In Bloom and Bough — Ross on Wye Cider and Perry Company in Herefordshire's Wye Valley
It’s late February on Broome Farm, and despite the last of winter’s grip on this corner of Herefordshire’s Wye Valley, there’s a sense that something is beginning to reach out and brush aside the deep-set cold. You might miss these signals for the peaceful, slumbering trees and chilly breeze, but they’re present: the flash of daffodils; birdsong darting through the orchards; a welcome extra half-hour of daylight. Spring is near.
Grey-green orchards mottled with canary yellow lichen still show signs of purpose after winter. A few determined and dogged apples hang onto mostly-empty branches, and those whose resolve fell foul to gravity litter the ground around certain trees; of some varieties, there was an overabundance, so the apples are left to rot and return to the ground. A few still look fine enough to eat, some certainly not. Soon, blossoms will burst from these branches, heralding fruit buds and young apples. Cider is on its way.
“This was the first orchard that my grandad planted, in 1978,” Albert Johnson of Ross on Wye Cider and Perry Company says, pointing to the trees on our left. “After they switched from being a dairy farm.”
Albert is in the process of slowly taking over the farm from his father, revered and much-loved cidermaker Mike Johnson, who’s been producing cider on Broome Farm for roughly 40 years. Mike took over from his father, Kenelm Johnson, who planted commercial orchards to supply local cider giant Bulmers with apples. The farm is still very much family-run—there’s even a single tree of a variety Mike named for Albert when he was young: Albert’s Hedgerow. “It makes terrible cider,” he chuckles.
As we walk through the orchards, ducking wayward branches and climbing fences, Albert marches ahead, calling out his well-practised tour patter over his shoulder. His Border Collie Norman—named for the suffix of many apple varieties that originated in the French region of Normandy—races past, orbiting us in his fruitless search for rabbits and squirrels. A few minutes and a zigzag of puddles down a bumpy track later, and we’re at the farm’s two barns: one for production, and one for storage.
The geometry and order of the former bring to mind a library, not a barn—bar an erroneously parked forklift and a litter of plastic tasting cups. Nearly 100 ex-spirit barrels form orderly rows, each filled with fermenting or maturing single variety juice or cider. Countless more blue and brown plastic barrels, and larger white plastic containers sit opposite, also filled with cider. On my first day on the farm, the barn is dark and gloomy; on the second, bright sunlight paints zebra stripes across the wood, revealing hues of russet and rust within translucent containers. Albert dips a pint glass in to retrieve a sample; the Thorn perry he retrieves is mellow, juicy, earthy.
Next, we taste cider pulled straight from the barrels. I’m met with a breadth and range of flavours that is astonishing: bittersharp cider near the end of its fermentation in ex-bourbon casks presents wonderfully deep honey notes atop a zingy sharpness; young Dabinett juice in pungent Islay whisky barrels tastes like smokey, fresh-pressed orange juice.
“They just love showcasing how different all of these drinks can be through the use of different varieties, or the use of ex-spirit casks,” The Ciderologist Gabe Cook—whose relationship with Ross on Wye goes back nearly two decades to the start of his own cider career—tells me. “It’s the demonstration that there’s a massive range of flavour profiles out there, and that cider isn’t just that one thing.”
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Cider and perry have been made on Broome Farm since the 1930s, though it wasn’t until shortly after that first orchard was planted by Kenelm in 1978 that it became a commercial effort. “There was a year, long, long ago now, when Bulmers didn’t want all of the apples,” Mike recalls. “We had an old orchard here with 10 tonnes in, and they said they’d take 4. We thought ‘well, what will we do with the rest?’” Mike and Kenelm hired a press, bought some old barrels from their sheep shearer, and made some cider.
“Knowing what I know now, it must have been awful stuff, but we sold it somehow,” Mike says. “So we hired the press the following year, and made a cellarful with better barrels, and then a friend of mine made me a press.”
Over 3 or 4 years the father and son team’s output grew from a cellarful to 7,000 litres—the limit of cider you can presently make without paying UK alcohol duty—which they sold from the cellar beneath their house.
6 or 7 years in, Bulmers entered a period of financial difficulty, and for a while couldn’t afford to pay Mike for his apples. “I suddenly felt extremely vulnerable because the whole farm was geared up to [supply] Bulmers,” he says. “Because I was making up to 7,000 litres and selling it all, we jumped to 20,000 and formed the cider company. We then eventually built up to 40,000, which is what we’ve made for the last few years.”
““I was like ‘do you know what, fuck all of this, I’m just going to go back to making cider.’””
In 2019, Bulmers bought out the contracts under which local farmers and orchardists grow apples for its cidermaking. With the contractual obligation to Bulmers gone, Mike and Albert—with the help of John Edwards, their head cidermaker, Max, who helps out on the farm, and Bob, Mike’s best friend—had to double their output to 87,000 litres, lest these apples be wasted. This step up in output, Mike tells me, is what Albert is now trying to sell.
“I never honestly expected Albert to want to ever come back here,” Mike tells me of his son’s decision to return to the farm in 2017, after completing his masters in US foreign policy. “He had a year between his degree and his masters when he worked here, and obviously enjoyed it enough that, by the time he’d finished his masters and become very disillusioned with politics, he said ‘well where else in the world would I want to be?’ So here he is.”
“The whole time, my best mate Ben was saying ‘stop talking about your career in politics, you’re just going to be a cidermaker,’” Albert says. The rising cost of a year in America (and the election of Donald Trump) put him off the idea. “I was like ‘do you know what, fuck all of this’,” he shrugs, “‘I’m just going to go back to making cider.’”
When Albert returned to the farm he set about modernising decades-old practices, which included reframing their product: newer branding for some ciders and perries, larger 750ml wine-style bottles, and a higher price point. He gradually began to reposition the brand; gone were the ideas of farmhouse cider in plastic flagons, in their stead artisanality, and craft. And this can all be traced back to a single moment.
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“For the past four years our best single customer, by an absolute country mile, is our Russian exporter,” Albert explains, topping up my glass with another single variety cider pulled from the depths of the production barn. “Two years ago, we opened this container of oak cask-fermented, two years matured cider, and we all said it was the best cider we’d made. I watched 200 litres of it leave the farm, and I was just like ‘this is fucking stupid: we can’t make cider the way we do, get unicorn ciders that are—by random natural chance—that good and sell it for piss all.’”
The remaining 800 litres became Raison D’être, the cider that changed everything for Ross on Wye. By talking about this cider in a different way, selling it at a premium, and by altering the presentation so drastically from what was considered the norm in UK cider, people took notice. “Because it stood out so much and was so different from what people were used to,” Albert says, “they realised there was something about cider, and there was something about Ross on Wye. Without Raison D’Etre 2016 we wouldn’t be anywhere.”
Raison D’Etre is unlike any other cider I’ve ever tasted. At first approach, the peat from the Islay whisky cask punches you in the face, which then mellows as deep and complex apple flavours—tannin, bitterness, sharpness, fruit sweetness, skins, and flesh—burst forth. The subsequent years’ releases present similar intensity, with each iteration of this spectacular cider strong with its own identity.
“Though Mike is a very good cidermaker and a very good farmer, he’s a bad marketeer—he’d be the first to tell you that,” Gabe Cook explains. “He’s never had an interest for it, and never wanted to invest the time into doing it. That’s the joy and the benefit of a younger generation coming in with the awareness that how one talks about and presents the product is so, so important. You’ve got to tell that story with the packaging, as well. Albert has, in such a short amount of time, grasped that, and made changes.”
It hasn’t been a complete overhaul, however. Though pét-nats and KeyKegs are now familiar sights, some single variety ciders remain in 500ml bottles with the old branding, hand labelled by Mike, and bag-in-boxes still abound. In the middle of the old and new sits Birdbarker, a medium sparkling cider aimed at those who drink mass-produced ciders from Westons and Bulmers, and on whose label sits Summer, Mike’s Collie, barking at blackbirds.
“It’s quite hard to follow in the footsteps of someone like Mike, who is so loved and revered,” Gabe continues, “Albert’s done such a brilliant job. Everything that he does is based around everything that Mike has done for the last 25 years. It’s just the story, the language, the presentation that he’s making applicable and understandable in this modern marketplace. It’s really, really exciting to watch!”
In the late winter sunlight, flipping between a bright white and a daisy yellow between dips behind the clouds, out comes another side to the farm: gone is the industry and production, and in its stead stands brightness and tradition, with a whiff of romanticism. It’s fleeting, but I catch some sense of a deep rooting of family and heritage. Broome Farm may always be home to a Johnson making cider and perry, although I suspect approaches may also continue to change.
“The onus is on us to be totally different,” Albert says. “This cider isn’t cider as you know it.”
