Cider makers Polly and Mat Hilton are visiting one of their orchards for the last time before the season turns. It is late November, and a long, wet harvest is drawing to a close. The apple trees have lost about half of their leaves. Most have also shed their crop, but some trees still cling to their clusters of fruit, not yet ready to drop them onto the grass below.
As we walk through the orchard, we have to watch where we step. The ground is littered with apples, some spread out and some huddled together in clumps where they have rolled into hollows. They stand out bright yellow and red against the deep green of the grass.
Polly and Mat look after multiple orchards across the county, and Woodrow Barton farm owns the largest of them all. It is, in fact, a series of three orchards joined together. They overlook a valley along which the River Exe meanders southwards to the sea via Exeter and Exmouth, a railway line snaking alongside.
Mat points out fruit on the ground that has been lost to marauding pheasants that are bred for hunting on a neighboring farm. He had told me about the problem posed by these game birds the evening before. "We've lost so much fruit because of the pheasants," he says. "They only eat [the apples] when they fall off the tree. And we only pick them when they fall. But the pheasants are here all of the time and we're only here part of the time. Next year I think we'll do more tree shaking in this orchard."
What’s in a name? In the case of Find & Foster Fine Ciders, quite a lot. As fine cider’s rebirth gathers pace in England, Polly and Mat are busy finding what remains of their county’s lost orchards, and fostering new life among the dead and fallen trees.
Together they make delicate sparkling ciders that are turning heads and finding fans in some of the country’s best bars, bottle shops and restaurants. And yet it’s only now, four years after launching Find & Foster, that Polly feels OK with calling herself a cider maker. “You have to do something for a while before you really feel comfortable saying, ‘Yeah, this is me, this is what I do,’" she says.
She didn’t drink cider growing up, despite hailing from the West Country, the spiritual home of England’s cider industry. But her interest was sparked when she heard that Devon, where she lives in southwest England, had lost 90% of its traditional orchards, and that half of those that remained were in poor condition. She was working a desk job at the time and looking for something new in her life. “I felt so like a caged animal,” she says, and so she responded to a conservation charity’s call for volunteers to find and record details of abandoned orchards.
Soon she found herself going a step further, putting notes through doors asking if she and Mat could step in and care for the owners’ neglected fruit trees. “It was a mixture of wanting to look after them and thinking, ‘Wow, look at this resource.’ All these apples are going to waste and that's something I do care about.”
“The supermarkets have six major apple varieties that everything’s bred from, and so there’s no resistance to certain [diseases]. So these orchards, where the trees have grown for a hundred years without any chemical intervention, are a really important resource.”
For its first two years, Find & Foster was Polly’s solo project, while Mat pursued his trade as a carpenter. But following a stroke that left Polly weak down one side of her body and prone to chronic fatigue, Mat stepped in to keep the venture going. He still does much of the physical work at the cidery, particularly during the harvest when things are busiest, plus bottling and winter pruning. “Mat does more than just help out,” Polly says. “I couldn’t do it without him.”
Four years later, Polly and Mat are restoring eight separate orchards, all within a few miles of their home in the village of Rewe. The farthest is a 30-minute drive away, the last few moments of which involve bouncing along a rutted and pitted farm track in Mat's Land Rover Defender, which is painted with the same design that adorns bottles of Find & Foster’s cider.
A hundred years ago, every small farm would have had its own orchard, and would have grown a mix of fruit. But over the last century, their number fell sharply as modern, intensive farming made traditional orchards less profitable. As cider making in the post-war years concentrated into the hands of a few large-scale producers, with large-scale buying on their minds, owners of small orchards found a dwindling market for their produce. Instead of selling crops, farmers used the fruit for their own consumption, or left it for wildlife. And as trees aged and fell, there was less and less economic incentive to replace them. Indeed, some farmers even chose to take EU money—accessing funds available through the Common Agricultural Policy to rebalance apple production across the EU—to grub up their apple trees and turn the land over to different uses.
This decline in the U.K.’s orchards was particularly steep from 1951 onwards. In that year, the total area covered by orchards in Great Britain was 113,000 hectares (279,229 acres), according to U.K. government figures. This sank to a low of 22,000 hectares (54,363 acres) in 2009. In 2018, orchards covered 24,000 hectares (59,305 acres). Over the same period, the number of people working on the land also fell, from 843,000 in 1950 to 180,600 in 2018.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that old orchards with old trees, and varieties that have been established in those orchards for many decades if not longer, give you the better fruit for the style of cider she’s making.”
And yet productivity more than doubled in the same timeframe, with U.K. orchards yielding 127% more fruit in 2018 than they did in 1950. For every four apples grown in 1950, U.K. orchards grew nine apples in 2018, thanks largely to the use of herbicides, pesticides, and mechanization.
Modern orcharding has become a specialized branch of farming, and this has come at a cost. The decline in traditional orchards has led to a major loss of habitat for indigenous birds, mammals (such as long-eared bats), moths, lichens, and fungi. In particular, the noble chafer beetle is classified as “vulnerable,” meaning the species faces a very high risk of extinction in the wild.
This change has also brought about a marked loss in the variety of apples planted, which narrows orchards’ genetic diversity and introduces a structural risk to cider making, with crops left more vulnerable to disease. Moreover, it shrinks the choice of flavors available to cider makers, and to drinkers in turn. What was once rich becomes muted. What was once varied becomes uniform. This can only be a bad thing where cider is concerned.
Driving back from Woodrow Barton, we stop at another orchard en route. The trees here are not as old, but the neglect is still clear. Some have been lost, blurring the once-neat rows and giving the impression they were planted at random. Many of the surviving trees are in need of care.
We stop by a tree that tells a story of good intentions fallen by the wayside. Whoever planted it also built a wood-and-wire enclosure around it to protect the tree from livestock brought in to graze the orchard. But at some point they stopped coming to the orchard and the tree, no longer pruned, grew out of control. Now it strains against its enclosure, growth bursting through in places. What was once the tree’s refuge has become its prison. Polly describes it as more like a bush of brambles than an apple tree. There are many others like it, some of them choked with actual brambles and mistletoe.
Much like winemakers, who make wine at harvest time and spend much of the rest of their year in the vineyards, Polly and Mat spend most of their time away from the apple press and in the orchards tending to the trees.
In the winter Polly and Mat prune the trees for shape and structure. This improves airflow through the branches and prevents disease. They also prune to encourage fruit and to promote growth; in the summer, they must prune to control unwanted growth. “If it's all lopsided, the tree will tip over,” Polly explains. “If it's all too much growth you get big knots of trees where they shade out the lower limbs and then they just kill the lower limbs ’cause they haven't got any light. And then the branches rub against each other and they create wounds that let disease in.”
But she can’t just hack away. She must be patient and considered. You can only prune an individual tree so far in any given year before you risk shocking it, which leaves it vulnerable to weak growth, pests, disease and even sun damage. Restoring these orchards is a long process.
When Polly is not pruning or planting to fill in gaps, she may be grafting to create new fruit trees. To do this, she takes cuttings of scion wood from an existing tree and fuses it onto a branch or stem of another tree, the rootstock, which is selected for its size and suitability to the site.
Grafting is not an easy skill to master. Cutting the wood so cleanly that the two pieces will marry up with one another and grow together takes patience and practice. But if you want new trees to grow a certain kind of apple then learn it you must, because apples grown from seed do not “come true”—they will not have the same characteristics as the parent tree.
“You get such amazing varieties in these orchards,” says Polly. “The supermarkets have six major apple varieties that everything's bred from, and so there's no resistance to certain [diseases]. So these orchards, where the trees have grown for a hundred years without any chemical intervention, are a really important resource.”
Grafting preserves the unknown varieties found in these orchards—some of which may be unique—partly for future cider making and partly because they have proven that they don't need pesticides or fungicides to grow.
In the end it all comes down to the fruit. Cider making has more in common with making wine than it does with brewing beer. It presents the maker with very few opportunities to influence the final product. Nothing is kilned. There is no mashing in, no adding hops (usually). There is just the fruit, its juice, the fermentation, and the cider maker’s skill at tasting and blending along the way.
“If you're a cider maker along the lines that Polly and Mat are, then the thing you rely on is the quality of the fruit,” says renowned cider maker Tom Oliver, of Oliver’s Cider & Perry. “There's no doubt in my mind that old orchards with old trees, and varieties that have been established in those orchards for many decades if not longer, give you the better fruit for the style of cider she's making.”
When Oliver talks about better fruit, he does not mean apples that are more pristine or from trees that give bigger yields. The apples Oliver is talking about will be uglier, and will come from the lower-yielding trees. In particular, he means apples from trees that are growing in a challenged situation. These have lower levels of nitrogen and amino acids and so lend themselves to longer, slower fermentation, which results in ciders with more flavor and complexity. Like wine again, stressing the plant leads to higher-quality fruit.
Part of the reason Find & Foster’s ciders are so complex is that Polly and Mat do not rely on cider fruit alone. They couldn’t even if they wanted to. Theirs are not commercial orchards, and rarely contain more than a handful of trees of any single variety. Instead they present Polly and Mat with a mishmash of all sorts of fruit—cider apples, eaters, dessert apples—that other cider makers might overlook.
“We've found that you can make really good cider from a multipurpose apple,” says Polly. “It doesn't have to be a cider apple.”
Mat agrees that it would be a shame to overlook the apples not traditionally thought of as suitable for cider making. “I think if we weren't using it because it wasn't cider fruit, we'd be overlooking such a massive resource that's got so much flavor and interest. I don't think the fact that it's a dessert fruit means that it's not good for cider. I think the fact that it's a cider fruit means it's not good for eating.”
I have a hunch that the best way to convince Polly to do something is to tell her that she can’t. She doesn’t back down from a challenge, and loves to prove people wrong. On a hiking holiday in the Alps with Mat’s family, she overheard her father-in-law tell someone she hadn’t done much hiking in the mountains before—the implication being that the group shouldn’t expect too much of her. “I ran up every mountain to get to the top before him,” Polly says, laughing at the memory.
It’s just as well that she has this contrarian streak. If she didn’t, the world might have missed out on her excellent keeved cider. Early on, when she was looking for advice on the method from other cider makers, someone told her not to do it—though Polly won’t tell me who. “I really don't want to badmouth him,” she says. “To begin with I thought, ‘Okay, well that's really bad advice. Of course I'm going to do that now.’ But now I've met him, I think he was probably just trying to be helpful. He was probably worried about putting me off making cider at all. But to begin with, it was just a red rag to a bull.”
Keeving is a way of making naturally sweet, sparkling cider. These days it is most commonly associated with the cidre bouché of northwest France. It was also common in western England in the past, but has all but died out there now. To keeve a cider, the maker adds calcium carbonate to the apple juice before fermentation, which encourages the formation of a gelatinous brown cap. Peering into a fermentation tank in Polly and Mat’s cidery reveals the cap on their keeve, which looks like chicken stock, or maybe lumpy wallpaper paste.
The cap is made of pectin, which is naturally present in the juice. This clumps together with nitrogen and proteins as it rises to the top of the tank. Once it has collected there and hardened somewhat, the cider maker skims it off, thereby removing nutrients that the yeast would have relied upon during fermentation. This process leads to a long and slow fermentation which finishes while there is still some residual sugar left in the cider. Keeved cider can be bottled while still sweet without any fear of excessive re-fermentation later on.
The other thing about keeving is it’s easy to get wrong. So why did Polly choose this method? “Everything is dictated by the orchards,” she says. “We have to make the best of the fruit that we've got.”
Polly explains that the orchards she and Mat look after have not had fertilizer added, meaning the soil has a low nitrogen content. “You need the fermentation to go really, really slowly and then to end without completing. So if you had lots of nitrogen in the soil, you would get lots of nitrogen in the apples. You'd supply the yeast with too much nitrogen and it would ferment too quickly. It would be too efficient a fermentation.”
Many of the apples growing in these orchards are old varieties, some of which are high in tannins, which counterbalance the sweetness of a keeve. “I started reading about different ciders and realized we had the perfect fruit for keeving. Not that many people will have fruit that they can keeve with,” she says. “There's a magic around what apples keeve well. I don't know what it is, but it just seems really old.”
“For me, it’s the British equivalent to Lambic and Gueuze in terms of the effort, the time it takes, and the connection with the area.”
In May 2016, still only in her first year of production, Polly entered her keeved cider into the Devon County Show and won the Best Newcomer award. She also picked up the Best Exhibit award in the cider category. And when the judges blind-tasted her cider in the final competition they crowned her Champion Cider Maker, an achievement unheard of for a newcomer. Polly says the reaction from other entrants was mixed. “There was definitely some people who said a newcomer shouldn't be allowed to win the Champion.”
But for her, the affirmation was reassuring. “I'd spent months writing a business plan about how to make this idea viable, like how to make it work out, looking after all these old orchards I'd come across. All of it was dependent on whether or not I could make cider. So it was, yeah, really good, a great feeling.”
Not all of Polly’s ciders are keeved. She also makes Champagne-style méthode traditionnelle ciders, which echo English cider making in the early 17th century. The name refers to the technique of carbonating still cider (or indeed wine) by fermenting it for a second time inside its stoppered bottle. This approach first developed not in the Champagne houses of France, but in England, thanks to English glass, which was better able to withstand the significant pressure induced by bottle fermentation.
Polly also makes sparkling pétillant naturel, or pét-nat, ciders that are spontaneously fermented and bottled without any additions of preserving sulfur. They are wildly aromatic, showcasing the characteristics of the apple varieties that make them.
Here her decisions are also dictated by the fruit growing in the orchards. Very rarely do Polly or Mat know the particular variety of apples they get from their trees. “But it really doesn't seem to matter,” Polly tells me. “What’s in a name when you can bite the apple and taste the acid, taste the tannin, and taste the sugar?”
Polly’s palate is Find & Foster’s secret weapon. Cider making isn’t overly technical, keeving aside. It’s mostly milling and pressing apples. The cider maker might exert some influence by pitching certain yeasts or controlling fermentation temperature, though Polly does neither of these—every cider she makes is spontaneously fermented. But the most powerful things a cider maker can do are tasting and blending. Polly does both constantly, bringing her expertise to bear on the fruit, the juice, and the finished cider.
Polly sees it as an advantage, that she must treat the fruit at face value and make decisions based on its taste alone. “I think it makes [my cider] really unique,” she says. “You don't ever make something that's going to be similar to anyone else’s.”
Cider has a long history in England. Despite this fact, it is a drink we don't value much. Most of the “cider” we drink these days is made with corn syrup and only 30% apple concentrate, back-sweetened to present consumers with an inexpensive and unchallenging drink.
Even in the country’s rural heartlands, most people know little about cider and care even less. For a long time, if people thought about it at all, it was linked in the popular imagination with yokels and Wurzels. Now it has become the drink of choice for bored teens at the bus stop getting drunk on the cheap.
Sam Congdon, owner of the Vessel Beer Shop in Plymouth, should know. He was one of them once. "Even though I'm from Plymouth, and Devon has a bit of a cider history, I drank terrible cider as a teen," he remembers.
He says his experience was a common one. "I'd end up at a country pub drinking some very bright orange scrumpy, or getting the mass-produced, plastic, two-liter bottles of the stuff."
For the unfamiliar, “scrumpy” is a term that denotes strong, rough cider. It's the bathtub gin to your Tanqueray, the moonshine to your bourbon. The stuff is often homemade, with variations in color, clarity, and quality—but it will definitely get you drunk.
Congdon also mentions “supermarket cider” a few times over the course of our conversation, alongside adjectives like "appalling" and "horrendous." At 5.0% ABV, bottles like these typically sell for around £3 ($4). That's far below the psychologically significant £1 per pint level; in fact, it works out at about £0.85.
"We get a lot of people coming in [to the shop] who think that's all cider is," says Congdon. "I think it's that historical misconception of what cider is in this country on the mass-produced scale." Congdon will typically sell four cases of his best-selling beers (Pale Ales and IPAs from Verdant Brewing Co.) before he sells a single 750ml bottle of Polly's cider.
Nevertheless, Congdon believes in Find & Foster, and says stocking it is good for his shop. Fine ciders like Polly's are pushing a proposition of quality and flavor over price and volume. It is a premise that will be familiar to craft beer drinkers, and Congdon says it attracts the kind of customer he's after.
"What I like about Polly's stuff is that there's a connection to Devon," Congdon says. "She's obviously doing something quite important in terms of trying to keep these orchards alive. So there's a good story behind it when we're trying to sell it to people."
Polly's cider is popular with the type of beer drinker who is more inclined to try wild and mixed-fermentation beers. "We've intentionally put the cider in the Belgian fridge, so it's sat alongside Lambics and Saisons," Congdon says.
“They are plugging into that golden period of cider, that we can only read about or are led to believe existed. And I would just love it for them to be the forerunners of a new golden age of cider, based around bottle-fermented cider of the finest order. That is what I would love.”
This was Congdon's own route towards appreciating cider again, after the misadventures of his youth. It took opening the shop and drinking ciders from Tom Oliver and Pilton Cider to open his palate up to ciders that were very different from those he had known before. "For me, it's the British equivalent to Lambic and Gueuze in terms of the effort, the time it takes, and the connection with the area," he says.
While there are certainly similarities to wild beers, the links between Polly’s ciders and sparkling natural wines are even stronger. The process by which the drinks are made is similar, and so too are the results. In this we see the influence of one of Polly’s early mentors, Irish wine and cider maker Simon Tyrrell, who taught Polly and Mat about the crossover between cider and winemaking, and introduced them to the Champagne method.
It is this similarity to wine that has opened doors for Polly’s cider. Andrew Downs, operations director at Tate (an English art institution comprising four major museums), stocks Polly’s cider in both the Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London. “I felt we needed a better representation of crafted cider in the business,” says Downs, who had already built up award-winning wine lists and an extensive selection of craft beer for his customers.
His first introduction to Find & Foster was its Méthod Traditionelle 2016. “It was a stand-out product, and exactly what I was looking for,” he says. Downs offers it to his customers as an alternative to Champagne or sparkling wine. “It’s made in exactly the same way and delivers the same, if not better, drinking experience as an aperitif, or to match with food.”
England’s new flowering of fine cider is still as delicate as apple blossom. Its producers do not enjoy the same robust distribution and sales infrastructure that underpins craft beer. Much of its success relies upon the energy of the cider makers to build a sustainable movement for themselves. Thankfully Polly and Mat have energy to spare, and the determination to match it. “A lot of the best energy comes from people who are new to making cider,” says Oliver. “Polly and Mat have come to it fresh, enthused, young, energetic. It’s great.”
Oliver says he looks forward to Polly’s future ciders. “I’m fascinated with the style of bottle fermentation, and their interest in apples. They are plugging into that golden period of cider, that we can only read about or are led to believe existed. And I would just love it for them to be the forerunners of a new golden age of cider, based around bottle-fermented cider of the finest order. That is what I would love.”
Polly and Mat, meanwhile, are happy building a life for themselves that they enjoy. “The freedom and the variety of what you do every day is amazing,” says Polly. “And you can also feel good about what you're doing, looking after the orchards and planting trees. So at the moment, when everyone's talking about global warming, I can actually feel like I've planted a tree in a place where it was a dead bit of land.”
Words + PicturesAnthony Gladman Language
