The railways and the cider trade

Cider is heavy, bulky and worth little per gallon. Before the railway, the cost of moving it by cart over bad roads exceeded its value within a surprisingly short distance, which is why cider was overwhelmingly drunk in the parish that made it. The exception was the bottled estate cider of the seventeenth century, which was valuable enough to justify carriage and river transport.

Apples have the same problem in a worse form: they bruise, they rot, and they have to move within days of picking. A cider maker before the railway could only use fruit from within a morning’s haul, which capped the size of any enterprise at the amount of fruit one district could supply.

Rail removed both constraints at once. Fruit could be collected from stations across several counties and delivered in bulk within a day, and finished cider could go out by the wagonload to any town on the network.

The works that grew into the twentieth-century cider industry were sited by the railway, and in several cases built their own sidings. Hereford, on the lines running north to Shrewsbury and east to Worcester and Gloucester, became the centre of the Herefordshire trade. In Somerset the industry gathered around the lines through Shepton Mallet and the central levels; in Devon, at Whimple on the line east of Exeter; in Norfolk, at Attleborough.

Each of these places drew fruit from a hinterland far larger than any farm mill could have served, and each shipped its product to markets its predecessors had never reached. The pattern is the same as in brewing, milling and dairying: rail concentrated processing at nodes and hollowed out the intermediate layer.

What was hollowed out here was the parish cider mill. A farm that could sell its apples for cash at the station had less reason to keep a mill, a press, a cellar and the skills to use them, and the number of farms making cider for sale fell steadily through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A cider that has to survive a journey and arrive resembling the last consignment is a different technical problem from one drunk in the yard. The requirements were consistency, stability and resistance to refermentation in the cask, and they drove the adoption of filtration, pasteurisation, controlled fermentation and blending across many batches.

That is the practical origin of much of what distinguishes factory cider from farm cider, and it predates any question of concentrate or of flavouring. The drink changed because the market it served was no longer within walking distance.

It also changed what fruit was wanted. A maker buying fruit by the ton from hundreds of growers needs varieties that crop reliably, ripen predictably and arrive in condition, and can afford to blend away the eccentricities of any one orchard. Contract growing and cultivar selection follow from that.

Road haulage displaced rail for fruit and for finished cider through the middle of the twentieth century, and the sidings closed. The concentration that rail had produced did not reverse; lorries served the same works more flexibly and allowed them to grow further.

The railway period nonetheless set the geography that persists. The places where cider is made at scale in Britain today are, with few exceptions, the places the nineteenth-century network selected.