we make our ciderS simply, locally, sustainably, responsibly and supportively …

… but we hope you’ll try some so you can tell us if we make them well.

Cider is made from apples (or supposed to be) so we define our ciders not by how much sugar is added but according to the fruit from which they are made. So, instead of sweet, medium or dry our ciders are FRESH+CRISP if made from eating apples, RICH+MELLOW if made from cider apples, SLOW+EASY if a blend of the two or SMOOTH+SUBTLE if made from perry pears.

Other things you should know about our ciders.

They are ONLY made from FRESHLY PRESSED JUICE and never from concentrate. They are proper FULL JUICE ciders. Almost all our cider, including the core range, is WILD FERMENTED. Most of our ciders are PASTEURISED but some of the Limited Edition ciders are not ; some of them are Bottle Conditioned or Petillant Naturel. Our core range is filtered and sweetened with sugar (we never use artificial sweeteners) and are softly carbonated. Most of our ciders are Dry or Medium Dry, except for SLOW+EASY, which is Medium. Sulphites are added to our core range at bottling but our Limited Edition ciders are almost always free from Sulphites (the label will, or course, have this information).

Our ingredients list is never more complicated than “apple juice plus a dusting of sugar”. it’s that simple.

OUR LIMITED EDITION CIDERS

Our LIMITED EDITION ciders explore the qualities of particular varieties of apples or perry pears. For example, The Colonel is made with only Ashmead’s Kernel apples, Gloucestershire’s most famous apple. Other variants celebrate fruit from a particular place; Chedworth Gold is made only with apples from that Cotswold village and Bristle is made only with fruit from Bristol (and environs) - thanks to a scheme we run in collaboration with the Riverside Garden Centre. The Avenue+ is made only with fruit from a famous avenue of perry pears near Dymock (plus a few Blakeney Red perry pears from elsewhere, to make it just a little bit better).

In 2023 we plan to have single variety ciders made from Yarlington Mill, Dabinett, Kingston Black, Balls’ Bittersweet, Tremlett’s Bitter, Brown’s and (of course) Ashmead’s Kernel, plus some location-specific ciders from Chedworth, Cheltenham, Bristol … as well as the famous avenue near Dymock.

Our LIMITED EDITION ciders are … limited in quantity. They come and go. We produce just a few hundred bottles of each variant each year so they are not permanently available. Sorry.

A short, old fashioned essay about THINGS TO THINK ABOUT WHEN BUYING CIDER

Much as we like to think cider is important we recognise that it’s probably not quite as important as food, water, shelter and our ability to socialise for our survival, so we have to admit, reluctantly, that buying cider is a discretionary purchase rather than a necessity. Therefore, first and foremost, cider must taste good, either as a drink on its own or with whatever is on you plate. Fortunately, there are a lot of cider-makers making great tasting cider (and quite a few making stuff which shouldn’t even be allowed to be called cider) so you have a lot of options to choose from.

But before you choose, here are a couple of things to think about. We don’t want to be overly gloomy, but Homo sapiens faces two major ecological challenges, climate change and loss of biodiversity. If you’re concerned about these and want a drink then cider is a good place to start; cider can have strong environmental credentials. Orchards are great for storing carbon, not so much in the trees as in the undisturbed soils (a claim beer can never make). Perhaps more importantly, UNSPRAYED orchards are havens of biodiversity, home to literally hundreds of species of flora, fauna and funga. Sprays kill things - it’s what they’re for - and they reduce or eliminate the biodiversity benefits orchards, so there is a BIG difference between orchards that are sprayed and those that are not. So, as you think about which cider to buy, here are a couple of questions to think about …

1. Is the cider you’re about to buy made with local fruit, perhaps from your home county, your local region, certainly from the UK? These islands are well suited to the growing of apples - approximately half of the 5,000 apple varieties in the world come from the UK - so you might want to ask yourself whether it is really necessary to burn carbon shipping fruit or fruit juice concentrate or, even worse, bottled cider around the planet.

2. Is the cider you’re about to buy made from fruit from sprayed or unsprayed orchards, from orchards that have played a part in protecting and enhancing biodiversity … or the reverse?

Once you’ve answered those questions, you could then consider other things, such as whether the cider you’re about to buy contains the pathetically low UK legal minimum juice content of 35% or whether it’s a proper cider with an apple juice content in the range of 90-100%. Or whether … but websites are supposed to be about stylish images and brand projection, so here are some images related to our world of making cider simply, locally, sustainably, responsibly and supportively (and one of Pippi the dog).

End of essay … and thank you for being a cider drinker!

become a fruit supplier

Surplus fruit? Unsprayed fruit? Live in Gloucestershire?

Interested in exchanging your fruit for Humblebee apple juice or Bushel+Peck cider?

If the answer to all 4 questions is “YES” then please fill out the form below - it won’t take a minute - and we’ll be in touch ASAP. Thank you.

how the scheme works

In exchange for your fruit, we give you 15% of the juice we are able to extract from your apples … or 20% of you are able to bring your fruit to our barn or drop it off at our home. Of course, much depends on the variety of apple and the sort of summer we’ve had so unless the apples or the weather are extreme we work according to these parameters:

For every 10 kgs of apples we receive …

… we get 6 litres of apple juice …

… from which you get 0.9 litres of either apple juice or cider …

… or 1.2 litres in you bring the fruit to our barn / home.

an example …

A family in Winchcombe has one large apple tree in their back garden. They make the picking of the fruit a family occasion on a dry autumn evening and often end up collecting well over 100kgs from that one tree. For “working” for an hour or so they get 18 bottles of delicious handcrafted BUSHEL+PECK cider delivered to their door … as well as the satisfaction of knowing that their apples have been put to good use.

our limited edition ciders

By their very nature, we make them in limited quantities, so their availability comes and goes. Apologies if we’ve run out of those you’re interested in.

BRISTLE

We don’t come from Bristol. In fact, being mongrels, we don’t come from anywhere in particular. But the memory of too many youthful summers, misspent in that fine city in the company of true, born and bred Bristolians, does tempt us to think about applying for Bristolian citizenship, but honesty, plus a realisation that we’d be found out soon enough, forces us to accept that all we can be is part of the city’s fan club, an outsider, looking in. Besides, we don’t even know the krek waiter’s peak Bristle.

Bristol is, of course, the cider-capital of the Universe and wanting to find any excuse to spend more time there, we set out to make Bristolian cider from Bristolian apples. In conjunction with the delightful Riverside Garden Centre we have set up a scheme to do just that … using surplus apples from Bristol’s gardens and orchards to make Bristol’s cider. We started off in small way in 2019, in 2020 we gathered just over a tonne of apples from the city and the latest harvest delivered closer to two tonnes of fruit. Cider made from Bristol’s apples is now available; there's a straightforward 500ml version and a 750ml bottle conditioned version.

Provenance is important, so the names of our Limited Edition ciders need to reflect the fruit in some shape or form, or where it all comes from, and for our Bristol cider we’ve settled on a colloquial spelling of the city. It’s the defining feature of the cider, it being a blend of all sorts of apples from Bristol’s gardens and orchards; Cox’s Orange Pippin, Worcester Pearmain, Newton Wonder, some Bramleys of course, even a few Ashmead’s Kernel, ripe a good few weeks before their counterparts in chilly, rural Gloucestershire. Plus many apples we couldn’t identify, but all unblemished, all unsprayed and all from Bristol / Brizzle / Briz / Bristle.

Of all the colloquial spellings of the city, we settled on “Bristle” … for several reasons. Firstly, we’re 110 years old, so something a bit old-fashioned isn’t out of place in our book. Secondly, it’s a recognised and published way of spelling the name: Derek Robinson (or Dirk Robson, in Bristle-speak) and Vic Wiltshire have published more than one book on the subject. And thirdly, because “Bristle” is almost a description of the cider itself. It’s a straightforward cider, with a crisp simplicity to it, with an aroma of ripe, green apples. It’s a dry cider - we’ve added just a dusting of sugar to counter-balance the natural acidity of the apples. Chilled, it’ll be refreshing on a hot summer’s day, a typical, no nonsense, forthright cider made with eating apples, FRESH+CRISP … just as it says on the label.

We’re pleased with it. The job’s a good ‘un, the cider’s gurt lush, so get your daps on, head on down to The Ciderbox (and other Bristolian establishments, in due course), try some for yourself and celebrate being in the uniquely interesting and varied city of Bristol.

COURTESAN

The English words for apple, pear and tree are all derived from Old English, and their meaning has remained unchanged for centuries, probably for as long as the language has been spoken. The meaning of the word “courtesan”, on the other hand, has changed remarkably quickly. A few hundred years ago, in feudal times, it referred to servants who were trusted to take messages to visiting dignitaries of the court, a perfectly respectable role, whose nomenclature was derived from the even more respectable role of courtier.

A couple of hundred years later, the word referred to a mistress, a kept lady of a wealthy or influential person (and, yes, almost all courtesans seem to have been women in the pay of men, rather than the other way round, or in other arrangements). A courtier with added benefits, as it were. Likewise, “to court” and “courtship” have changed in time, their original meaning of behaving as a courtier now replaced with something of more amorous intent.

And how does this relate to our Courtesan perry? It’s a single variety perry, made only with Blakeney Red perry pears, which are also known as Painted Lady, a reference, no doubt, to the attractive red blush that appears on many, if not most, of them. And a painted lady is - or was - a colloquial name for a person who made their living in a way similar to a latter-day courtesan.

BLAKENEY RED

Blakeney Red is a multi-purpose pear. We use it to make perry, but it can also be used to make jam - there used to be a couple of factories in the Forest of Dean dedicated to this - and can be stewed or pickled, so useful in the kitchen as well. Most famously, it was this pear that was used to dye the uniforms of the British Army during World War I.

Our Blakeney Red perry is light, bright and breezy. It rolls around the mouth gently and easily and is, we think, very drinkable. We suggest you drink it in much the same way as you would a white wine … chilled, possibly with a meal, sipped and savoured, rather than glugged. And notwithstanding the huge advances made by English wine-makers, perry is England's native wine. We hope you’ll try some.

THE DAPPER APPLE

It's Brown's single variety cider, so why call it The Dapper Apple? Simple. Imagine an apple tree drawn by a child … one brown tree trunk topped by a spherical dark green blob dotted with bright red apples. That's what a Brown's apple tree looks like. On closer inspection, the apples themselves are good-looking, generous in size, consistent in shape, attractive of colour, bright red with a handsome pinstripe. They dress a tree perfectly.

The other reason for calling it so is a bit of linguistic playfulness; Brown's apples are “sharps” meaning that, within the classification of cider apples, they're low in tannin and high in acidity. A dapper dresser is a natty dresser is a sharp dresser. Forgive us - we had to call it something.

PROVENANCE

We get our Brown’s from a delightful orchard in Ashleworth, from where we’ve been getting apples for the past 6 or 7 years, not only Brown’s but also Sweet Alford, Dabinett, a few Yarlington Mill.