Cider With Barny - Taking a Look at Sandford Orchards

Now that the mooring ropes have finally been cast off and the good ship Britannia edges out into an ocean all of its own making, we can look back to consider what - if anything - we learned from being tied to Europe for so many years. And perhaps it is in the area of food and drink that we have gleaned so much. After all, many of us will remember what was on offer in the UK before we joined the EU in the early 1970s, and pretty poor and miserable fare it was too.

I remember the delight of visiting even the most basic of French supermarkets - the only store that could have come close to offering the wide range and quality in the UK at the time was Harrods Food Hall. 

We’ve caught up, big-time. 

Barny Butterfield of Sandford Orchards

But there is one area in which we still lag far behind - and that is in the way we fail to rejoice in and celebrate localism. Yes, we’ve come a long way in that too - as organisations such as Taste of the West and Food Drink Devon prove - but here’s an example of how we continually ignore the things we do best…

If you were given just a second to name the things for which this region is well known, you’d probably come up with Cornish pasties, clotted cream and maybe Red Devon beef on the food side - and you’d list cider as our most famous drink.

And yet few visitors entering a supermarket west of Bristol would know it. Go to a French supermarket in Normandy or Brittany and there’ll be entire aisles devoted to the local cider. Here one or two stores have a “local produce” stands parked somewhere in a corner - which may include a few bottles of our famous fermented apple drink. They will also have a collection of so-called “quality” ciders perched above plastic bottles of the cheap stuff - but few if any will shout loud and proud about coming from the West Country.

That is crazy! And you really do get to understand how crazy when you talk to someone like Barny Butterfield, of Sandford Orchards - a fast-emerging yet highly traditional Devon company which produces some four million bottles of the good stuff each year. 

Just like the French use words like “appellation” and “terrior” when they are defining local food and drink, Barny will talk about the fine red sandstones of the Creedy Valley and the microclimate that comes from being protected by the granite mass of Dartmoor. 

Barny is not only an eloquent evangelist when it comes to good cider, he is a pioneer. And you know that statement has credibility when you hear him say… “In 2002 I made 200 gallons of cider - we did 2 million litres in 2020. All the twos! And I still have my first bottling machine - which I keep in my pocket. It’s an inch and a quarter of garden hose which went on a the end of a barrel and I could fill a bottle without getting wet feet. 

“Our new machine can do 6,500 bottles per hour. I could have bottled the whole of my output 18 years ago in 15 minutes!”

But it’s not the success of Sandford Orchards that Barny wanted to talk about - it’s the story. The authentic, historic, story of Devon cider. The story which shows how fermented apple juice created in the Devon way was so wonderful and refreshing to taste that wealthy merchants and aristocrats in London much preferred it to dodgy foreign wine in times of yore…

A point which I verified with leading cider expert James Crowden who is at present writing a new book on the subject - Cider Country (published by Harper Collins) will be launched in August. James told me: “Devon cider was famous and was exported to London from ports like Topsham, Salcombe, Dartmouth and Kingsbridge. Daniel Defoe commented in the 1720s that the trade amounted to around 20,000 hogsheads annually.

“Defoe certainly had a taste for Devon cider and commented on it favourably several times in his writings. In a letter from his West Country travels in the 1720s he states…  ‘There is one article in the produce of Devonshire which makes good what I have written before, that every county contributes something towards the supply of London. And this is the cyder which takes up the south part of the county where they have so vast a quantity of fruit, and so much cyder made, that sometimes they have sent ten, or twenty thousand hogsheads of it in a year to London, and at a very reasonable rate too’.”

James added: “Defoe also comments that the London Vintners use the Devon cider to perk up their wine…”

Barny Butterfield is well aware of this rich heritage: “Devon cider was always known for being very fragrant and of a very fine quality - so we’ve stuck with plantings to go with that,” he told me, explaining that Sandford Orchards now grows its own cider apple varieties while also purchasing traditional fruit from a patchwork of local farms around the Crediton area, (some of which are now contracted to grow exclusively for the company).  

“You don’t grow pineapples in Northumbria or potatoes in Sahara,” says Barny. “Having a natural sympathy with the land will tell you what will grow well. Millions of years ago a sandstone mountain range sat on top of what is now Dartmoor - there was a similar one in Wales - and they both washed down their alluvial soils to surrounding lowlands. So you have Monmouth and Herefordshire - and you have the Creedy Valley and another pocket around Wellington in Somerset. It is the same soil, and these areas are famed for their orchards and apples. In geological terms, it is actually called the Crediton Measures.

“So we know we are in exactly the right place to be making cider,” says Barny, whose Sandford Orchards is based in the old headquarters of the Creedy Valley Cider Company.

 “Within living memory Devon was massive for cider,” he added. “In 1955 one quarter of all the cider made in England came from Whimple (the old Whiteways Devon Cyder Company), just down the road.”

But it all goes back way before that - and even long before the likes of Daniel Defoe…

Barny mused: “What I love about the story of apples and cider is that it originally came down the Silk Road. Apple trees came out of Kazakstan where there are still wild apple forests. If you take the story from our end - Crediton was the home of serge-making. It was the best woollen cloth you could buy and it was being traded in places like Florence. 

“Even nowadays we tend to see ourselves as a kind of isolated little English peninsula - and yet there we were hundreds of years ago being part of a global trade system. Apples came one way, our wool cloth went the other.”

The whole idea of being part of this long tradition seems to delight the 43 Year old who grew up in Sanford at the heart of Devon’s apple area… 

“The house I grew up in was surrounded by orchards, so it was predestined I was going to end up in cider,” he laughed when we talked on the phone this week. “I went away to university and studied something which wasn’t very applicable - but I’m a country boy and couldn't stick the town. So after uni’ I went back to working on a farm - and I was enjoying farming, but didn't earn enough money to go to the pub often enough. So I figured I'd make some cider to drink. 

“And, in keeping with the centuries old Devon tradition, the farmer gave me space in a barn and let me make cider for myself.”

From that first 200 gallons, Barny’s business has grown to the size where it is one of the leading examples of modern authentic cider-making in the UK.  

“Our blend is faithful to a natural Devon style of cider - easy going with a gentle tannic kick and a clean apple finish,” he says with a noticeable degree of pride. 

A pride which is well deserved, because Barny Butterfield and his Sandford Orchards have now become a true part of Devon’s long and delicious cider-making history.