June Blog

June has gone quite quickly. We have however got our new range of ciders on the go at last!
The new ciders have been tried at various shows and have gone very well indeed so we have decided now to bottle these ciders so they will last longer. This enables us to offer these special ciders all the year round. Our new ciders are:

Cider with Damson
Cider with Elderflower
Strong Dry Cider

These new ciders will only be available at the farm shop, the shows we attend and I am hoping to be also offer it on mailorder too.
Our first show with the new ciders was at Ellesmere on the 18th/19th June and we were very pleased with how the ciders went. It is nice to be able to offer a tasting of these ciders at shows so customers know exactly what they taste like. What is pleasing is to be able to offer a larger range to customers.
Ellesmere show was well attended and that is down to the organiser of the show called Lincoln who is a great character. Not so sure about the dressing up like a bunny rabbit but I suppose the theme was Alice in Wonderland. Joking apart the show was very good and we were lucky with the weather too.

June is Elderflower month and we have been busy picking the flowers and making lots of Elderflower syrup. It has been a good crop this year and I do enjoy picking them. I think it is because it so peaceful and also natural the actual harvesting of anything from the countryside. You can see what you have achieved and then make something delicious from them. We will be making a small amount of Elderflower Syrup in small 250ml bottles to sell but obviously with our new cider with elderflower on stream we are making it larger bottles for adding to the cider through the year.

We have almost run out of our popular medium sparkling cider which is not ideal. Planning the bottling is not easy at the best of times however the contract bottler has changed its lead in time from 1 month to 4 months. This I think is probably due to so many more cider producers jumping in on the scene as well as beer producers. Anyway it wont be long now and our stocks will be refreshed and we will be back to normal....

We are also planning at least one more photography course and we also planning a very exciting event in the barn just before Halloween. We will be holding a ticket only event which will feature a very special owl display. I am considering making it a bit scary but it will also be aimed at familys so I will have to tread carefully.... We shall have to see but watch this space for forthcoming news.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

First drop of rain this morning for quite a few days. More birdsong in the morning which helps to reinforce that spring is just around the corner. No yellow daffodils quite yet - still just the leaves poking up out of the ground. Fencing went quite well yesterday despite the Land Rover deciding that it had had enough at the end of the day and refused to start. I am hoping that this is because I did not use the tedious 'warming up' of the plugs for long enough AND I have started and stopped it about 8 times during the day and it never really had a good chance to charge. Apart from this I think the Land Rover is going to be quite a success as it enables me to get to the more remote parts of the farm to do jobs. Today I am loading up the van and heading off up to Telford for this evening. Stopping the night and cracking on with the farmers market at Telford for the weekend. Looking forward to a couple of nights out in Newport but not so much the early mornings.... Had an intense l...
Read more

Spring 2013

Ok I am certainly guilty of not staying on top of this Blogging BUT my little life has been ram packed with stuff going on since January... I am now a new dad to a lovely little boy born in March! Urgent plans had to happen to make more space in the house which involved building some sort of outside office for me to function. It has taked for ever to build and went fiercely over budget but not only do I have a boy but I am a proud owner of an official man cave in the garden. Wow! - its great and so much space to at least feel prepared to get sorted and to plan for the next few months. So apologies to everyone but I am slowly getting back to normality again! So we have had one of the most awful start to the year with the weather.. but finally we are starting to see some sun again albeit sporadically and the cider drinking season is now well under way. We have only been to a couple of shows but we were very lucky with the weather and there were good turnouts for both shows. No real ...
Read more

End of year post

Well at last we have finished making cider for another year. It has been an unusual and somewhat challenging cidermaking time for us for various reasons. The local apple crop did not do particularly well despite reports nationally that it was a bumper year for apples. Lack of rain throughout the year saw a marked decrease in size of fruit. One orchard owner which we have had apples off over several years let us down badly. Despite the communications we had concerning the time of when we were going to come and pick it them up, we phoned them up to inform them we going to come in the next few days and they said it was fine... THEN they rang back to say that someone had already picked them... astonishing behaviour. When I said that we had contacted them etc and their come back was 'well I can't change the past can I???' Errr no sir but you do remember the past. We move on... Anyway we are pleased with our slight tweak to the cider making process which has made it a lot easier ...
Read more