Kent Cider of the Year Winner: Turners Apple Pie Cider

Turners Cider is a family business based in the village of Marden, in the Weald of Kent. We make a range of craft ciders in the ‘Eastern counties’ style: that is, from only eating and cooking apples.

We select each type of apple for its flavour. That’s why we use so many traditional varieties like Cox, Worcester, Bramley and Russet.

The result is a range of clean, light and refreshing ciders with a balance of sweetness and acidity. They’re perfect for summer drinking, for thirst[1]quenching, as an aperitif and with many types of food.

Our Apple Pie Cider is one of our range that is slightly different to the rest! It started out as a ‘winter warmer’ to be drunk warmed up or mulled on a cold winter day. It’s a secret recipe so we can’t divulge the exact ingredients, but there are a few key things that make it taste just like apple pie!

Those winter spices that you’ll probably be familiar with such as cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves give this cider a gentle but warming spice hit. It’s these spices that you’ll find in an apple pie and when we were experimenting with flavours in the Turners Cider kitchen we knew we were delighted with the results. Gentle but warming spices and subtle sweetness that comes naturally from the apple juice we use to sweeten the cider.

It’s a careful balance of spice and sweetness together with apple juiciness!

We make it today how we’ve always made it, cooking up a batch of spices into a syrup at the kitchen hob in a huge 30-litre cooking pot. It’s all done by hand and mixed up with an enormous wooden spoon. Properly craft stuff! We then mix it with the apple juice and our cider blend and then we pasteurise it. We used to pasteurise and bottle in-house, but due to an increase in demand we realised we had to get some help with that. Now, we get a bottling facility to do that part of the process for us, but that’s the only difference.

It was originally just a seasonal winter cider in our range, but as the years have passed, its popularity has increased and we found that our customers were asking for it during the summer months. We made some more and to our surprise the customers kept ordering it throughout the year. In the hot days of summer, it can be very refreshing when drunk well chilled and this has carried on to this day.

In summary, our Apple Pie Cider is a pretty unique product. It’s still, craft cider - with a sweetly spiced twist!