Stashed within a vast, padlocked wooden barn on Middle Farm near the village of Firle, East Sussex squats a dark iron structure the size of a small bus. On the outside a grid of redundant doors like a row of giant filing cabinets. On the inside: lashings of cider.

“It’s an old mortuary fridge,” explains farm director Rod Marsh, with a nervous chuckle. “Most of our ciders are unpasteurised so we keep them cold in there. You can tell what it used to be by the doors.” He chuckles again. “Someone got locked in there once.”

What once preserved cadavers are now keeping the life in ciders. A neat piece of repurposing.

Not many visitors get to see inside this barn, the storeroom for what Middle Farm grandly titles the National Collection of Cider and Perry, a shop where you’ll find at least 100 different ciders on draught and 250 more in bottles.

“A ‘curation’ some people would call it,” Rod says. “We want it to be representative of all the cider in England. I’m sure there’s a terroir of cider just as there is for wine. In Devon cider has a bite to it, in Somerset cider is more rounded. Norfolk cider has a reedy quality.”

With cider at its core, plus an extended farm shop and café on the A27, Middle Farm has become a busy destination for a family day out where city kids can get muddy meeting farmyard animals.

And behind this commercial success, Rod Marsh, playing Michael Eavis to a Glastonbury of apple growers, is on a mission to conserve ways of the English countryside that survive on the precipitous fringes of the economy.

A stonemason in London for 18 years, he came to Middle Farm from London in 1987 on a different kind of quest, to court and marry the farmer’s daughter.

He quickly saw the potential for selling more cider through one of the country’s original farm shops, established in 1960 by the man who would become his father-in-law, John Pile.

In 1981, though not a drinker himself, Pile, who died in the summer of 2021, started bringing back ciders from regular trips to the West Country to pick up butter and cheese for the shop. The first on the shelves, Hancock’s and Gray’s from Devon, along with Sheppy’s and Perry Brothers from Somerset, are still stocked.

“The cider was stuck in a passageway in the shop so I created a separate cider barn,” Rod recalls. “I never went back to stonemasonry after that.”

He has maintained the personal approach to purchasing begun by Pile ever since. Few of the ciders arrive here via a wholesaler. Building up and constantly reviewing the range is a careful, studied process. He likes to see for himself where and how ciders and perries are made, a way of checking quality and finding the story behind them, stories the staff in the shop can tell customers.

“It takes time and trouble. I started out driving around myself, picking up cider from individual farms. I used to get up at 3.30 am, travel 600 miles to visit six to eight cider makers and get back at 11 pm,” Rod tells me.

“It’s a personal obsession and, I believe, the right thing to do. There’s a quintessential Englishness about cider farms and the people who work on them. And we’re in danger of losing that.”

““There’s an honesty about farmhouse ciders, a purity, and I always come back to that.””

— Rod Marsh, Middle Farm Cider

These days Rod has a driver to help, David Bromell, who is on the cider trail two days a week.

“The joy for me is keeping the collection fresh,” Rod goes on. “We have at least one new product in every week and that’s been key to our success. It keeps people interested.

“There’s a reason why every cider is here. Half the time I’m going by what wins competitions, but the best indicator is the public, what they’re buying.”

The shop is busy with well-trained staff who are allowed time to talk to customers and can quickly discern what they’re looking for, and what they might like.

“Cider can still be a challenge to modern palates. Now we’ve got artisanal ciders, champagne styles, influenced by wine production and what’s happening in the States. They’re more expensive but if it saves orchards I don’t care. I’m keen to provide an end-use for apple trees or they’ll be grubbed up.”

Rod does worry that a “gentrification” of cider might undermine what has always been “a very democratic drink”, but nevertheless believes “cider is a very broad church”.

“Some things you see, you wonder ‘why bother?’ but I’m always willing to put it in front of an audience.”

***

High up on a shelf at the back of the shop there’s a large bottle labelled The Winston, which Rod brought back from The Newt in Somerset, a country estate with its own orchards and cider press.

“It’s an 11.5% Champagne-style cider—and at £35 a pint, the most expensive I’ve ever bought. That’s pushing the envelope and we’ll have to see whether anyone will spend that much, but that’s the direction the market is going,” he says

“There’s a new audience for cider, particularly among wine drinkers who are predominantly young, under 30. In the past, the image of cider would have put them off. But they’re looking for drinks that are naturally made, and there’s now a broader base of cider-makers producing them.”

Rod’s heart, though, lies with the more traditional, “ciders that have been made in the same way for 1,500 years”.

“The best is still made by farmers,” he believes. “There’s an honesty about farmhouse ciders, a purity, and I always come back to that.”

Middle Farm made its own cider at one time, pressed from its own apples. Now it has an exclusive blend, a mix of apples and pears that weighs in at 8.6% abv, made a little way down the road by Norman Hunt & Sons.

Here was an opportunity to climb up the supply chain, to explore what provenance might mean for cider, and find the stories that Marsh’s customers are also buying when they buy that bottle of golden liquid.

Waydown Wood Farm, 25 miles to the east of Middle Farm, is easy to miss. There’s no sign on the gates, but it’s the only place on the lane, so this must be it.

The Hunt family is a relative newcomer to cider making. Chris Hunt, the grandson of the founder, who now runs the firm with his two sons, learned the science in the 1970s while working at Long Ashton Research Station, a now-closed facility set up by the industry in Somerset to develop new apple varieties for cider.

He turned the farm’s 56 acres, formerly devoted to dessert fruits, over to cider orchards in the early 1990s, initially selling the apples to Taunton Cider. As far he knows, this remains the only farm in South East England still growing exclusively cider apples.

In 1996, following a health scare, he stopped adding what he refers to as “chemicals.” On this morning in late summer 2021 the orchards are alive with almost an excess of nature.

The warm air is thick with clouds of dragonflies that flit between trees thickly smothered in the pale green lichen normally killed by sprays. Hunt points out the red caterpillars of a rare moth among the wildflowers.

Wild deer are wandering around at the end of one field. The law allows them to be shot to protect crops, “but I couldn’t do that,” Chris tells me. So the trees have to be individually fenced to stop them being eaten.

Do drinkers appreciate the special place their cider is coming from?

“Consumers are still pretty unaware of what goes on, but that’s beginning to change,” Chris says. “They’re interested in where the fruit is produced and how it’s produced, and they have a voice and an opinion. That’s a knock-on effect of what we try to do—but we’re only a small part of the picture.”

Another surprising thing about this farm is the sheer number of different varieties of apple grown, more than 100, that are carefully blended for Hunts’ own bottled range and the Middle Farm draught.

““There’s a quintessential Englishness about cider farms and the people who work on them. And we’re in danger of losing that.””

— Rod Marsh, Middle Farm Cider

Chris reels off the exotic names in an intoxicating incantation as we walk around the avenues of trees: Black Dabinett, Red Foxwhelp, Coat Jersey, Michelin, Harry Masters Jersey, Ellis Bitter, Yarlington Mill, Brown’s Apple, Chisel Jersey, Somerset Red Streak, Kingstone Black, Porter’s Perfection, Broxwood Foxwhelp, Slack-Ma-Girdle, Red Moth, Brown Snout.

Among them are 25 varieties developed in the laboratories at Long Ashton where Hunt used to work. “They would have gone if I hadn’t rescued them, and they are unique to these orchards. Most of them don’t even have names,” Chris says.

One exception is the variety formerly known as number 1066, which is of course now called Hastings. The farm is only a few miles from where the eponymous battle took place.

Nor has the quest for new varieties stopped. A while back, Chris stumbled upon some wild apples by the roadside that had fallen from a tree he reckons must have been more than 100 years old.

“We juiced them and it’s fruity and has more acidity than any other apple I’ve come across,” he tells me. “Thatchers analysed it for us and it’s very high in acid and tannin, so it has potential, and we’ll plant it next spring.

“Every pip is a new variety. They never produce the same apple twice. So there must be billions of them!”