Welcome to the Steilhead Cider Page, where we hope to keep the world abreast of everything happening with Scotland's newest craft cider-maker. We make naturally-fermented dry cider, in the west-country style: a full-flavoured, dry, tannin-rich cider, in the "artisan" or "craft" manner - the same way that generations of our family has done; which is to say, on a small scale and with a reliance on n
atural processes to produce a drink of high quality. We don't use any added ingredients in our cider, and we allow the wild yeasts found in our apples to ferment the juice at their own pace. All we do is to provide the finest juice we can, in the best, cleanest environment, and keep a close eye on how our little ye**ty friends are doing over the course of fermentation (which can take up to a year) before blending the different barrels to get a satisfying, balanced, deliciously flavoured cider. We use locally-sourced culinary apples for our cider, mixed with true cider varieties, many of which come from our own orchard of 60 trees here at Steilhead. We currently supplement these with cider-apples from Herefordshire, since our trees are still quite young, but every year the balance will shift towards home produced fruit. Once it is ripe, we mill the fruit and press it using a traditional pack-press, then ferment the juice in sterilised barrels, racking it occasionally as required. Sometimes we blend the juice before we ferment it, sometimes after, and sometimes we keep a particularly good batch as a "single-variety" cider. When the cider is clear and matured we either bottle it or syphon it into bag-in-boxes, and after that....well, that's up to you!
