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GEOGRAPHY |
Shopping - Past, Present and Future
The Herefordshire Cider Industry
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What is cider?
Cider is an alcoholic drink made from specially grown varieties of apples. During the second half of the 19th century it is estimated that there were over 30,000 acres of apple and pear orchards in Herefordshire. Most of these apples were grown for the cider industry and the pears were pressed to make a drink called Perry. Many farmers produced their own cider, mainly as a drink for their agricultural workers, but also to be sold to local pubs or even from their own kitchens. During the late 19th century entrepreneurs started up cider factories, which produced larger amounts of cider more efficiently.
The railways made it possible for the increased amount of cider produced to be sold in other parts of Britain. Many cider producers were bought out by Bulmers at different times during the 20th century, making H.P. Bulmer now the largest cider producing company in the world. There are several other large and small scale producers in the county employing many people in a variety of jobs. Today about 132 million gallons of cider are drunk in Britain every year and over 63 million gallons are produced in Herefordshire.
To find out more about the history of cider production in Herefordshire, read the article "Factory Cider in Herefordshire" which you will find on the Home Page of Apples and Pears Past.
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OVER TO YOU Discuss: Why is the cider industry important to Herefordshire? Which developments helped to increase the amount of cider produced and sold? |
Where could you buy cider?
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I. In days gone by (over 130 hundred years ago):
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| apple picking, Bustin Collection |
Most people would have bought cider directly from the farmer who produced the cider. You might have taken a jug to the kitchen and had it filled there directly from a barrel where it was stored. Or you could have gone to a pub and ordered a drink of cider there. Women were often not allowed in the parts of the pub that sold cider, so they would have gone to a hatch at the side of the building with a jug and had it filled to take away. Some people of course made their own cider. People who worked in the fields took small barrels, called “costrels” in Herefordshire, filled with cider into the fields with them to drink while working. Part of an agricultural worker’s pay was often in cider (This is called the “Truck System”). Farm house cider was never bottled.
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| Cider barrel | costrel |
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Ken Williams Publican Talking about the Lamb Inn, in the 1920s and 1930s "In between the Lamb Inn and the Sun Pub in Harrisons Street there was an entrance there into the Sun, that was the ‘Jug and Bottle’, all the people down Bath Street, that was the women, they used to come out for their booze, with jugs. They didn’t drink in the premises, they used to come and get jugs of cider or beer. My father wouldn’t have any women in the pub for years, until after the War. They could go in the Jug and Bottle to take away or there was a Ladies Room, they could go in the Ladies Room and the Lounge but they couldn’t go in the Smoking Room or the Bar." |
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| agricultural worker's smock, Cider Museum |
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Questions:
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II. When your parents were growing up (second half of the 20th century):
Corner shops and co-op stores sold bottled cider in the alcoholic drinks section alongside beer and wine. The first supermarkets were built in the 1970s and they too sold cider, as did some delicatessen and specialist shops. You could - and can -still drink cider in a pub or restaurant. A nice way of sampling and buying cider is to visit a food and drink show or other kind of show, for example “The Three Counties Show”, or other agricultural and gardening shows, and visit the stand of a producer or a group of producers.
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Margaret Thompson Cider Museum Director "Margaret Thompson relates how the Cider Museum in Hereford was granted the first license in over 200 years by Customs and Excise to revive the old craft of distilling cider. After the distillation process, the cider brandy (40% alcohol by volume) matures in oak casks for 3 years. This product is sold in several outlets across Britain, such as the stud farm at Chatsworth House. Trade outlets in other parts of the country were made aware of this range of distilled cider products, because the Cider Museum used to take part in a number of shows, such as The Three County’s Show, food shows (eg. the Food Show at the NEC and in London) and garden shows. In this way, people from all over got to find out about and sample the products. Exhibiting at such shows, however, is an expensive form of marketing and it is difficult to find people prepared to work such long hours over a weekend. They had to give away lots of free samples and ultimately the decision was taken not to exhibit in this way anymore for the time being."
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Questions:
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| cider storage tanks |
III. Now (the early part of the 21st century):
In addition to the shopping places mentioned above, out of town retail parks often have hypermarkets where you can buy a wide range of ciders and perrys. Now you can buy cider in cans or bottles. The Internet too has also become a new type of shopping outlet for many people. Mail order is another possible way of shopping. On a more local level, and with an increase in food tourism, people can now visit small scale producers and once again buy directly. In Herefordshire tourists can go on a cider tour where several cider producers open their sites to visitors and sell on the premises. Some even have cafés and restaurants. To see a map of the Herefordshire Cider Route and a list of cider producers and specialist retailers, go to www.ciderroute.co.uk/map.html
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| Hereford Cider Museum |
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Margaret Thompson Cider Museum Director You can also buy a range of cider and cider-related products at the Cider Museum in Hereford. Margaret Thompson, the museum director, has worked here for 25 years. She says that the bulk of customers in the shop are visitors to the museum who would like to take a souvenir home with them. The visitors, who are mainly from the UK, like to buy something that was made in Herefordshire. The museum shop has an assortment of gifts such as books, posters, key rings, pens, porcelain and recipe books. Apart from apple juice, cider vinegar, cider and perry, customers can also buy a variety of distilled cider products, such as the Apple Aperitif, The Cider Brandy or the Cider Liqueur. The customers also have the opportunity of sampling some of the products. Another idea that has been considered is online selling. There are several problems however with this option:
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Geoff Morris, a specialist cider merchant, had good reasons for wanting to set up an Internet order business.
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Interviewee Geoff Morris, Orchard Hive and Vine, Leominster Date July 18th 20 Interviewer Rebecca Roseff I’m Geoff Morris - with my wife Sue we run Orchard Hive and Vine which is a now a mail order business dealing mostly with cider and perry and selling it to all parts of the country and occasionally to Finland, where we have a fairly regular customer. I got interested in the selling of cider by quite a devious route. I was given a redundancy from teaching, I was a science teacher in Wolverhampton for about 20 years, and I used my redundancy money to set up a mead making business, which needed a retail outlet. By that time I had joined the Three Counties Cider and Perry making association having met Peter Mitchell and I’d started making a sizer which is a mead involving the fermentation of apple and honey juice together, and while I was looking for the retail outlet for the mead, I noticed a nice empty shop in Leominster. I didn’t think that my mead could fill the shop, I didn’t think I would sell very much, but I started speaking to other cider makers through the Three Counties Association and a lot of them were thinking about going into bottled cider and were looking for a retail outlet for it. some of the local brewers were looking for a retail outlet for their beer, the wine makers wanted a retail outlet for their wines so I thought there’s a fair chance that we can have a shop there. And then through Janet Mackie, secretary of the TCA, she was about to start this business making apple juice and that was the final piece which put the business plan together and enabled me to open the shop in Leominster which we did in 1997. We were still living in Walsall at that stage so it meant a long commute but we moved down here in 1998. We ran the shop till 2005 with one change of premises and then the amount of business we were doing in Leominster died, foot and mouth didn’t help and then it didn’t really take off again after that. But it kept going on the mail order front. So we closed the shop to concentrate on mail order. Since November 2005 that is what we have been doing. The best year in my shop was 2004. We had our best ever Christmas, 2005 we had our worst January and January didn’t finish until March 31st. February didn’t finish until the end of May and we were just rattling along on the bottom, not making any money, having to dig into our own resources just to keep the business afloat. I think other people in Leominster were struggling as well. We had the opportunity because the lease was coming to an end that we could get out of the lease fairly easily and not shave to put up with a loss making shop. With the mail order we were given a lot of help from some of the cider makers and we are using a cider makers premises as our store room, which is very useful as he is not charging us any rent… Then in June 2000 we opened our internet site and probably about a third of business is mail order. It has more or less kept up, we haven’t lost much through not having the shop. I think people when they rang us up could see us we were a shop as well as a mail order site so I think that actually helped the internet business as well. But the internet going and the shop didn’t so the shop had to go I’m afraid… The people who come to us tend to be over 30. I think that the young market is catered for by the mass advertising stuff, the well advertised stuff. It is only at about 30 that people begin to realise that it is their money and it is what they like and what they want to spend it on, rather than on something that someone has told them they ought to like. So our customers tend to be over 30. They are often CAMRA members, but we have retired professors we have retired building workers on our mailing list. A love of cider is not a class based thing. I was sad to some extent to close the shop. If the shop had been making money we probably wouldn’t have closed it. Because the shop had all year been a drain on our finances and it didn’t look as though it was going to pick up we were relieved as well as sad. It was the end of a chapter but it means we can carry on business without the overheads. I miss the people. I spent 20 year in teaching where I probably had too many awkward customers, in the shop they were in there because they wanted to be. I didn’t give them lessons in cider making unless they asked. I knew when to stop when I saw their eyes roll over. I’ve made my business in dealing with people and now life is a lot quieter. .. In the shop cider was about 25% of the business, wines about 25% and beer about 10% or 12%. Now cider is about 80% of what we do. On the internet there are lots of people doing wine, lots of people doing beer. We are about the only ones doing cider. So anybody looking for cider will find us. There was one time I did a Google search for cider and found Orchard Hive and Vine was above Bulmers. We had a misunderstanding with the internet and we lost our registration for the name and it was taken off and we had a three week period and we lost all our places in the Search Engines. Until early May we were third in the order on Cider and Perry, we went down to 114 and we have come back to 6 or 7. Once the search engines have found you it is a lot easier. We probably lost quite a business… I haven’t got the shop now, so if I need new stock I go and collect it. It gives me an excuse to have a natter and am offered a taste. Depending on the driving I say yes or no. Apple juice has declined on the internet. We had a period two years ago when the Sunday Time Style magazine was interested in something non alcoholic like apple juice or perry (which shows how much they know). We sent them some samples of Janet Mackie’s apple juice and the one they really liked was Grenadier, which is quite a sharp, early, cooking apple. About Easter they decided they were going to run this. We got a call in the shop from their photographer who wanted a photograph of Grenadier apples, in early April. So I said in about three weeks time we can send you some blossom. O you mean you haven’t got the apples there now, … er No, but if you go onto the Brogdale site they have got the national fruit collection and there might be a picture there. A lot of journalists, even food journalists haven’t caught onto this idea of seasonality. Dennis Gwatkin was filmed by some people who came to him in January who wanted to film him making perry. Dennis said, “they wanted me to be a yokel so I didn’t have to try too hard for that but then they wanted me to make some perry, but I said we haven’t got any pears here, Ive used them all. They wanted me to go to Tesco and get some pears there. And I told them where to go.” With the business I am hoping that we can start doing a lot more wholesale. There is a pub in London which takes about 30 cases a month from us. There is a restaurant just opened in the Covent Garden piazza which is taking about 10 cases a month from us, we have started dealing with one local gastro pub, they want some cider there. So I am hoping that we can build up the wholesale side. ..
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OVER TO YOU Discuss: 1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of buying cider, apple juice or cider vinegar on the Internet? 2. Why might you choose to buy cider or apple juice directly from a producer? 3. Do you think you would get a greater choice of brands at the supermarket or at the shop of a producer? 4. To what extent is the “experience of shopping” different in the various shopping places? 5. Which type of outlet would you prefer, keeping the product in mind Search the oral history database: Click onto the database link on the homepage. Click into the “subject” search box and choose the “selling” and the “supplying” criteria. You will find interviews with people involved in the selling of cider. Choose two people and answer the following two questions: 1. In what way is that person involved in the sales process? 2. Did his/her role change during their working life? |