How cider was sold in the twentieth century

The commercial cider firms that emerged around 1900 faced a problem their competitors did not. Beer was an established national product with an established trade; cider was a regional farm drink that most of the country had never bought. Advertising had to create a category before it could sell a brand, and early cider advertising is correspondingly didactic — it explains what cider is, where it comes from and why a townsman might want it.

The imagery of that first phase leans on provenance and on purity: orchards, ripe fruit, the West Country, and an implied contrast with adulterated urban drink. Adulteration was a live public issue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a drink that could present itself as simply pressed fruit had an argument to make in that climate.

The medium was the enamel sign, the poster, the trade card and the press advertisement, and a good deal survives in museum collections. Enamel signs in particular were made to be fixed to the outside of a shop or a public house and to last for decades, which is why they are the most visible remnant of pre-war drink advertising in Britain.

Interwar cider advertising made claims about the effect of the drink on the body that would not now be permitted and that CiderHQ does not repeat. Tonic and restorative properties were attributed to cider, connections were drawn to the vigour of country people, and the drink was positioned as a mild and sensible alternative to spirits.

These claims should be read as a commercial response to two things. The first is the temperance movement, still politically significant into the interwar years, against which a drink could position itself as moderate and wholesome. The second is the growing market for branded proprietary products of every kind sold on assertions about the body, from patent medicines to malted drinks; cider advertising is using the standard register of its period.

No claim of this kind is supported by evidence, and this site takes the position that alcohol carries no benefit that offsets its harms. The interest here is historical: the advertising records what its audience was thought to want to hear, which is a fair guide to the anxieties of the time.

After the Second World War, cider advertising worked hard at respectability. The drink had a class problem in Britain, and the association with farm labour, with rough cider and with the flagon was commercially inconvenient for firms trying to sell a bottled product in grocers and off-licences.

The response was domestic imagery: the bottle on the table, the meal, the family gathering, the woman as purchaser. This is the period in which cider is presented as something bought in a shop and consumed at home, rather than drawn from a cask in a yard. The packaging supports the same message — labels, capsules, branded glassware — because a presented bottle is doing different social work from a jug.

British commercial television began in 1955 and changed the economics of this entirely. Television advertising rewards national brands with national distribution, and it accelerated the concentration of the cider trade into a small number of firms that could afford it. The advertising did not merely reflect the industry structure; it helped produce it.

From the 1960s the target moved decisively to young drinkers, and the register changed with it. Cider was presented as modern, informal and unpretentious, in contrast to both beer and wine, and the advertising took on the visual language of youth marketing generally. The most consequential single move of the later century — the promotion of cider served long, over ice — belongs to this line and dates from the 2000s.

Two commercially important products of the period sat awkwardly with the respectable positioning. Strong cheap cider in large containers was not advertised in the ordinary way at all, and became visible mainly through public health reporting rather than through marketing; and the sweet flavoured category imported from Scandinavia was sold on fruit and refreshment rather than on any orchard association.

Regulation tightened around all of this. Advertising codes in Britain progressively restricted appeals to strength, to social or sexual success, to intoxication and to anything likely to appeal to those under eighteen. Reading the codes alongside the advertising is a good way to see what the industry had been doing, since a rule is usually written about something that happened.

The last phase of the century, and the one still running, returns to provenance: orchards, named fruit, the West Country, the farm. This is the same appeal the first generation of cider advertising made, and it is being made at the point when the largest part of the market is furthest from it in production terms.

That tension is not hypocrisy so much as a structural feature of the category. A drink whose identity rests on an agricultural origin will always be sold on that origin, including by producers whose process has moved a long way from it, and the label rules that govern what may be claimed are the point at which the argument is actually settled.

Read as a whole, a century of cider advertising is a record of a product repeatedly repositioning itself: as pure, as wholesome, as respectable, as modern, as authentic. Very little of that sequence was driven by changes in the liquid. Nearly all of it was driven by who the industry needed to sell to next.