Got The Life — Keg Conditioned Cider's Answer to the Pub Cider Problem
Vivid, coppery-gold cider trills from the tap, frisky with the briskness of light, spritzy mousse. It settles in the glass, gleaming; tight, fine whorls of bubbles aglitter with microscopic life.
Its scents burst and boom like perfumed fireworks. The vibrancy of oranges here, the electric, breath-catching streak of wild strawberry there; maybe the brooding, ruddy brusqueness of russety skin and fallen leaf. Gentle bubbles wax and wane like breakers over your tongue—a spark of acid, a crackle of tannin, and over it all, the rising tide of ripe and juicy and savoury fruit.
It is a drink of textures and complexities. Of questions and answers. Of soul and joy; of personality fully revealed. A drink that is alive—and all for just a few pounds. The rare and wonderful drink that is keg-conditioned cider.
***
In prosaic terms, keg-conditioned ciders are made by filling a PolyKeg (or KeyKeg) with unpasteurised full-juice cider still alive with yeast, and utilising a secondary fermentation to achieve carbonation. In doing so, a naturally sparkling, stable, full-juice cider can be made without any additional processing that would compromise flavour. There, that’s the technical plug.
But to fully understand the excitement and potential of keg-conditioned cider, some cultural context is important. Cider in the UK is a two-headed beast, but the one most familiar to most of us is the head that looks to the pub.
You’ll know the ciders I’m talking about. Either brewery owned, or brewery-inspired—a legacy of the movement from the 1960s and 1970s onwards to lager-ise cider. Sweet, fizzy, predominantly made from concentrate and water and—crucially—diluted to a strength close to that of beer. To each their own, of course, and these ciders have many fans, but their legacy has unquestionably been one of decimated orchards in the wake of lower-juice content and imported concentrate. Not to mention a dramatic narrowing of the view of the whole cider category as presented to the consumer.
““It is a drink of textures and complexities. Of questions and answers. Of soul and joy.””
The other staple—at least in those venues where pubcos have not banned them—is the bag-in-box, a format that can offer sensational still cider across a broader range of styles and flavours. But this is limited, as I have covered before, by issues of improper storage and service, relatively short lifespan, the necessity for anything not fully-fermented to be pasteurised and, perhaps most tellingly, a general consumer preference in the UK for cider to be sparkling.
Around the late 2010s a perfect storm gave cider’s second face a moment in the spotlight. Inspired by movements in the USA, facilitated by the arrival of online cider merchants, buoyed by Jane Peyton’s and (the dearly missed) Susanna Forbes’ call to ‘Rethink Cider’ a number of predominantly small-scale cidermakers began producing bottles of what have come to be dubbed by some as: ‘aspirational ciders’.
These ciders, built on the full-juice legacy of generations of makers and orchardists, elevated themselves in the eyes of the consumer by promoting different apple varieties, vintages and styles such as pét nat, bottle conditioning and traditional method. These are well-known in the worlds of wine and beer but had, until recently, occupied only a very quiet place in cider’s firmament.
Importantly, these ciders arrived at a time when ‘craft drinks’—be it beer, single malt whisky, natural wine or anything else—were at something of a zenith. When consumers were interested in trying the new. In ‘drinking less but better.’
Ironically, the move to drinking at home during lockdown proved a further boon as—with the help of those new online retailers—consumers were tasting their way through ranges of smartly-packaged bottles, rather than pints at the pub. With the social network formerly known as Twitter still in its pre-Musk era, aspirational cider was discussed, shared, boosted and drunk in ways it had never, in recent memory, been before.
Illustrations by Otto Indiana
And then lockdown ended and we returned to the pub, where nothing had changed in terms of its cider offering. But these were still the same central points of social life where our friends were happily drinking the best examples of beer.
Meanwhile, aspirational bottled cider in the UK slowly began, if not to stall, then perhaps to gently move down a gear. And so the disconnect between the cider we drink at home and that which we drink in the pub—that stark, two-headed difference in quality and experience—remains.
***
In 2019, Little Pomona—so often a kernel for British cider innovation—released a cider called Root & Branch. Full-juice, undiluted, unpasteurised and naturally conditioned for its touch of sparkle. Exactly like their celebrated 750ml bottles, in fact. Except that this was served from a keg.
“Bottles are great at getting fine cider into the hands of cider and wine drinkers,” Little Pomona’s cidermaker James Forbes tells me. “But in the world of beer, draught dispense is king, and we wanted to have something to offer tap rooms and craft beer bars that would suit them better.”
Keg-conditioned cider is the most compelling attempt to date to bring the two faces of cider into one cohesive expression. It offers the same level of care, quality and respect for its ingredient as a bottle that might grace a home dinner table, but served in a format that nestles comfortably into cider’s more familiar British surroundings of the pub.
“The aim was to produce draught cider without compromising on our approach to cidermaking,” Paul Harrison of Dorset’s Temple Cider says. “Totally natural, full-juice, wild-fermented, minimal intervention.”
***
How does this format of draught cider actually differ from the kegs whose tap badges already puff their chests so ubiquitously across bartops?
“First of all, the kegs themselves are different,” Paul says. “[Unlike conventional kegged cider] they consist of a bag within a PolyKeg, and it’s the bag that is filled with live cider. This enables the cider to be used in the same way as a 750ml bottle—it’s just a much larger container. Rather than bottle-fermented it’s keg-fermented.”
“Standard kegs are force-carbonated, and gas is used to maintain the fizz and to dispense. By contrast keg-conditioned ciders are naturally sparkling, and the dispensing gas doesn’t come into contact with the cider. It’s therefore a more natural product: unpasteurised, naturally sparkling, wild-fermented cider,” he adds.
A living product, naturally conditioned and served on draught at pubs? Sounds familiar to me, as it does to Alison Taffs of The Hop Inn, a multi-CAMRA award-winning micropub in Hornchurch, which places natural cider on the same exalted plinth as cask beer.
“Keg-conditioning means being able to serve something that fits the bill for truly natural cider,” she tells me. “It’s completely authentic and it’s a great story, because for us it links with our real ale on cask. The fact that we’ve got the live product with natural carbon dioxide is a big plus.”
It gets better. Where the often lamented throughput window for cask ale means pubs ideally need to finish the cask within three days, natural cider—with its tannin and acid structure—can often continue to age and improve for years in its keg, just as it would with a bottle. And the nature of the PolyKeg prevents any oxygen ingress even after the keg has been put on.
““The aim was to produce draught cider without compromising on our approach to cidermaking””
Albert Johnson at Ross-on-Wye Cider & Perry is perhaps the most prolific advocate of keg-conditioned cider. The format now makes up a meaningful percentage of his overall sales, and is a staple at the pub the company runs, The Yew Tree, in Peterstow. At the recent Ross-on-Wye Cider Festival, attendees were offered a remarkable 17 keg-conditioned options to choose from across every variety and character of apple, rapidly changing as kegs ran dry.
“It’s a huge opportunity for producers and retailers to showcase the full potential of the apple,” Albert tells me. “The low barrier for entry to embark upon keg conditioning is a real opportunity for small makers to get their cider on keg lines in venues.”
“[There are] no downsides from my point of view,” Alison says. “We get them regularly, but my goodness I’d love to see more and I would take them. I’d have one all the time if I possibly could.”
***
On the face of it, then, keg-conditioned cider seems a no-brainer. So why, beyond the perennial issue of keg lines being controlled by huge breweries and pubcos, are keg-conditioned ciders not a more common sight in pubs and bars?
Education, I suspect, is a significant factor. Where cask and keg beer are distinguished by visibly different forms of dispense, there’s nothing from the consumer’s visual perspective to separate keg-conditioned ciders from those which are pasteurised and carbonated and served from ordinary kegs through the same taps.
Indeed the very word ‘keg’, carrying as it does its associations with macro, heavily-diluted brands, seems to attract concern from some stalwarts of full-juice cider. Whilst CAMRA have been some of the foremost champions of the format, presenting several keg-conditioned options at the most recent Great British Beer Festival, many branches—including some in classic cider regions—have yet to embrace them at local festivals, or campaign for their adoption in independent pubs.
“Cider is naturally a still product, and the majority of cidermakers supply it in this way in bag-in-box (BiB),” Chris Rouse, East Anglian Regional Cider Co-Ordinator explains. “Along with the burden of extra equipment to dispense keg, BiBs are the favoured choice for the temporary nature of CAMRA beer and cider festivals.”
There is also the ever-present headache of the natural strength to which full-juice cider ferments. A fully-fermented dry keg-conditioned cider will reach, depending on variety and vintage, anything from 5.5% (at the most modest end) to 8.4% ABV; twice the strength of the average cask beer.
“With some lovely exceptions it does seem that quantity and variety are crucial in the draught arena,” Little Pomona’s James Forbes says. “7% keg-conditioned ciders drunk in two-thirds measures deliver the same amount of alcohol as a 4.5% pale ale, but you session on pints, not two-thirds.”
Some excellent makers are attempting to solve this problem with pét nat kegs, which are naturally lower in strength through the cold-racking process of reducing the yeast’s ability to ferment to dryness. But whilst this results in a lower-ABV cider, it means the product will inevitably be sweet.
Little Pomona have also produced their popular ciderkins—cider ‘piquettes’ pressed from rehydrated pomace—in keg form, but these are very different drinks to full-juice ciders, with correspondingly different flavours, textures and experiences.
““It’s completely authentic and it’s a great story, because for us it links with our real ale on cask.””
What’s more, Albert believes that a shift in drinking habits could hole keg-conditioned ciders below the water before they’ve really carved out their niche.
“The challenge is that, at present, cider is such a low percentage of alcohol sales, and consumers right now are, more than ever, sticking to their preferred ‘no risk, good value’ choices,” he says.
“The era of consumers purchasing experimental drinks and drinking broadly has largely ended, and it feels like there is a greater preference for venues running on very squeezed margins to follow consumer preferences for ‘more of the same’ at as low a price as possible.”
The truth is that, five years after its inception, keg-conditioned cider remains the smallest of concerns, even within the rarefied bubble of aspirational cider itself. Few and far between, high in strength, requiring the confidence of a keg line rather than simply tucking into a fridge or on a bar-top as a BiB can be. Perhaps in trying to reconcile the two faces of cider, keg-conditioning has ended up satisfying neither.
***
There is a quote from Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge that has always stuck with me: “He allowed himself to be wholly known and for that I think I will love him more than all my sensible clients. And yet, it is better to settle for half, it must be.”
The modern history of cider is one of being forced to settle for half. Of having the terms of its acceptance, its identity, dictated for it by people who often don’t care terribly much about the drink itself—indeed who often mock it or condescend to it as something quirky and rustic and amateurish and uninteresting.
If it tries to elevate itself; to present itself the way a wine might, it is labelled hoity and highfalutin, as if it has put on unmerited airs. It is allowed in the pub or the bar or the restaurant—indeed it is expected—but it must be half its natural strength, denuded of its natural textures, characters and complexities. Or it must be still and convenient and tucked-away and minimum-effort.
And so, even at some of the very best pubs and bars and taprooms—places of pilgrimage for beer drinkers—or on the hallowed wine lists of gushed-over restaurants, there are those lone ciders which have settled for half; which are carbonated, pasteurised, diluted. Ciders which bear no equivalence to the beers they sit beside, but are there because “well, we need one cider, and that one’ll do.”
Keg-conditioned ciders are something different. Along with fully-fermented bag-in-box they are the only ciders that provide, in draught format, the most complete experience a cider can deliver. Flavours and characters without compromise or caveat; ciders that are, truly, the very most that they can be.
They should be seen as cider’s answer to cask. They should be revered and treasured and encouraged as the go-to ciders for every on-trade venue interested in drinks of craft and care. They are the only ciders I have ever tasted that bring the flavours of the greatest bottles to the taplines of the pub. Ciders that ripple with texture and character; that billow and swell with their joyous fullness; that allow themselves, at last, to be wholly known.
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