How we make our ciders


1. Orchards

We currently have over 24 acres of orchards producing in excess of 180 tonnes of apples each year. The remaining apples we press are sourced from local farms all within 10 miles of us.

We love orchards so much we're recently planted out another 11 acres.


2. The Mill & Press

Once cleaned and any leaves etc. removed the apples take a final journey into the mill where they're quickly and humanely turned into a pulp. We build this pulp into a cheese using the traditional 'rack and cloth' method, before exacting up to 9,000 litres per day using our twin presses.


3. Fermentation

Here at Perry's we like to take a few risks that why we insist on using only the apples own 'Wild' yeasts to turn the natural sugars to alcohol. This is a pretty risky process if an undesirable yeast strain takes over, however we think the pay off is far greater. Our ferments are usually cold and long and can last from 3 weeks to 4 months, we also like to play with open top fermentations just for good measure.


4. Maturation

After a long tiring fermentation the spent yeast cells drop to the bottom of the tanks. The cider is then rack off this into clean tanks and left to mature for up to 2 years some in wooden barrels. This allows our ciders to mellow and build character.


5. Blending

The art of cider making is in the blending. Blending allows us to play around in the cellars mixing ciders to produce hopefully a well balanced cider in terms of sweetness and acidity. It also gives us yet another opportunity to drink at work.


6. Filtering

Despite starving the yeasts some times they just won't die. We filter these ciders to remove any surviving yeast cells. Filtering also gives us a totally bright stable cider. We use a state of the art cross flow filter to do this which means we can cut down on waste by over 75% compared to traditional methods.


7. Carbonation

To give our ciders a little mouth feel and to release the apple aromas we carbonate some of our ciders by forcing c02 into the cider before bottling. Carbonation unlocks the ciders flavour profiles and adds a little excitement. We also like to play around with natural carbonation in our bottled conditioned ciders.


8. Botteling

We can rinse, fill, cap and label 1600 bottles per hour, that means your closer to 12,000 bottles of craft cider everyday we bottle.


9. Kegging & Bag-in-box Cider

We also keg and box some of our ciders which means you can enjoy our craft ciders draught in your local, or at home with our bag-in-box ciders.