By the early 18th century, it was estimated that 1-3m gallons of farmhouse cider were made each year in Herefordshire from cider apple varieties including Redstreak, Morgan Sweet, Foxwhelp, Upright French and Cider Ladies Finger.
Herefordshire farms often had land put aside for the planting of orchards and the making of cider, mainly as a means of attracting farm labourers. And working in the fields was thirsty work; stories have been told of farm labourers drinking several pints in a working day. The cider was rough and dry as a bone. The good stuff, of course, was saved for the gentry.
In the fashionable drawing rooms of Georgian London, cider was seen as good as, if not better than claret, mainly because it had less distance to travel and therefore less chance of spoiling. It was drank fortified with brandy from elegant glasses etched with bucolic country scenes, a far cry from the horn mugs that farm labourers used in the fields. And on the high seas, cider was seen as a means of preventing scurvy because of its high vitamin C content.
The Symonds family began producing its cider in 1727 in the Herefordshire village of Bodenham, using apples from their own orchards. It was probably sampled by Daniel Defoe on his tour through Great Britain when he remarked: “In Herefordshire we could get no beer or ale in their public houses, only cider. And that so very good, so fine and so cheap that we never found fault with the exchange.”
However, by the late 1770s cider making in Herefordshire began to go into decline. Squeezed by wine at the top and beer from the bottom, cider became subject to heavy taxes. And with Napoleon’s army poised over the Channel, food production was now the overriding concern of the government of the day and the plough began to take precedence over the orchard.
The Symonds family, with William Symonds at its head, were made of sterner stuff and carried on making their traditional farmhouse cider, even experimenting by making it from the skins and cores of the apple, where, William believed, all the flavour lay. Their apples of choice were the Michelin and Dabinett varieties, still used today in the making of Symonds Founders Reserve.
But the likes of William couldn’t stop Herefordshire’s orchards going into slow decline, and if it wasn’t for the work of orchardist and fruit breeder Thomas Andrew Knight, who wrote two important books, Treatise on Cider in 1797 and Pomona Herefordiensis in 1811, the county’s proud history of cider making would have become a distant folk memory. New techniques were applied and new fruit stocks introduced. This embrace of innovation has continued to serve the cider industry well, through good times and bad.
The industrial revolution may have meant Satanic mills to Blake, but it also meant a lot of thirsty workers and cider again went through an upswing – by the late 1880s Herefordshire had 27,000 acres of orchard. This boom was aided by the efforts of CW Radcliffe Cooke of Much Marcle, MP for Hereford, known as “the member for cider”, who got cider served in the bars of the House of Commons. And between 1870 and 1900, 12 cider plants opened in Herefordshire, including Godwin’s, Evans’ and Bulmer’s in Hereford, Ridler & Son in Clehonger and Henry Weston’s in Much Marcle.
Cider is nothing if not resilient, and since the 1990s many old varieties of cider apples have been brought back from near extinction, and a new wave of cider makers entered the scene. During that decade, as a new generation discovered the delights of cider, The Symonds family, famous for their cider making credentials, were producing more than a million gallons a year at their plant in Stoke Lacy and using 6,000 tonnes of apples from neighbouring orchards.
Symonds Founder’s Reserve, made from Herefordshire cider apples is part of that continued resurgence. A refreshing drink that’s part of Herefordshire’s proud heritage in cider making.
