Æblerov is an organic cidery that has its home in Beauvais' old sourdough factory in Svinninge in West Zealand. It collaborates with Denmark's most skilled organic growers to transform fruits and berries into crisp ciders, second-generation fruit wines and drinkable mash-ups that blur the lines between cider, beer and wine.
At Æblerov, nature is let loose. The fermentation is kick-started by the wild yeast cells that live on the surface of the fruit, just as the fine bubbles form naturally during bottle fermentation, as you know from Lambic, Loire and Champagne.
Æblerov cultivates wildness, good taste and all the small and large coincidences that nature throws up. They don't always know what to call their wildest products, but otherwise modestly call what they make 'real cider'.
It all started in 2011 in a small garage on Limfjordsvej in Vanløse. Here, the current owner Morten Sylvest-Noer and now former partner Christopher Melin supervised the newly purchased 30 liter plastic buckets of fermenting applesauce, which stood bubbling among rusty lawnmowers, a discarded pram and a litter of dried paint buckets. The initial capital was modest, the fruit grinder and press were hand cranked and production was limited to 50 litres.
Back then, they were then two happy wine waiters studying food science at the University of Copenhagen. They both dreamed of making wine but were far from vines and south-facing slopes, in a country where the climate offered some of the world's best apples year after year. It made more sense to throw themselves into the cider, so they did. Only problem: they didn't have any apples.
No apples = apple robbery!
That's how the robbery started. First in the backyards of family and friends, before they ventured out into Copenhagen's housing estates, where tons of apples rot to no avail every autumn. They went there and scouted over planks and privet hedges and then rang the home owners who had well-hung apple trees in their gardens. The first year's harvest resulted in a paltry 50 litres of spontaneously fermented cider. But when the first bottles were opened, the scent of Danish apples spread in the small garage. They were left with apples in their noses, good taste and bubbles.
In the coming years, they learned that nature, when we let go of control and let chance prevail, created genuine, wondrous expressions of taste that could never be 'engineered'. They soon began rebelling against the establishment's 'no eating apples' rule and unleashed the fermentation on all Danish apple varieties they could get their hands on. Slowly but surely, they saw a new Nordic cider emerging: the dry, slim and vinous cider that spoke the same language as the new Nordic gastronomy.
Æblerov moved into 'Two Beer City' in May 2019, where the factory halls had been empty for a few years. This move created a new synergy. The opportunity to become part of a larger production community, where they could build bridges across 'the city's' producers and create new experiences that make us rethink what alcoholic drinks are and can be. A good example is Cityboiz, a carbonated drink made with stout from To Øl, coffee kombucha from friends in Læsk mixed with pear cider from Æblerov. A drink that catapults the brain out of autopilot and into the taste buds: WTF!?
Although Æblerov has grown up, anarchy thrives, and although the apple poaching in Copenhagen's residential areas has long since been replaced by a more organized apple poaching from the country's leading organic fruit growers, the name remains the same: Apple robbery. Because it's the taste of pure chance, fruitful disobedience and wild rebellion that gets wilder and wilder.
