Never from concentrate, never pasteurised

The best cider is made by blending traditional varieties like Dabinett, Kingston black, Brown Snout and Strawberry Normans. While they take more care, and yield less fruit than more commercial varieties, their high sugar and tannin levels create a cider that’s full of flavour and character.

Using the fresh juice from apples picked from Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, we make cider from freshly pressed juice only (never concentrate which leads to a blander flavour and is often sourced from abroad) and ferment it in oak vats for up to 6 months using champagne yeast. Finally, we avoid pasteurisation, cold filtering the cider to remove apple and yeast particles.

About Hawkstone
Long before the Chipping Norton set was a thing, the Cotswolds were terrorised by another shadowy cabal — The Ancient Hawkstonian Order.

Legends say, the high priests of the Hawkstone (the neolithic standing stone that gives our beer and cider its name); participated in excessive drinking and bizarre fertility rites performed by the light of the full moon.

Now, for the first time since before the Norman conquest, the order is accepting new members.

Mike took me out behind his barn and gestured to a perry pear tree planted around 1828. He pivoted and swept his hand across a portion of the farm. “This orchard here, for example, my grandfather put some of those cider apples in in the 1930s, so we’ve always had cider fruit here.” Mike and his father began selling cider to the public in 1984, and, in the more than thirty years since, he’s learned how to work with the seasons, the orchards (each apple variety grows differently), the harvest, and the pace of the yeast that turn his crop to sparkling liquid.

The entire farm is self-contained. Throughout the spring and summer, Mike lets his sheep roam the orchards. He harvests the fruit in the fall and begins pressing it. The juice goes into fermenters in the barn and, when it has become cider in a few months, he bottles it in a building connected to the house. When people come to stay at the farmhouse, they’re invited to wander the orchards and even enjoy a picnic while roaming around. Mike has made the farm a bit of a destination; in the summer, he schedules bands to play in the barn, and people come and enjoy music and Ross-on-Wye cider. It’s just about exactly the romantic image people have of a cider farm.

By the standards of industrial farming, Mike’s ten thousand trees amount to a “tiny” parcel, but they’re more than enough to keep a small cider-maker in fruit. He has around a hundred different varieties planted, though many of those are just a tree or three. “It’s just for fun,” he says. “TI like new varieties and trying new things out.” His soil is a red sediment known as Hereford sandstone, and it’s great for drainage. That can be a problem in hot summers, but lately England has been drenched by rain. Although 2012 received a deluge, it was exceeded by the winter of 2014, the wettest winter on record. When I visited, the ground was sodden and the little stream by the farm was leaving pools in the road. In Somerset, the flat farmland was flooded, and it stretched out like an immense lake.

Like the old seventeenth-century English cider-makers, Mike maintains a natural farm little or no pesticides or fertilizer. The key is livestock. Keeping sheep means he lets his trees grow larger than modern orchards that are low and bushy. Pushing the canopy up allows more air flow, which he believes gives it less disease, and makes it easier to prune. The Johnsons even keep a particular breed for this purpose. “The problem is that most sheep, when they’re bored, start to nibble at the bark,” he explains. “But Shropshire sheep don’t.” For a farmer, there’s a lot of upside to this system. Not only does Mike keep down pesticide and fertilizer costs (he may or may not spray minimally or use fertilizer, depending on the circumstances), but he saves on the cost of diesel a mower would use. And for all that, he has a second crop with his sheep.

Soon we would walk into the barn and I would learn how Mike made cider, but as we stood and talked at the edge of his orchard, I was already beginning to get a sense of his underlying philosophy. I was asking him something about orchard maintenance, but his answer was typical (I heard it at least three other times), “I know people worry about all these things. Of course, I’ve been doing it thirty years and you get an instinct.” If you do things simply, the message was, problems take care of themselves.

The county of Herefordshire promotes the local industry by directing tourists along the Cider Route (“the real cider country,” they boast), guiding them to sixteen cideries from Ross-on-Wye in the south to Wigmore in the north. About halfway up and a bit to the east is number five on the route, Oliver’s Cider and Perry. The address I asked Google to decipher again included no street or address, but one interesting detail: Old Hop Kilns, Moorhouse Farm, Ocle Pychard, Herefordshire. Did you see it? Hop kilns. Until 1999, Oliver grew Fuggle, Northdown, and Target hops that were processed on the farm, in buildings now devoted to maturing cider. Among some American cider-makers, Tom Oliver is regarded with a level of respect that borders on awe. Even though he produces only a bit more than Mike Johnson, his ciders and perries find their way to the United States, where they are snapped up with glee. He’s won just about every award there is to win, and the Champion Cidermaker Cup was situated prominently in the tasting room when I visited—one of the few that had evaded him until that year. But this is what separates cider-makers from practitioners of more glamorous arts: when I pulled up in Ocle Pychard, I founda still farm veiled in mist, and a farmer in jeans and a down vest. He may be arock star among cider-makers, but he still puts his wellies on one foot at atime.

It turns out that hops were actually not the ancient family trade those were installed by Tom’s grandfather between the wars. His great-grandfather was an orchardist. When hops became unprofitable, Tom decided to return to his roots. He began planting treesboth apple and pear but unlike Mike Johnson, he gets most of his fruit from neighboring farms. For now, he grazes cattle and sheep on his 133 hectares [330 acres]. “I am variety fussy,” he told me when I asked whether he felt at risk having to buy fruit from other growers. “It’s almost more the varieties I don’t want too much of. So ’round here there’s stacks of Bulmers Norman, stacks of Michelin. I don’t mind either, just not all of it. They’re just boring and not great cider.” Many apple varieties are biennial, and some years they don’t produce much of a crop. But when you’re buying apples, you don’t have to worry about that. Getting the varieties he likes? So far it hasn’t been a problem, though he watches the market closely for changes in availability.

The Oliver cidery is mainly a two-man operation. As we were stamping our feet in the damp air discussing apples (or anyway I was), Tom’s collaborator arrived with the offer of warm tea. Jarek Kuzelka appeared in Ocle Pychard in 2007. He started working part-time for Tom, but was soon learning about apple varieties and y fermentation. As his palate sharpened and his knowledge deepened, he became more and more valuable and now works as Tom’s assistant. Soon he returned with an enormous mug of milky tea, and Tom periodically conferred with him in answering my questions. Steaming tea in hand, we began touring the cidery.