“When I started out 10 years ago, only three of the makers here were even in business,” says Felix Nash, gesturing to the reams of golden bottles that line the shelves of his shop. I’m at the Fine Cider Company in London Fields, east London, with its founder, having arrived with the hope of lapping up all that fine cider has to offer inside a neat hour. (Spoiler alert: I leave thirsty and inspired.)
Although much of recent cider-making history is defined by mergers and mass-market production, there’s also an exciting re-emergence of terroir-focused production, though that is something Nash claims has always been a part of the UK’s agricultural DNA: “One of the first things the Royal Society ever published was on perry and cider, when John Beale, an early fellow, recognised that an apple variety called redstreak grew particularly well in certain parts of Herefordshire, a concept we now understand as terroir.”
