery.
Henry and Kaval met as stallholders at the farmers' market in the central goldfields town of Talbot in the early 2000s. They crossed paths in their respective fields over time, until Kaval recently decided he would like to give cider making a try, as a move away from wine.
He approached Henry, suggesting his idea for a cider that was low in sugar and, in his words, "was not as sweet as buggery and was something I was happy with."
After some negotiating - the competition between winemakers and brewers over who knows more about making beverages is somewhat of an industry secret warfare - they decided to make Hardcore Cider.
"I've known Michael Henry for years," says Kaval, "so I went to him and said 'Hey, this sounds like a crazy idea, but this is what I'm thinking' and he said, 'Yeah, not so crazy - I think we can do it."
Henry would know. After the main supermarkets offered him 20c an apple - as long as it was perfect - that cost him 15c to grow, pick and package, he turned to making cider.
He grows and uses varieties of apples with such mellifluous names as Improved Foxwelp, Brown Snout and Belle Cauchoise, rare types that are disappearing rapidly. He says he was up for the challenge.
"I've always been about promoting craft ciders and making sure that there's more out there on the market, because my philosophy is always make the pie bigger, rather than trying to make your own slice of the pie bigger," Henry says.
To make a long story short, Henry and Kaval worked up a recipe, crushed and blended the apples, tested them at Harcourt then sent them to Fed Uni to be brewed.
A few weeks later and the first batch of low sugar, traditionally flavoured Hardcore was ready. Now, says Kaval, comes the hard work. Getting it into the notoriously difficult beverage market in Ballarat and beyond.