The founding of the commercial cider industry

Farm cider was made once a year from whatever the orchard gave, fermented in whatever casks were available, and drunk within the year because there was no way to hold it. Its strength varied, its clarity varied, and a proportion of every year’s make was sour or spoiled. For a household and a workforce that was tolerable; for a shop or a public house selling to strangers it was not.

A farm also could not buy fruit. Its output was capped by its own orchard acreage, and its orchard acreage had been set generations earlier by the size of the workforce it had to supply. When the resident farm workforce began to shrink in the later nineteenth century, that logic came apart: the orchards were still there, and the reason for them was going.

The commercial firms solved both problems at once. They bought fruit from farms that no longer needed to press it themselves, and they applied to the resulting juice the kind of process control that only fixed plant and continuous operation make possible.

The founding cluster is tightly dated. Firms that grew into the twentieth-century industry were established in Hereford, in Somerset, in Devon and in Norfolk in the 1880s and 1890s, typically by families already inside the fruit and farming world rather than by outside capital. H. P. Bulmer’s business in Hereford, begun in the late 1880s, is the best documented and became the largest.

Location followed the railway rather than the orchard. A cider factory needed to bring in fruit from a wide catchment in a short autumn window and to send out finished cider all year, and both movements ran on rail. The consequence was concentration: processing gathered into a handful of rail-served towns while the fruit continued to be grown across the counties around them.

Company histories of this period should be read with care. Firms wrote their own origin stories, often decades later and for advertising purposes, and precise founding dates, first-barrel anecdotes and claims of priority circulate widely without independent support. The general shape of the change is well evidenced; the details of any one firm’s beginning frequently are not.

Buying fruit at the gate is unreliable, so the firms moved towards contracts: an agreed tonnage of named varieties, at an agreed price, from growers who planted what the factory wanted. That arrangement transferred the choice of cultivar from the farmer to the buyer, and it is the origin of the modern situation in which a small number of varieties dominate the national crop.

It also made varietal consistency valuable in a way it had never been. A factory blending to a house specification needs to know what is arriving, which favours heavy-cropping, reliable, machine-tolerant fruit over the miscellany of a farm orchard. Cultivars promoted through this system — Michelin from France, and later selections raised or propagated within the industry — spread accordingly.

The relationship was not one-sided. Contracts gave growers a market for a crop that had lost its original purpose, and in the cider counties they are the reason a good deal of orchard survived the first half of the twentieth century at all.

Pasteurisation, filtration and controlled blending are what separate factory cider from farm cider more than scale does. Heat treatment stopped the drink changing in the bottle; filtration made it bright; blending across many batches let a producer put the same thing in the bottle each time. Sugar and water adjustment brought strength within a target range.

Glass and, later, crown-corked bottles made retail sale practical, and the branded bottle is what carried cider into the grocery trade. From this point the industry’s customer was a shopkeeper and a publican rather than a neighbour.

Duty policy helped. For much of the twentieth century cider paid no excise duty in the United Kingdom, a position that ended in the 1970s, and the price advantage over beer was a genuine factor in the category’s growth. This is treated at length under the history of cider duty.