Skyborry Cider & Perry

The London Cider Salon at Tate Modern is fast approaching! Join us on Sunday, 24th of May to celebrate and sample the finest ciders and perries alongside the makers themselves. Visit the 6th floor of the Blavatnik Building at Tate Modern to explore over a hundred different bottles from UK and international growers. All tastings are included in your ticket price. Meet the Makers: Rawlins Family Cider Specialising in keeved ciders, this small-scale Somerset maker uses hand-picked fruit from traditional orchards. By focusing on local varieties, @rawlins_family_cider save fruit from waste to create naturally sweetened ciders with a natural sparkle. Smith Hayne Based on a Devon farm dating back to 1333, Anna and Will of @smithhayneorchards have been crafting cider for over a decade. They manage 13 different varieties and perform every step by hand—from harvesting to labeling. Their ciders are unfiltered, unpasteurised, and never back-sweetened, ensuring a low carbon footprint. Skyborry Cider & Perry Founded in 2010 by brothers Adam and Dani Davies, @skyborrycider operates on the border of Wales and England. They work with biologically diverse relic orchards to produce hand-harvested, spontaneously fermented ciders and perries. Recently, they focused on single orchard blends to highlight specific varieties and locations. Starvecrow & Walgate Wine @starvecrowcider Crafted by Ben Walgate in East Sussex using fruit from neighboring orchardist Steve Reeve, these ciders demonstrate the heights a talented maker can reach with non-traditional varieties. Dry, lean in tannins, and beautifully oriented toward a bright acidity, they are truly the white wines of the cider world. @walgate.wine is Ben’s solo project, an evolution of his expertise in fruit and fermentation. Book your tickets today via the link in our bio!

The @fine_cider company have kindly invited us to attend the Cider Salon at London’s Tate Modern art gallery in May! More details to follow closer to the day. A great chance to meet various cidermakers from the UK and beyond and taste all the drinks.

Some of the Perry Pear trees in our Lower Jackets orchard are bursting into blossom. The oldfield tree in the second photo often shows well. I love oldfield, i think it’s a classy pear and have very fond memories of a batch we made in about 2011, the last time we had access to some. It makes Perry with a lovely silken texture. We made a little bit last year. Most of the Perry from 2025 harvest is bottled already but none of the cider, fermentations have been slow but steady, and within the next month or so we will hopefully have our 25s bottled. Our 2024s are being collected by @wrightswines this coming week so should be available from them shortly after that!

Gwin Pobl Y Mynydd (Sir Fynwy, Cymru) & Skyborry Cider (Knighton, Cymru) Wednesday 1st of April, 6 - 10pm Join us for our next meet the maker event. This time we’ll be hosting an informal midweek tasting with Mountain People Wine / Gwin Pobl Y Mynydd, Skyborry cider and Wright’s Wines. Joel has started distributing Dave’s wines across the UK, so he and Dani Davies (Skyborry) will be on hand to chat about these exciting projects. To soundtrack the tasting, we’re delighted to have our first vinyl deejay set at the bar with friends of Ogof, Huw H Hawkline & Gruff Rhys on the decks all night long. Dave Morris’s domaine name is of course a nod to that great Super Furry Animals song 🎶 We’ll have lots of old and new vintages available by the glass & bottle, with wine bar snacks to soak up the Welsh pinot & perry : ) Yumm-OO No tickets. Open to everyone, on a first come, first served basis. Iechyd da 😘

Today we added a few pears to our nursery. This Roman Road pear from the Tedstone Orchard that we have gotten excited about. We have grafted 9 of them. A few for our orchard then the rest for other people who are interested when the time comes to plant them out. Pyrodwarf rootstocks have been recommended to us as the most fireblight resistant.

Fog on the Teme. Another Perry put in bottle. A pure Perry, an orchard blend but mostly Winnals Longdon and Brandy. 7 Magnums 654 bottles. Bottled at 1011 SG. Hand harvested fruit from old trees in Kingsland. We call the orchard Tedstone as that’s what it was referred to when we first heard of it. The guy who planted, owned, tended and harvested it was called J Tedstone. I hope that when we are long gone that some other people make some nice Perry and cider from the orchard that we have planted.

We bottled a Perry today. Frederick Perry 2024/25. 450 bottles, 5 Magnums bottled at 1010 SG. A blend of Perry pears with a seasoning of Frederick apples it’s a 75/25% mix. In the UK you can add up to 25% of cider into Perry and still call it Perry FACT. We have had half of the assemblage in an oak barrel for almost a year before blending 50/50 with a good barrel of fermenting perry pear juice from the recent 2025 harvest. Worth a try! The third pic is just a bottle we opened that was kicking around the shed, there’s quite a lot of miscellaneous bottles in there, a few too many maybe.

Quiet time in the cider shed. Turning bottles on the racks, labelling a few cases and measuring the Specific Gravity of everything fermenting. After a really cold few days in late December everything kind of paused, but has since began to ferment again slowly. 2025 as a vintage is certainly not lacking. Our Breinton Magic blend has a very present tannin even with a good 50g/l of sugar left in. As the sugar ferments into alcohol at this point you start to get more of the flavour of a cider coming through and you begin to have an understanding of how it will be when finished. Most have them still have a good way to go. It’s a lovely day today here on the borders. Cold and crisp, it’s going to snow later today apparently.

Just went on an absolute cracker of a trip with @wrightswines to the Alsace and Jura regions of France. If you’d told the younger me that one day I’d be sat around a large wooden table with a French family of winemakers in their farmhouse, eating beef bourguignon and spaetzle and home made biscuits whilst tasting through about 20 different bottles of wine of various hues, everybody full, happy and rosey cheeked, I’m sure I’d have grinned with excitement. What an absolute bloody treat.

Merry Christmas, time to get on the strongbows!!

The last drop of juice was squeezed from the last remaining sacks of apples this afternoon. Harvest was fantastic this year. The main blends have been compiled, there’s a few this and that’s about to be blended tomorrow before we tidy away for the winter and put some bottles out on the riddle racks. The Perry blends are more of a ‘fruit salad’ approach. Here is what I wore basically every harvest day for 2025. 1. The jeans. Levi’s 560 from eBay £9 including delivery. 2. The belt I was issued for my uniform for the Fire Service. A keeper. 3. The most important item I think. The guernsey sweater I picked up from Barnardos in Tenby for £8. Absolute bargain. Don’t think I washed it the entire time after it past several sniff tests. I love these jumpers. The way the collar tickles the front of the neck, I think it makes me stand up straighter and improves my posture. And very warm. 4. A nice hat that Lettice my friend and work colleague knitted for me for Christmas. It wasn’t a mainstay but had several outings on the colder days like today. 5. A pair of waterproof timberland shoes I got off eBay for £16. I wasn’t sure when they arrived but after a few wears they became a mainstay. Part of my personal effort to not wear trainers and wear ‘proper’ shoes instead.

Today we mill these Kingston Black cider apples for tomorrow pressing that we hand harvested a solid month ago. I haven’t graded out the rotters from the tub yet, but look at them bathing in that low winter sun, there’s barely any decay there. We are blending these with browns and chisel jersey and im imaging that with the crunchy acidity from the browns this will be cold racked to retain some residual sweetness before bottling.