Established in 1994, we make craft cider and perry from 100% juice of vintage fruit harvested from traditional standard Herefordshire orchards.

 

Our product range includes draught, bottle conditioned, and in-bottle fermented ciders and perries.

 

We make in season, typically from late September to early December, with what nature provides - that’s just 100% fresh pressed juice from named varieties of sun-ripened fruit and wild yeasts. We nurture the long, slow fermentations and intense flavours these simple ingredients give us.

 

We don’t use concentrates, corn syrup, artificial sweeteners or other ingredients allowed by the legal definition of ‘cider’.

 

We harvest our fruit from wide spaced trees in traditional standard orchards, sometimes a single lonely old tree or a row of trees. They’re unsprayed, rich in birds and bugs, not like the many pesticide sprays and sterile strips typical of more intensively managed bush orchards.

 

We seek out named varieties with natural fruit sugar, tannin and acidity (rarely found in a single variety), and blend different varieties with the required vintage qualities each year.

 

We value diversity in characteristic fruit flavours and alcohol levels. So we’re not dependent on clever chemistry, or dilution with water, to achieve a consistent (and boring!) product range each year. Our products are gloriously inconsistent and we make a virtue of this – it's part of our USP!

 

All of our products carry Protected Geographical Indications (PGI) and conform to the approved specification for ‘Herefordshire Cider’ and ‘Herefordshire Perry’. This means they have complete traceability from blossom to barrel, and bottle. We record and report to Trading Standards the source(s) of our fruit, the named varieties, and the volumes of each we use to make our products every year.

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For further reading on both our story and philosophy, please read James' chapter of 'What's for Dinner?' an online book published in 2020.