Vagrant Cider was born from noticing: the derelict and unloved orchards with fruit rotting on the ground season after season. The wayside wilding blossom or autumn fruit splattered on the road. From the noticing came the sampling and cataloguing and from there, the most ridiculously uneconomic way to make cider imaginable.

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We try to have our ciders tell stories. Most are made on the one hand from old varieties found in Cornwall for generations and the other from the fruit of unique seedling trees. Cornwall has a tradition of growing apple varieties which are either double or triple purpose (this generally means dessert/culinary/cider in that order) and most of them don't perform any task particularly well. There were scant quantities of dedicated dessert or cider apple orchards in Cornwall historically and most apple trees were found in a small home orchard attached to a farm for purposes of providing that farm only with its apple requirements. Historically, most cider made in Cornwall must have been pretty jangling.

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The unique opportunities afforded by the seedling apple tree, owing to its extreme heterozygosity, allow these trees to tell their story. We have found apple trees thriving in some of the harshest, most exposed conditions in the UK. These trees tell the story of Cornwall's punctured granite heart. We gather the fruit to tell those stories and present to you a unique experience. It may be the case that a particular tree produces enough fruit to make nine bottles and that's it. Ever. Next year the tree will likely not fruit owing to a propensity to biennial habit and the following year the conditions for growth will be different, so the fruit will differ in character. Those nine bottles will be all that will ever taste that way and never again. This is marvelous and also ludicrous. The results can be marvelous (and also challenging - no one said these stories were easy to sit with) but the labour required to produce such small amounts is ludicrous, but worthwhile and that's why we do it. 

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We are in the process of selecting seedling trees for a broader palette of tannic apples than is currently available within the cadre of specifically Cornish varieties and this is part of the creation of a new tradition of Cornish cidermaking using proper Cornish apples.

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We make cider as simply as possible. We use sulphur in the sterilisation of equipment and that's it. No filtration, no pasteurisation and no preservatives. Our yeasts are what's on the fruit, our equipment, the cidery walls, our hands. Nothing else. For this reason, nearly everything we make is bone dry.

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(Apple juice - Air) x Time

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That's all there is to it.

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Because of this simplicity, our processes must be diligently clean and we have had other producers we respect remark of our cider that it is clean in taste. We strive for this. We feel it helps the fruit tell its story clearly.

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We're also about waste reduction. This is the reason why you might obtain two of the same vintage and they're in different bottles. We have an arrangement with local pubs and hotels to collect their Champagne and Prosecco bottles which we diligently clean, de-label and re-use. A recycled bottle uses 70% of the resources of making a new bottle and that's without all the road miles it travels, whereas repurposing an existing bottle uses hardly any extra resources. Less waste, less distance, less carbon. Also a simple formula.

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