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Cider writing and its own history

Who has written about cider, and how much of it can be trusted?

In short

A surprisingly small number of people, in four distinct phases separated by long gaps. The seventeenth century produced a concentrated body of technical and polemical writing; the eighteenth and nineteenth produced very little; the twentieth produced a scientific literature from a single research programme; and the period since the 1970s has produced handbooks, campaigning writing and journalism.

The reliability varies by phase and by kind. Technical writing about method and chemistry is generally sound and checkable. Historical writing in the popular literature is the weakest part of the field, because authors have relied on each other rather than on sources, and the same unsupported claims have circulated for over a century.

The shape of the literature

The first phase is the 1650s to the 1690s, when a group of writers associated with the Royal Society produced a concentrated body of work on orchards and cider. It was technical, it was argumentative, and it had a political purpose: to establish that England could produce a drink to rival imported wine. That combination of instruction and advocacy has never entirely left the genre.

Then the record thins for two centuries. The eighteenth century produced a long georgic poem on cider and a certain amount of agricultural reporting; the nineteenth produced county surveys, pomonas and periodical articles, but no sustained technical literature. This gap is the reason so much of what is asserted about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice rests on inference from equipment and from passing references.

The twentieth century produced the most reliable body of writing the subject has, and it came almost entirely from one research programme. Analysis of fruit and juice, work on fermentation and spoilage, and the description and classification of cultivars were published over decades, and nearly every quantitative statement about English cider fruit descends from it. Its closure in 2003 left a gap that has not been filled.

The fourth phase runs from the 1970s: campaigning publications from consumer organisations, practical handbooks aimed at small-scale and commercial makers, regional histories, popular surveys, specialist periodicals, and since the 2000s a large body of online writing. The volume is greater than in any previous phase and the quality is far more variable.

The circulation problem

The defining weakness of popular cider writing is that authors cite each other. A claim enters the literature — that the Romans brought cider to Britain, that wassailing is pre-Christian, that a Basque fleet was saved from scurvy by cider — and is repeated in the next book, and the one after that, until it has been in print for a century and has acquired the authority of general knowledge.

Two features of the genre make this worse. Popular cider books are rarely footnoted, so a reader cannot follow a claim back; and the field is small enough that a determined author can read most of what exists, which produces confidence without producing independent verification. Following a chain of citations backwards in this literature frequently ends in a book that asserts the claim without support.

The pattern is not unique to cider. It is characteristic of subjects with a strong popular interest, a weak academic presence and a commercial incentive to claim antiquity. Cider has all three, and its history has consequently been written largely outside the discipline of history.

Who writes it, and what they have at stake

The people who write about cider are, in the main, producers, campaigners, scientists, journalists and enthusiasts, and the categories overlap heavily. A writer may also make cider, consult for producers, judge competitions, sit on an association committee and sell books to the sector. In a field this size that is unavoidable rather than improper.

It does mean interests should be visible. Writing produced by a trade association is describing an industry it represents; writing produced by a consumer campaign is advocacy with a position on what cider ought to be; a producer writing a handbook is describing methods they use and believe in. All three can be accurate and useful, and all three are written from somewhere.

The technical literature is the least affected, because chemistry can be checked. A statement about phenolic composition or fermentation kinetics is testable in a way that a statement about a tradition is not, and the writers of the scientific literature have generally been careful to say what is measured and what is inferred.

Campaigning writing as a source

Consumer campaign publications occupy an unusual position. They are advocacy, with a stated view about juice content, treatment and dispense, and they were written to change what was on sale. They are also, for several decades, the most detailed running record that exists of the small British cider sector — who was making what, where, and by what method.

Both things are true at once and neither cancels the other. Using such a publication as evidence of what existed in a district in a given decade is reasonable; using its definitions as though they were neutral descriptions of what cider is would not be, since those definitions were formulated to make an argument.

CiderHQ cites material of this kind for what it is competent in — its own definitions, the sector it documented, the campaign it ran — and not as an authority on questions it was not written to answer. That is the same test applied to every source in the register.

How to read a cider book

A small number of questions does most of the work. Does the claim have a source, and does the source say what the author says it does? Is the date given to the year, and if so on what basis — because a precise date in a field with a thin documentary record is more often a sign of carelessness than of research?

Is the statement technical or historical? Technical claims in cider writing are generally reliable and are checkable against the research literature. Historical claims are the weak point of the genre, and the ones that assert great antiquity are the weakest of all.

Finally, what is the book for? A handbook exists to help someone make cider and is judged on whether the methods work. A campaign publication exists to change the market. A producer’s history of their own region is doing something for that region. None of these is disqualifying, and reading a book without knowing which it is will lead to trusting it for the wrong things.

This site is part of what it describesCiderHQ belongs to the fourth phase described here and is subject to the same criticisms. Its response is to name its sources, to mark contested claims as contested, to give a century where it cannot give a year, and to say where the register holds nothing competent rather than writing past the evidence.

How this developed

Certainty is marked on each entry. Where the popular account runs ahead of the evidence, that is said rather than smoothed over.

  1. 1650s–1690s

    The Royal Society phase

    A concentrated body of technical and polemical writing on orchards and cider is produced by writers associated with the Royal Society.

  2. 1708

    A georgic on cider

    A long poem of instruction in blank verse treats orchard management and cider making as a subject worthy of elevated diction.

  3. Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

    A long thin stretch

    County surveys, pomonas and periodical articles appear, but no sustained technical literature; practice of the period is known largely by inference.

  4. 1903–2003

    The scientific record

    A single research programme produces the analytical, microbiological and cultivar literature from which most quantitative statements about English cider fruit derive.

  5. From the 1970s

    Campaigning publication

    Consumer organisations publish definitions, guides and running records of the small producer sector, as advocacy and as documentation at once.

  6. 1990s onwards

    Handbooks and international writing

    Practical handbooks for small-scale and commercial production, and surveys written from outside Britain, expand the literature and its geography.

  7. Throughout· contested

    Claims circulating between books

    A set of unsupported historical claims has been repeated between popular works for over a century, acquiring authority by repetition rather than by evidence.

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