Cyder cider

So, cider v cyder - you might have spotted our tap badges are changing from Unfiltered Cider to Cyder Cider, which probably looks like a typo to some.

Cyder is the olde English spelling for a tipple made in the olde English way - thoughtfully, slowly and with respect for both fruit and drink.

Even though often drank out of a pint glass in a pub garden, cider is different to beer. Beer is made from barley, which can be harvested and stored, and then malted, stewed & fermented over a matter of days as and when the brewer wants to. Cider is made from apples which don’t store well, meaning traditional makers tend to press & ferment all their juice once a year at harvest time. The juice can take 6 months to ferment and benefits from a little more time in the tanks to mature.

Compared to beer, cider making is inefficient business.

Big modern cideries have found ways to get around this - using apple concentrate which stores for ages, and adding sugar before fermenting to get a higher alcohol content, which is then diluted back down with water before drinking. More booze & more sugar helps to stabilise things, which makes these ciders more consistent, efficient and affordable.

What they gain in affordability & stability, they lose in flavour. Efficient, after all, is rarely delicious.

Concentrating & then diluting the juice removes the volatile aromas and tannins, which are the moreish flavour makers we love. It is the polyphenols in traditional cider apples that are only retained with a slow & natural fermentation that give complexity & variety to the best cyder ciders.

Our cyder is made from fresh apple juice, fermented slowly with wild yeasts and diluted to a sessionable strength with more juice. Naturally delicious & full flavoured, we think it deserves the ‘y’.