Robin Barton's Commercial Cider Maker
Above: Cider Maker
Above: Cider Maker
Above: Cider Maker
His first love was brewing beer, something he began when he was only seven but he wanted to be different. When he became disenchanted with travelling the world with M-Sport, the Ford rally operation based at Dovenby Hall, Robin looked around for a business to start. 'I thought about beer, but we already have a booming micro-brewery sector in this area, so I decided to make cider as there was nobody making it here.'
The idea came in part from the Cistercian Abbey of Holme Cultram in Abbeytown. 'There's an area in the centre of the village called Applegarth where they had their orchard. The fishponds were in the field by our house and there was another wood and orchard beyond it,' he said. Getting a working cider press was far from easy.
Robin considered flying to New York to dismantle and ship one home but eventually he found one in Normandy that he and a friend trucked back to Abbeytown. The French connection doesn't finish there, he ended up leasing a Norman orchard and importing the cider made from its fruit. Cock Robin Cider is now in its third year.
The busiest time is October to December or even January, when the recently picked fruit is pressed and the cider made. He buys lorry loads of nine tonnes of unsprayed apples at a time, and uses organic cane sugar in some brews. Until now the apples have all come from Herefordshire, but he is keen to use local produce in the future and Robin has just signed a contract to take the fruit from a nearby five acre plot, and is talking to other farmers about working with them too. His strongest cider, Rockin' Robin, uses pure Cumbrian honey, another demonstration of valuable cross-fertilisation within the county's craft food sector.
The range goes beyond cider. 'There is no better taste than Elderflower Cham…Sparkle,' he reckons, biting off the champagne word in case the French are listening. 'And it's a lot more pleasant picking elderflowers in the summer than apples in the autumn.' It's traditionally made, the flowers readily available from hedgerows in the fields around his home. He has added a couple of pear ciders to his range too, one he brews and one from his French contacts. The French version is just 2% alcohol, and is closer to cider than perry in flavour.
His own has more pear to it, and is closer to wine than cider in style. The strangest thing he has experimented with is banana cider, though it won't feature in the range. 'It's lovely, but after only a couple of weeks in the bottle becomes too dry, so it's not practical.' The sense of fun that pushed him to try banana cider is behind the names of his products: Red Cock, in his terminology a champagne-style cider, is like a cleaner version of French farmhouse cider, with a roundness and complexity a million miles from the plastic-bottled fizz that passes for cider too often in this country. 'People used to commercial cider are sometimes surprised by the flavour,' Robin added. His others are Happy Apple, aged in oak barrels for two months to keep the fruit flavour and add something to it; and Rockin' Robin, at 7.3% alcohol a drink that should be handled with care. The French-made cider from his leased orchard is called Coq d'Or.
It was his intention to sell cider from the farmhouse gate of his home just outside Abbeytown, like a thousand farms in Normandy and Brittany do, and to brew his product there in a converted cowshed. But problems with red tape have meant he has had to lease a small industrial unit several miles away. It has been hard work setting the business up, and the seasonality of the work and sales can make life difficult, but he now hopes to expand and is looking at applying for a grant to help finance this. One happy by-product of the business is that he met his fiancée Emma, at that time working in a pub in Cockermouth, when he was trying to obtain bottles for his brews.
Robin's ciders are sold at fairs throughout the county and to some pubs as well as through his website. For more information contact Robin on 07989 592566 or go to www.cockrobin-cider.co.uk
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