APPLES TO APPLES

Bittersweet apples are the special tannic apples we’ve used to make cider in the West Country for centuries. Tannin gives cider a refreshing dryness like wine grapes and a delicious bitterness like beer hops. It also gives cider structure, allowing complex flavours to emerge as you savour the drink. Each of these bittersweet varieties can produce enormous variations of flavour and aroma, just like grapes & hops, but even more so. And there’s hundreds of varieties to explore!

 

It used to be that West Country cider was packed with flavour by virtue of these unique bittersweet apples. Then as it became cheaper to ship in apple concentrate from all over the world, so the big cider producers started blending more and more basic eating apple concentrate into their cider, making it increasingly bland & boring.

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The potential flavour possibilities with bittersweet apples are endless and they’ve barely begun to be explored. At our new cidery at Bristol’s Far Orchard we aim to turn our bittersweet apples into modern craft ciders that modern drinkers will love - delicious, flavour-packed ciders that are a true reflection of our unique local apples.