Ciderhouse News - Welland Valley Beer Festival #1

Anticipation of this year's Welland Valley Beer Festival is reaching fever-pitch, or at least it is in this house! It's now only eight days until the event kicks off, and months of planning by the licensees, brewers, and the volunteers supplying the magnificent range of vintage buses, are finally coming to fruition.

I've spent most of the morning in the ciderhouse racking off this year's Welland Valley Special Cider ready for the festival. This cider is 'special' because the apples used to make it were sourced exclusively from within the Welland Valley itself. Old, unsprayed orchards in Cottingham, Rockingham, and our own village of Middleton provided the fruit. By using full-flavoured dessert apples, and limiting the quantity of sharp culinary fruit to a minimum, we've ended up with a rich, fruity cider, naturally medium/dry, and beautifully clear with a pale yellow colour. There's also a hint of the buttery roundness which develops from the Malo-lactic process, definitely desirable in an 'Eastern Counties' style cider like this.

I'm very pleased with the WVS Cider, and hope it hits the spot with visitors to this year's festival. You can try this cider at the Talbot, Gretton; and our 'cider-tap' the Red Lion, Middleton during the festival.

As if the first taste of our 'Festival Special' was not exciting enough, I've still got the thrill of tasting our first ever Perry, and also the bottling of this year's Rockingham Forest Slider to come, more of which later...