The apple revolution
If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you might not have noticed that cider is cool again. Ben McFarland gets to grips with how it happened
Heavens to Betsy, how did that happen? Just a few years ago, cider had all the lure of an apple with a maggot in it and, then suddenly – bam!
Cider is the apple of the United Kingdom drinker’s eye.
Its transformation from park bench to swanky bar is perhaps the most remarkable drinks story of the new Millennium. No longer the sole preserve of straw-chewing village idiots and law-breaking youngsters, cider is now the drink on the trend-setting lips of Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Kate Moss, Prince William and the Arctic Monkeys to name but a few.
It was Magners that made cider cool – in both senses of the word. Served over ice, Magners has brought much-needed innovation into the cider market, considerable investment and a sales increase of 225 per cent in 2006. “Magners is an overnight success three years in the making,” said Simon Russell, spokesperson for the National Association of Cider Makers (NACM). “The over ice serve is not rocket science but it’s great theatre and it’s caught the drinker’s imagination.
They’ve also spent a lot of money on advertising which has made cider aspirational.” Cider’s reversal of fortunes cannot be entirely assigned to the luck of the Irish. Bulmers (the cider arm of Scottish & Newcastle) is fully behind Strongbow and also unleashed the bottled Bulmers Original as an unashamed rival to Magners. Gaymers, meanwhile, revealed three new premium ciders last year and has pledged on-going record investment in 2007.
“There’s been a significant chang.....
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By Ben McFarland
Section : Cider Special
Page number : 70
