So the short story goes like this.. Man meets apple, finds fermentation, gets way too carried away with apple history and varieties, dedicates life to spreading the real cider gospel...

Ok, a bit self-righteous, but that’s how it feels a few years down the line.. I like to bang on a bit too, so I'll try to keep the long story brief.. It all started when we moved to an old Oxfordshire water mill with a few mature apple trees. Reflecting on the massive crop of apples that were all about to go to waste, I had to do the decent thing and ferment the juice - I'd caught the bug. Cracking the batch open a while later, it was soon apparent the mixed cookers and eater apples weren’t enough to satisfy my taste for the deep, rich flavours of proper cider, so there started an odyssey of searching out the real cider varieties, with all their history of centuries’ worth of propagation and cultivation that so fascinated me.