Cider Fauns

When I was writing up the fauns for the Magonomia Bestiary I missed a trick. The player characters discover they can make faun-like creatures with different alcoholic beverages. I missed an important one: cider.

Cider and beer are rivals for English drinkers over centuries, but cider is in the ascendant in the Ars Magica period. This is because one of its great cultural centres is Normandy, and the 1066 invasion makes it popular in the upper classes. That’s not to say cider wasn’t already made elsewhere, it was: it’s just that when you look at nobles they are mostly wine drinkers in most of Europe. Among peasants it was also popular, because it was cheaper to make than beer.

It’s cheap to make cider, because you don’t need to boil the apple juice in the way that you boil the barley mash. You don’t need fuel, which is handy in a kingdom that has deforested itself and not yet discovered the widespread use of sea coal. Cider apples are also usually picked in October during the period, which is after many of the other duties of the agricultural year.

If you look at the basic information about variants, you’ll read that there are three essential types of apple. These are dessert, the cooking and crab apples. The last one’s used to make cider, and you’ll read is is full of tannins which make it too astringent to eat, but which add flavour to the cider and clarifies it. These divisions are essentially rubbish in modern Australia, and may be where you are too. I’ve eaten apples sold as crab apples, and they were just dessert or cooking apples that were too small to be accepted by supermarkets. Australia’s favourite cooking apple, the Granny Smith, is probably a weird natural mutation of the French Crab, which is a cider apple people also use for desserts. Basically you can mix and match your apples to create different flavours and qualities.

A better way of thinking about apples is along two axes: sweetness and biterness. This divides apples into four groups and I’d like to suggest that you could map these to the four humours so that you could program the personality of the faun-like creature you make with cider. The types are:

Bittersharp: This is the classic ancient cider apple, that can be used without being mixed with other apple varieties. It is high in tannins (bitter) and acid (sharp). The acid slows fermentation, but that’s not a bad thing sometimes: it means that your apple juice is less likely to pick up stray yeasts and ferment weirdly.

Bittersweet: This is a high tannin apple, but it is low in acid, so it tastes sweeter than a bittersharp. Lower acid in the juice makes fermentation faster, so these let you speed up and bulk out your cider.

Sharp (or, in the French system, acidic): A sharp apple is low tannin and high acid. It can be added to up the acidity level, see above for how that preserves apple juice. A lot of cooking apples are sharps, because the acid generally breaks down under heat. So, the Granny Smith is a sharp apple. To show how useless the three-way division of apples is, the Harrision Cider Apple is also a sharp cultivar.

Sweet: this is a high sugar, low acid apple Basically, that’s a table apple. Sugar doesn’t add a lot of flavour to cider, but it does add extra alcohol after fermentation, so, handy to have. In the Faun chapter, you are initially looking for highly potent alcohol, and so you’d load up on sweet apples when making a faun. In the four humour model that would push all of the fauns toward the sanguine humour, and your tuning would be along the tannic axis, so you could push some into phlegmatic (by making the cider bitter). After you work out that the strength of the alcohol doesn’t matter, you could pull back on the sugar and add more sharpness (acid) to pull your fauns back toward melancholic or phlegmatic. I’d argue silenii are pretty phlegmatic, so you might be able to make something a little like them that way.

Would there be a physical divergence? I have thought of these creatures as a sort of woodwose, but I’m not tied to that idea. I have also considered them as serpent people.