The Museum of Cider in Hereford is outstanding, with skilful interpretive material and a rich collection of objects. It was educational in the best sense – interesting and fun.
It stands on the site of Henry Percival Bulmer’s first cider-making factory dating from 1888. Two of its founders, Bertram Bulmer and Norman Weston, belonged to cider families, and teamed up with the Director of Long Ashton Research Station, John Hudson, to begin a far-sighted project, the Hereford Cider Museum Trust, in 1973 to rescue evidence of the history of their industry.
They spent a decade building the Archive of Cider Pomology, collecting oral-history and moving-image records of processes that were going out of use, gathering artefacts and surveying the remaining sites connected with the farming of apples and the manufacture of cider and other fruit-based drinks.
Bertram Bulmer had a flair for public relations. He took advantage of the fact that the factory was rail-connected to create Bulmer’s Cider Train. At a time when British Railways was desperate to eliminate steam locomotives on their lines, Bertram Bulmer bought five redundant Pullman coaches and leased the locomotive 6000 King George V from Swindon Borough Council to operate a mobile exhibition train from 1968 to 1987.
The Cider Museum opened to the public in 1981, showing how apples are processed from orchard to bottle. It’s a complicated process, first encouraged in the seventeenth century by John, 1st Viscount Scudamore (1601-1671). When the apples are harvested, they are scratted (pressed) in a mill to a pulp, which is sandwiched between layers of sweet straw and squeezed to extract the juice. Yeast is introduced into the juice either in an open vat or a closed cask for three months to three years, ready for bottling.
All this and much more is shown in the Museum by exhibits, illustrations and copious readable interpretative displays.
The range of ciders is vast: blending cider from different types of apple gives a wide variety of colour and taste; sparkling versions are created by a version of the méthode champenoise; adding liqueur to cider makes cider brandy. Cider made with pears is called perry, of which the best known is Babycham, devised by the Somerset brewer, Thomas Showering.
The popularity of cider as an alternative to beer had a profound effect on the local economy. Farmers found it profitable to maintain their orchards rather than grow arable crops or raise livestock. Industrialisation and rail transport enabled the cider-makers to develop markets in the growing towns and cities of the nineteenth century.
The Museum displays a wealth of art and artefacts – illustrations, advertisements, labels, bottles, glassware. There is a gallery of framed illustrations from the rare Herefordshire Pomona, a catalogue of 441 watercolours by Alice Blanche Ellis and Edith Elizabeth Bull (1878-85): HOGG, ROBERT,, The Herefordshire Pomona..
The visitor route begins at a huge seventeenth-century horse-powered circular French cider mill and a mobile cider press. There’s a cooperage, casks of all sizes and a fermentation vessel, displays of bottling and capping machinery and an abundance of bottles.
Although the Museum is located in Hereford it reaches out to the other cider-producing areas of England – the Three Counties (Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire) and the South-west (Somerset, Devon and Cornwall).
I chose not to sample the cider – it’s too heavy to carry on a train – but the coffee was excellent, served in a cafetière with a Dorset apple cake which signals that the place isn’t parochial.
The Museum of Cider is well worth two or three hours, something to eat and some means of carting bottles home: Visit Us | Cider Museum.