Cider? Yes!

I met Sam Nightingale in the yard of the Nightingale Cider Company at Gibbet Oak Farm in Kent.

We sat around a large table made from recycled apple bins and sipped a few of their delicious ciders, from beautifully branded glasses.

What are your family’s connection to the area and your history in farming?

Sam. My grandparents set up a fruit farm in the North Downs in 1948, 15 miles across the valley from where our farm is today. That was a year before my dad was born, and my uncle was a couple of years old. My grandfather had returned from the war and invested in orchards; they had planted a few cherry trees before that. So my uncle and dad grew up on the farm and went into farming. They both had families, and the farm wasn’t big enough to sustain everybody.

When I was three years old, my family found this farm in 1984, and we moved here. The farmhouse was built, which is where my dad still lives. So, although I spent the first three years of my life in the North Downs, this is very much home for my three siblings and myself.

We grew many more strawberries in the beginning and then planted the pear trees over the years. So some of the trees predate when we came to the farm, we built the reservoir to help with irrigation of the strawberries. And over the years, we’ve grown strawberries, raspberries, cherries, plums, pears, apples and asparagus at the bottom of the farm.

We’ve got a farm shop that we started around 25 years ago at the side of the road, with an honesty box. We did pick your own strawberries back in the day. I remember doing that as a kid, sitting on the edge of the field, weighing people’s strawberries. The farm shop came into its own and has been a fully-fledged farm shop for probably 20 years.

Although farming on a small scale is what we’ve done here, this is only 43 acres. It’s pretty small for a fruit farm. The buildings that have become the Nightingale Cider Company used to be where we packed fruit for the supermarket for years. We were deemed too small by our marketing organisation. And so we had to send our fruit to a centralised large pack house. It’s about economies of scale and saving costs, but not for the small grower. That was the demise of the farm and making the farm work financially. But the farm shop was able to prop it up; we diversified, planted the cherries and planted asparagus, which enabled us to go forward.

“I could pretty much drive a tractor before I could walk. I have early memories of sitting on dad’s knee on a tractor”.

We now rent most of the orchards to a local farmer, who has a lot more orchards and his own large packhouse. He’s got those economies of scale, which we couldn’t do as a small farm. He is the caretaker of the orchards, and we’ve got about three acres, which we keep back just for cider including our first orchard we planted for cider in 2017. We also have access to the fruit he’s growing on the farm, and we can buy the fruit back from him. So, someone else is doing the custodianship work, which is crucial because we couldn’t just leave the farm. It needs to be managed and looked after; the orchard needs pruning and harvesting.

My dream is the orchards will come back under the fold, as we progress with the cider business. And we get to a point where we can look to expand and diversify so that the farm will start to come back into that bigger picture.

My brother Tim has worked on the farm for years, and in 2020 after travelling in New Zealand, my other brother Olly started working with me full-time and has become a huge part of the cider business.

“Sometimes, you need to reconnect with what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. There can be days or weeks even when I haven’t walked past the end of the yard. I’ll be in the office or production, and you need to remind yourself what it’s all about and why you’re doing it. We are very privileged to have this place in the family, and the environment is what inspires us.”

How has the cider Nightingale Cider developed?

Sam. I am dyslexic; I struggled at school, dropped out at 17 and went to a horticulture college. I saw how hard my dad worked tirelessly seven days a week to provide for the family. We didn’t get to see much of dad, and I think that’s why I enjoyed spending a lot of time out in the orchard because it was a way to hang out with my dad.

After a year of this course, I realised that there were lots I loved about farming, but I was worried that I would end up going down that path. It is backbreaking work, and I am not afraid of that, but I went in a different direction. I studied a degree in Sound Art and Design in London between 2003 and 2005. Then I lived in London on and off for 13 years and worked as a sound recordist. So very different to farming and cider making.

In 2009, I was conversing with one of my best mates, Dave. We already had apple juice made and had done for years; we sold it in our farm shop. So we said let’s see what happens when the juice goes bad; only good things can happen, surely. So we bought eight rum barrels from Speyside Cooperage in Scotland and filled them with apple juice. All you could taste for the first two years was rum because there was so much liquid from the previous inhabitants, but that’s where it started. I lived in London, Dave lived in Brighton then, and we’d just pop back here every two or three weeks.

The cider was really to enjoy with friends; it’s kind of when you make booze, possibly quite badly, but your friends are kind of young, and it’s free alcohol. So everybody kind of nods and helps you drink it. That’s kind of where it started. We got a licence for the farm shop in 2013, so that was when we bottled our very first cider. Before that, we’d done a little in boxes and poly bins to take to local Camra Festivals. We had an old worldly label with Gibbet Oak Cider written on it, which was the brand’s name and the farm’s name.

Those first ciders went into the farm shop. All completely dry ciders, no sugar added; I was a purest; I don’t add sugar to our cider. Then one day, when I was back in London, my dad took some of my cider to the guys that did our apple juicing for us and added some sugar to it, a little bit too much. And all our geriatric customers were getting high on this sweet cider. And obviously, it was outselling my cider, and I was just like, Oh no!, what have you done, dad?

At that point, we started dabbling with sweetening and pasteurising cider. I had a friend who had a soft drinks business in London, Duncan, a company called Dalston’s Soda. That was back when they were grinding the cola nuts themself and doing everything. And as they were getting slightly bigger, we borrowed their pasteuriser, got some of their old kit and had it down here. So we were able to add a bit of sweetness to some of the ciders, but you always have to pasteuriser if it’s sweetened; it needs to be stabilised to stop it from refermenting in the bottle and causing a bottle bomb.

So living in London, I saw the craft beer scene growing, and I was also really interested in wine. So thinking that cider was having a bit of a renaissance, maybe. Is it happening now? It could be, 2014, 2015, no, it wasn’t. But in 2015, I went snowboarding, broke my collarbone, and couldn’t work as a sound recordist. I couldn’t do any lifting for three months. So I spent loads of time down here and in that time I started having conversations with people, visiting customers and I started seeing this potential and suddenly I think something clicked.

I had been thinking about moving out of London for years. I thought I’d meet the right person and kind of move out together. But you need to make those decisions for yourself. So in the Summer of 2015, it was a realisation, let’s get out of the rat race. So took a massive pay cut to basically come back to the farm. Initially, I came back to join the farm as well as grow the cider business. But very quickly, if I was going to do a cider business, I needed to give it a hundred per cent of my focus and concentration.

We did two years of developing Gibbet Oak Cider, and then we rebranded in 2017 to Nightingale Cider with the help of Anthony Burrill (RyeZine Issue Two). And we worked with a mutual friend, Emma. Anthony did the creative direction for the rebrand and Emma did the graphic design of the individual labels and brand stuff. I’d met Anthony when I’d bought some of his art in London a few years ago. And when I moved back down to Kent, a mutual friend told me that Anthony was having an open house. So my sister and I, turned up around quarter to four on Sunday, just before they were about to shut up. And we hit it off; we ended up hanging around for about an hour and a half and just hanging out with him, which was the start of a friendship. In 2016 I’d just gone to Anthony for some advice. I said I wanted to go through a rebrand. Chating through some ideas. He said, I’ll do it for you, Sam. I was like, seriously? And he said, I mean it Sam! It’s just like, wow, it was so special. His contagious enthusiasm around the idea of positive messaging that’s become an essential part of our branding, being playful, being fun, kind of less is more.

I wanted to do something different with our 750ml bottles. I had been thinking about working with an illustrator for a while. I was introduced to an illustrator called Lauren Humphrey by a mutual friend. I said that I wanted to find a cool, off-the-wall illustrator and do some fun stuff around the brand; something left field.

In 2012, Tim, my brother and I went to the west country to do a cider-making course for a week. That was interesting, but it was very much geared towards commercial cider. One of the takehomes from that was you could make cider with dessert fruit, but it will want to be fermented and sold within six to eight months. It doesn’t keep; it doesn’t mature. And that was the biggest load of nonsense I’d ever heard. I’m making ciders that are six years old and cider ages, and it developed in the same way wine does. It’s got so much potential. But it wasn’t until probably 2017 and ’18 I started to go back to my notes from the course. And there was some technical stuff we were doing, getting a lab set up and being able to do titration to measure acidity and sulfites. In recent years, that has given me more control and understanding of what I’m doing because those details can inform my choices.

I rally against the idea of a homogenous product that is the same year in and out. I cherish being able to celebrate vintage. Most of my ciders are vintage, so they will be an expression of a year. Something like the Wild Disco cider, because it’s a single variety, I find it helps a lot when I blend between vintages. That brings a bit of maturity to the more youthful cider, which helps. But with something like Night Bird cider, the Falstaff Bramley, the Perry, I lovethat kind of expression of this was a season. What’s come from the land, the environment at that particular time. My core ciders, Night Bird and Wild Disco, are more mainstream, and I have to have some consistency. Quality is key, but you need not be too far removed. It’s changing and developing over time as we blend it in small batches; it’s constantly evolving.

This is a generalisation, but people give good wine the credit it is due. Were as the perception of cider seems to be that it’s one drink. Do you agree, and why do you think that is?

Sam. For many people, their first alcoholic drink is cider. Of course, if you enjoy a drink, we’ve all got much more drunk since that first time, but there’s something that polarises in your mind about that formative experience, and so often for people, it is cider. Cider has such a low perception, and we’re trying to change that.

Cider has always had this label of being a Summer drink. And with the Summer we are having sales have gone bonkers, as you can imagine, especially over that 40°C week.

Cider has been a little brother or the poor cousin to beer; there’s always been an expectation that a pint of cider is cheaper than beer. The reality is if you’ve got a high-quality cider that hasn’t been chapterlised or made from concentrate, that is made with a hundred per cent full fruit juice and it’s made once a year rather than brewed time and time again. So we ferment the fruit once a year, the same way as winemaking. We harvest from late August into October, which is everything we get to work with for a year before we can try again.

So it is a costly process, and when you value that, not belittling brewing and beer, you can make a beer then buy more grain and hops and repeat the process. Some beers like a lager will take longer and some are barrel aged; of course, there are differences. But we’ve got one shot to do it, and I’ve always struggled with the fact that cider is always expected to be cheaper than beer.

We need to raise the profile of cider. I think it needs to be seen as more than just a kind of poor brother to beer. It has such wine-like expressions; its ability to pair with food. There are master sommeliers, amazing wine lists, but you turn to the back, and you’ve got maybe two beers and maybe one cider. There is so much potential; this renaissance is happening around cider, and these conversations are starting to be had, it’s is an exciting time.

I have a good relationship with Gusbourne vineyard, and I’ve had access to wine barrels from them since 2016. So I make some cider in wine barrels that have contained English chardonnay and pinot noir, and it is incredible to see what that does to cider. Only in the last two or three years have I started to get into some of the barrel ageing. Most people would say I was foolish, but during lockdown, we were lucky enough to get one of the grants; I bought eight barrels from Speyside Cooperage, bourbon and whiskey barrels. I was stuck on the farm; our sales had gone sideways cause 90 per cent of our business was selling to pubs. So that disappeared overnight. So we had to change direction. So we started playing with the barrel aging; that’s where doing these 750ml fine ciders took off for us. It’s become an important part of what we do.

I’d been listening to a podcast; a guy called Matthew Curtis, who runs Pellicle magazine, was talking about an organisation called Cider is Wine, and how he disagreed with the concept. I thought, totally cider is cider. I thought, Cider Fu*k Yeah! I thought I couldn’t put Fu*k on a can. I was driving back from a days canning, and this idea appeared of Cider? Yes! Just like a question and answer, and we did it, it took off. It started generating positive conversations about cider, opened doors, and introduced us to people. People seemed to connect with it, which was lovely.

Cider has come into people’s consciousness. Suddenly, many independent bottle and wine shops look at cider seriously. I think there’s that huge overlap between good natural wine and cider, but also see similarities between sour beers and people getting interested in cider from beer. There’s the challenge of peoples preconceptions. Is this cider? It could be wine. You can stick certain ciders in a blind tasting with wine drinkers, and they’ll probably think it’s wine. There are so many different expressions of cider, and that’s what’s so exciting about it. I am always learning; you think you understand cider and what the flavour profiles are, and then you get completely side-punched by something going, Wow! What was that? That feeds my hunger to learn more about it.

“Dad retired supposedly three years ago; farmers never stop and dad is down in the farm yard daily.”

So what are your plans for the future of Nightingale Cider Company?

Sam. We now have The Watch our tap room. I’ve always been passionate about wildlife sound. While doing my sound, art and design degree, I met Chris Watson; he’s a fantastic wildlife sound recordist. I did a few of his courses over the years. My major project for my degree was wildlife recordings. And my dissertation on ethical wildlife sound recording. Over the years, I’ve recorded lots of nature and nightingales. We’ve had nightingales on the farm, and that connection to the land and place, and it’s obviously my family name as well. So that’s why the bird theme runs through our ciders; whether it’s Night Bird, we have birds on some of the new labels. Satakieli, the name of one of our ciders, is the Finnish word for nightingales, literally translated means 100 tongues, so many voices of nightingales.

So, back to The Watch, the collective noun for a group of nightingales. And this is our home, where the Nightingales reside, and it’s our space to share with people. That’s the idea behind it.

Music is an important part of my life and sound. So, by creating a space, we can bring people in for shared creative experiences. We’ve got a film that was shot on the farm about 50 years ago, which someone gave me footage of which we’re going to slow down and do a live score with some local musician friends, using some of my nature sound recordings from the farm.

We are planning to do supper clubs, bring people together around these tables. There is so much potential. It’s really exciting. This is just stage one. We’ve got this idea to hang artwork as well. So we can hopefully do some artist and photography exhibitions. And the plan is for Lauren to do a mural, probably working on a variation of one of the art pieces she created for our labels.

Nightingale Cider Company
Gibbet Oak Farm, Appledore Road, Tenterden, Kent, TN30 7DH
www.nightingalecider.com
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